The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Many people who have heard something superficial about spiritual science or theosophy find it fairly surprising that—after one has spoken already from this viewpoint about the manifold practical topics—one even attempts to speak about occupation and earnings. For many of our contemporaries have received the idea more or less superficially that spiritual science is something that lies far away from all practical life and cannot at all intervene anyhow in this practical life of the daily routine. You do not find the idea as seldom as it expresses itself in the words: oh, this spiritual science, it is something for single people who are tired of life who do not deal with anything practical and have time enough to deal with all sorts of muddled, fantastic speculations as the spiritual-scientific ideas are.

I do not deny from the outset that strictly speaking such a reproach is even justified with many theosophical phenomena that it is often true that those who deal with theosophical matters and ideas really face the everyday life as strangely as possible. However, even among those who have hard to fight and to work in the everyday life and bring themselves through only with pain and misery, those are found who are driven from inner sympathy, from the yearning of their hearts to spiritual science. Among them many a man will be for whom this duality—the everyday occupation, the everyday work from morning to night and then the merging in the great ideas has something marvellous. For others both things stand rather abruptly side by side, the one is very far away, so to speak, from the other.

However, someone who does not regard theosophy or spiritual science only as an idle employment for some daydreamers but as something that is suitable to intervene deeply in our entire cultural movement will also hold the conviction strictly that this spiritual science just leads to the true knowledge of reality. It has also something essential to say to him, where the big questions of the everyday life appear which the human beings concern who work hard from morning to night.

Someone who gets himself not cursorily, but deeper into spiritual science, who not only attains some abstract ideas from it, but also the deepest impulses of life, comes very soon to the insight that one can attain a true and healthy judgment in the broadest sense. However, a few abstract sentences are not sufficient, in least the basic sentence of any abstract brotherhood of humanity. This abstract general brotherhood of humanity is a matter of course for any good and striving human being. However, the task of theosophy or spiritual science is not only to preach this general brotherly love comprising humanity, but also to create the method, the conditions which make a real human brotherhood possible and can also be realised. Admittedly, many people also say this way; but they lack the overview.

If we look at the whole human existence and compare the everyday life of our present to that which was there at all times, we realise—according to the opinion of many people—that certain forms of life have not changed: there were always rich and poor people. There was always hardship and misery on the one, a good life, and contentment on the other side, and no human spiritual movement did change these conditions. Hence, one can also not believe that—as so many people say—an “idealistic” spiritual movement like the theosophical one can state anything considerable just about that which must stir our time concerning occupation and earnings.

However, we consider this topic best of all envisaging both ideas of occupation and earnings spiritual-scientifically. Then it becomes apparent that it is necessary above all to maintain a deepened thinking in order to penetrate this field of our manifold and variform life. There has always been the phrase of “rich and poor” of course. This is not sufficient if one wants to understand life. However, if we look at our environment and compare it to the environment centuries ago or also before shorter intervals, then it is obvious that the way of life has substantially changed that the causes of distress and misery, of poverty were produced by a new way of life. It is obviously very necessary that people think more about these questions of the changed relation to occupation and earnings. He who surveys this life as it has gradually developed for centuries with mature thinking has to say to himself that a certain human class is concerned above all if we want to say anything considerable about this question. This class has come into being in the newest time, and just in this human class, something gains significance more and more that reveals its power and intensity concerning the question of occupation and earnings in our time. If we go even deeper, we realise what it means that humanity advances on one side and cannot pursue its own progress, on the other side, with the necessary knowledge and interest. The modern worker, the industrial worker is in this form, as he exists today, actually, only the result of the development of humanity during the last centuries.

This is connected with the wondrous, the most marvellous progress within the human development. Today we see the earth littered with the productions of human thoughts, human inventions, discoveries, and arts. Where the human beings build up factories and enterprises, where one digs into the earth, where one looks for natural resources and metals, everywhere we face results of the human thinking. We see the progress of the knowledge of nature, the control of the physical principles; everything that the human thinking, human mental work created in the course of the centuries crystallised in our industry, in the threads of all kind which encompass the earth with our modern means of transportation.

All that has given our life the imprint. All that has generated the modern worker, the proletarian worker. With him, only the modern form of our calamity has originated concerning occupation and earnings. There is hardly any class of population that is not touched anyhow by that which has been created for humanity this way.

If we ask ourselves now: was the human thinking, the human interest also capable to create such a social structure which is in any harmony with that which the human mental power has created in the fields of technology and industry? Imagine once hypothetically what would have happened if the human beings had been able to use their mental power which has crystallised in machines, in the international banking and in the traffic system to put those who are placed in this development also into a suitable social structure. We do not mean what a much-cited naturalist means who says that any big, immense progress of human mind, of human science, industry and traffic has contributed nothing at all to the progress of the moral human development. However, if we looked at that what the human beings have produced concerning morality and civilised behaviour, we would stand even today on the oldest viewpoint of barbarity.—I do not join any deeper consideration to this opinion; nevertheless, it is true that all the technical and scientific achievements that we admire today face nothing in the area of the social life, the social structure. We realise that the human thinking is not appropriate to eliminate the disharmony between human longing, human need, and human ideals, even the simple-natural human life-style and what life offers in reality to all human beings concerning the industrial activity.

It would be an obligation of all classes of the population just to think about this question because in these questions something world-shaking is contained today. However, the broadest circles, in particular of certain classes, feel this by no means. Just the theosophical movement must be such a one which believes to be able to do something here not with a few abstract dogmas, with a few prescriptions from a think tank, but it must attempt to unfold healthy, profound thinking also in this field, in unselfish devotion, with knowledge of the true human being. The essentials are in this field that the human beings educate themselves internally in order to see the things in this field in the right light.

Those who look down at such an impractical spiritual movement, as the theosophical one is, from a supposedly practical viewpoint with a shrug, nevertheless, shall look once at life and learn with typical symptoms in which way they shall position themselves to such questions. Today the human thinking has become short in certain respect because the human beings have got used to seeing everything in materialistic thought forms.

Somebody deceives himself who stands on spiritual-scientific ground and believes that he can recognise the riddles of existence with a few single concepts, which were sufficient to construct the whole world edifice up to the human being. Yes, for a superficial understanding a few concepts are sufficient; but not for the intimate, precise judgement of life. Spiritual science is uncomfortable. Indeed, it is uncomfortable not for those who keep only to that which is spread in words and confine themselves to an abstract approach to life but for those who penetrate deeper in it. It has nothing to do with a few mechanical mental pictures, but it urges us to attain appropriate special concepts for the most different stages of existence. However, these special concepts are good guides in life.

People open a spiritual-scientific book where the physical world, the astral world and even higher spiritual worlds are brought forward, which are hidden in our world. There they read that the human being consists not only of that what one sees with eyes and can touch with hands, but that one can still live in higher regions Then they say, this is too complicated, there is everything boxed in certain way. The world is simple, and somebody who does not show the world simply causes mistrust with them already from the start. The world is simple, is comfortable!—One can probably say this, but it is not true! These concepts are not suitable to penetrate in the real life. Many people reach with their concepts not farther than the few steps they go daily. It is obvious that such human beings get quite weird ideas of life. Of course, such human beings can only be recognised when they talk or write. I could state manifold examples.

I want to pick out two examples of the large quantity that may show how quickly those persons judge about life who should be destined, actually, or feel to be destined to manage life.

There is a person that wrote a book. Today this is nothing special; it is sometimes difficult to find out those in a society who have not yet written a book. Now this person wrote a book about life. He says in it that he has thought a lot about the functions of the money and its significance for our outer life. Now, however, he only had to learn in a special experience that money is only one kind of means within a certain section of the community, and that it has, actually, no real significance. He would have learnt this once by a journey in South America. He had hundred dollars with himself, but he would have had to starve frightfully, because he could get nothing for his money. When he came to a hut and got something to eat, one said to him, he should retain his dollars; one would have no use for them.

This person has such “clear” concepts that he had to travel to the Brazilian jungle to ascertain them! Further, you know that a councillor Kolb has written a book. All the credit is due to this book. It should be recognised that a councillor brings himself to work as a usual worker in America, for instance, in a bicycle factory, and to live together with the workers in laboriousness. He has also written a book in which he says, I learn now to judge life different from I was used once. If I saw a person begging in the street, I said, why does this fellow not work? Now I knew it!—And he adds meaningfully, yes, one can economise very well and comfortably with the most significant problems of the economists on a theoretical basis; but in life, they appear different.—All the credit is due to somebody if he undertakes such a thing out of his social circles, and all the credit is due to the action to confess this openly and freely!

But now the reverse. If we ignore the man, we look at the fact as such. What does one say if anybody who lives in Europe and has a responsible post on whose measures a lot depends, grief, joy, happiness and misfortune of various human beings if he walks like blindfolded through the world? Has one not to ask, how was he walking, actually, through the world? How did he study it? How did he train himself? If one sees only what he would have to see, then one must ask, have these people walked blindfold through the world, and had they to go only to America to find out that one cannot pay with money in the jungle, and to get to know, why does the begging “fellow” not work? Must one not say that a time in which these symptoms are possible in which the thoughts are so short that such a time also needs clear and certain thoughts of the social structure as one could produce them in admirable way for centuries up to our time concerning machines and industry? If one does not understand theosophy or spiritual science as an abstraction, as a sermon of nice phrases, but as an announcement of that what forms the basis of our whole world in reality, then it gives this real knowledge of human nature.

We want to talk about that in detail. If we look somewhat deeper into the changes that have taken place since centuries and still project with their last extensions into our present, we have to say, occupation and earnings have changed in their relation to the human being very much, very much. Admittedly, various persons know the nice word even today that Goethe pronounced: “Desire and love are the wings of great actions.” Really, desire and love are the wings of great actions! They must also be the wings in the human life if human progress and human bliss shall prosper. Would the artist if he pronounced his most intimate not say any time, I can only work really and produce something fruitful if joy inspires me at work.—That is true, very true! However, how far is our life away from this truth! We come to a sad chapter concerning occupation and earnings putting this question.

Let us compare a hard working miner with an artist who creates his works to the delight of his fellow men. In the mines, for example, in Sicily, you find not only adult workers, but also many children of seven, eight, or nine years working who are ruined most dreadfully and spend their lives below—with few exceptions. If you recognise the impulses by which these human beings are driven to work, then you understand something that is usually understood very hard. There is a dreadful mood of hostility and opposition to life if one experiences those things that are otherwise intended to cause joy of life. The human being who works in such a way—I tell no fairy tales and emphasise expressly that I begrudge describing these realities—, may express his mood, as it is expressed, otherwise, with other human being in a nice, glad song, in a song like this:

A curse upon the mother who born me,
A curse upon the priest who baptised me ...

(Gap in the transcript)

Compare this with the words: “desire and love are the wings of great actions,” and try to realise the necessity of striving for a worldview that can deepen the hearts in such a way that one has to add it to our human material development. For it is something that belongs to the structure of life and has to belong to industry, traffic and technology.

However, we can imagine the emergence of the machines during the last centuries concerning occupation and earnings still in another way. One does not need to go far back; there one finds the proverb “a trade in hand finds gold in every land.” Why? Many people had a deep personal relationship to their work and the product they created. Try to imagine the medieval cities. Try to watch any door lock and any key exactly, and then try to look in the workshops where these things were created. Imagine how people worked there with joy and love, how the worker gave, so to speak, a piece of his soul to the products he created.

On the other side, try to imagine the industrial worker, the worker in the factories who works on a small part only whose coherence with the whole he does not survey. He lacks the intimacy of the coherence between that product and his work. This personal relation is something exceptionally important. It is something that brings these both concepts—occupation and earnings—home to us clearer and clearer. It is something different concerning the acquisition if the human being can take a personal interest in the products, in their form, their appearance etc., than if the only interest in the product is the acquisition, the wage. The one gives the occupation; it expresses itself in the work that becomes the product. The acquisition expresses itself in that what the human egoism receives in recompense for the product. We have to put both concepts side by side this way comparing the craftsman of former times and the modern worker. Today everything is different right down to the last detail that you carry with yourselves and have round yourselves. The whole tragedy of the industrial era concerning occupation and earnings in the human life expresses itself in a nice small poem that an almost unknown poet of our newer time wrote (Heinrich von Reder, 1824–1909, Bavarian officer, poet, and painter):

Gone to rack on a mule track
a smithy stands in woodland solitude;
no longer does the hammer blow
accompanied by merry songs.
Not far away the buildings rise
where sooted blacksmiths
are working so hard.
With the steam mill's nails
the coffin is closed,
it carries the nail smith
impoverished to grave.

In these lines, you have the turnaround during the last centuries concerning occupation and earnings.

We need to take only the lines: “No longer does the hammer blow accompanied by merry songs.” They express this turnaround. We realise everything that concerns occupation and acquisition. Imagine a human being who accompanies the hammer blow with merry songs and then imagine the mood of a human being who stands as sooted worker in the factory. It is not the task of spiritual science to preach the reaction, to restore the old conditions or to prevent things that have developed in the human progress and had necessarily to come. We do not criticise what had to happen inevitably. However, we have to realise that it depends on the human beings to work from their spiritual work for the welfare of the human being and for the human progress.

Many people will now say, nevertheless, we see enough human beings in our surroundings who have prepared themselves well to think about the social question, about what should happen.

There is a certain difference, which is very immense, between that, what spiritual science has to say and the general mood of time. One could characterise this mood with general expressions. Those who have studied say: you theosophists preach that the human beings should become better that they should develop love et cetera. We do not deal with such childish trifles, we do not want to improve the human beings for better life and for their welfare, but we know that it does not depend on the human beings, but that it depends on the conditions.—Many people say this, not only professors, but also people at the “green tables” of socialism. What is announced there is as haughty as what is spread by the other green tables. Everywhere one preaches: improve the conditions, and then it already comes that the human beings are getting better.—One can hear them declaiming this, the quite clever people who appear repeatedly.

I could enumerate many examples of the immediate life. From here, I needed to do only three steps, and I could point to a place where once someone stood who said [about theosophy]: these are brainless ideas! It depends on improving the conditions. If one gives them better conditions of life, the human beings are getting completely better by themselves.—We hear this song singing concerning occupation and earnings in all variations repeatedly. If anything is wrong, one does not think that it depends on the human beings, but one says, one must make a new law, so that the conditions change. If anything is wrong in a field, they say that one has to protect the immature mass that has no right judgement against those who want to slave-drive in this or that area. If one says this, for example, towards some methods of treatment, nevertheless, one would like to ask, is it not more obvious and more natural to say that everybody who understands these matters has the duty to enlighten the human beings, so that they turn out of own judgment to those to whom they should turn? It does not depend on the conditions but only on the development of the human soul.

This kind of materialism, which comes from the atomistic way of thinking and which was transferred to the social conditions, lies deeply in our thinking. Many people discuss such things, however, arguing leads only to endless debates. Someone who knows the secret of dialectic knows that one can talk about the significance of the human being with endless pros and cons. It concerns not only that one can state endless reasons for pros and cons, but that one also feels the weight of the reasons. A human being who was destined to pass sentence in this field because he was an ingenious human being is the Englishman Robert Owen (1771–1858). He was ingenious because he wanted to make the human being happy, but also because he had a warm heart for the social misery. He succeeded in founding an almost prototypical colony. He attained something great with it. He made the matter so clever that he put those people who were addicted to drink or had other vices among the diligent human beings who could work by their example on them. Thereby he got some good results.

This encouraged him to found another colony. Again, he did it in such a way that he wanted to realise certain ideals that fulfilled him. However, after some time the development in the colony was so that he had to realise that those who did not have diligence and industriousness became parasites of the colony. There he said to himself, no, and—it was like a confession—with general institutions, one must wait, until the human beings have been brought to a certain height in theoretical respect. Only by the transformation of the human soul welfare and progress can come, never by mere institutions.

A man said this who was allowed to say it because he had gone out from a compassionate view and was taught by experience. From such facts, one should learn, not from abstract theories. However, what gives an inner and viable thinking in this field? A precise and viable thinking in this field shows us that human beings have made all institutions that press and become awful for the human beings. Human institutions originate there which become the cause of hardship and misery, only because they are made first by human beings. Someone who wants to figure the things out really shall try to study the historical course, to study how the human beings live together today, how the one is placed in life this way, the other that way. Who has placed them there? Not uncertain social powers, but human thoughts, human sensations and human will-impulses. We must put the sentence: the human being can suffer only by the human being. Any other suffering is not real, considered socially.

One cannot demand that the spiritual scientist should criticise the historical necessities. It is necessary to understand that human beings have created the conditions and then brought misery in these conditions solely by wrong thoughts. It is not difficult to realise that a short thinking, a thinking that has no idea of the big, immense world connections can create no institutions that can bring happiness and welfare of humanity. With the dictum that one should be unselfish that one should love the human beings it is in such a way, as if you say to a stove: you are a stove, be a friend and warm; it is your moral duty to warm the room.—It does not become warm! However, if you heat, it becomes warm! Preaching general charity is something that one can put with self-evidence in the world. However, the practical handling, that what enables us to intervene in the outside world so that welfare and blessing develop for humanity depends on the relation from human being to human being.

A materialistic epoch sees that of the human being only which one can touch with the hands and perceive with the eyes. However, the human being is more than this. It is a spiritual, mental, and physical being. Everything that can bring welfare and blessing to the human beings can arise only from the fact that one considers the whole human being, in particular in the more and more complex conditions of the present and future. Spiritual science shows this true nature of the human being, shows his basis, and leads us thereby in quite different way to an understanding of the human being and the world. Only in a life eager to work, we can produce by our occupation in the world. Imagine what it makes up if the workers can accomplish their work like in the poem with a merry song. The single blacksmith was able to do this. He knew the work from its beginning to the ready product. The work cannot arise from the earnings; absolutely no work has arisen from the earnings. Try to look back at the simple work: it took place rhythmically, the hammer blow was rhythmic, and the song accompanied the rhythm. The impulses, which one can compare to joy and love, drove him to the work. The further you go back, the more you find that earnings and occupation are two completely different things.

What the human being performs as a work he works from an impulse towards the thing. Something different is to get earnings. However, this is the reason of our modern misery that earnings and occupation that wage and work have become one, have coincided. Our consideration must culminate in this. A human being who works on a small part in the factory will never have the abandon for the product that the former craftsman had; this is past retrieval. It is never possible in future with our complex conditions that a merry song penetrates the field of work. The song has faded away, the song that joins the product!

We ask, is there another impulse, which can replace it? Let us look at the time when more and more factories were built and more and more human beings were herded together in the sites of modern misery. If we let all that pass by, we realise—even if many things have changed—that one means to attach the future development simply to the past, when joy and love were still the impulses of work. However, humanity could create no substitute that attaches the human being again to the product. This can also not brought back. However, something else can be done. What can replace it? How can joy and love become impulses of the daily work again? How can one create them?

Of course, some people will argue, create impulses for a work that is dirty, bad, and hideous!—There are such impulses. Remember only what mothers do if they do the work because of love for the child. Remember what the human being is able to do if he does anything because of love for other human beings. There is no love for the product of the work necessary; there it needs a tie between human being and human being. You cannot bring back the love for the product within humanity, because it was bound to primitive, simple relations. However, what the future must bring back is the big, all-embracing understanding and love from human being to human being. Not before any human being finds the impulse for his activity from the deepest impulses which only a spiritual world movement can give, not before he is able to do the work because of love for his fellow men, it is not possible to create real impulses for a future development in the sense of the human welfare.

Thus, we have put as an impulse what any occult science knows since immemorial times. There is a spiritual principle; this is, in the social life only that is fruitful for the welfare of the human beings what the human beings do not for themselves, but for all human beings. All work is detrimental which the human beings do only for themselves. This is apparently a hard principle, but this hard basic sentence is the result of true knowledge.

Theosophy or spiritual science has to bring this to the today's humanity: to learn to understand such a sentence again. Something that should enclose all human beings or groups of human beings has become a complete abstraction in the materialistic view. This can no longer provide any moral impulse. Reflect once how one speaks about folk souls or group souls. This is nothing real! The human beings must get clearness again about the fact that there are beings who live in spiritual worlds, and that such group souls live and are reality. We have advanced in our development so far that we have arrived just in our time at views that are exactly the opposite of spiritual science that regards as formalities only, for example, all that what encloses a group, a togetherness in the world.

Spiritual science, however, shows that the entire existence is not included in the physical, in the visible, but that the supraphysical, the supersensible underlies all the visible, so that such things like common spirits and group spirits are no abstractions for us. Thus, it becomes to us a precise concept if we say, it does not depend on the work, and if it is valued ever so much. It depends on the work only in the human coherence if this work is fruitful, productive for the fellow men.

Realise that by a simple example: two human beings live on an island. The one produces things that satisfy the hunger of both, make their existence possible. The other also works a lot; he occupies himself with throwing stones from one place to another. He is very industrious and diligent. However, his work has no significance, is quite unsubstantial. Not that is the point that we work, but that we perform work which is fruitful for the other. The work of throwing stones is fruitful only if it gives pleasure to the person concerned. However, if he is forced by any institution to be paid for the work, then the work is insignificant for the coherence. It must be in a coherence that wisdom and structure regulate. He who looks into the coherence knows that the most important works are performed independently from earnings. Earnings must stand for themselves. It is a separate question how the human beings keep themselves mutually. The impulse of working is not allowed to be grounded in egoism, but it must originate from the regard to the entirety.

Other human beings require what one human being does. If the human beings ask for that which I produce by my work, then my work may correspond to my ability, it may be lower if I have low abilities, it may be significant if I have high abilities. However, if the human beings need this work, it is an impulse for the work that can induce me to a merry song. However, we must have the impulses and the abilities at first to look into the hearts of the human beings and to see that the hearts can become something for us. If we understand to immerse ourselves in the hearts of the fellow men, we know the nature of the human beings; then we also work in community and obtain social thinking. You will say, no one throws stones from one place to the other.—This happens in our relations perpetually, only people do not see it! They see too short.

Someone who learns to think socially soon becomes aware of that. Imagine, you sit somewhere and find a nice picture postcard and then you write twenty postcards without having to inform of something particular. Somebody who looks deeper sees not only the postcards with the pictures, he sees many mailmen going upstairs and downstairs. How much work one would save if the postcards were not written!

However, a quite clever one says: because one writes so many postcards, one brings about that one mailman is no longer sufficient. Another is hired, and this other earns his keep.—No one considers that in this way no productive work is performed. This is the work by which nothing is produced. Because you force a human being to a work and pay a remuneration for it, you create no welfare for humanity. However, one must look into the structure of existence as spiritual-scientific education can only give us. One has to realise that not only a few economists should look into these matters. One has to make any single human being unfold this social thinking. That flows from the spiritual-scientific wisdom as a spiritual-scientific disposition that the human soul becomes open and free that it then sees things, which he thinks and studies to an end, so that one does no longer say, one must create work for the unemployed people. It does not depend on giving this or that person work, but which work is performed, just work which the community needs. If we look at the matter in such a way, we realise that that what must become the impulse of our work must be a feeling of solidarity penetrated by real wisdom, the living social feeling that shall take place in any human soul. Not the abstract love, not that love which talks only about love and cannot see beyond its nose, but only that love which is illumined by knowledge can cause an improvement of the human conditions.

Hence, spiritual science cannot be an accumulation of dogmas, of ideas. The ideas are there for the soul. The point is the living human being. The more this wisdom grasps human beings and inspires them, the more exists true, real love, the more it serves the progress, the welfare of the human beings. Thus, we find that, because the occupation is based on the commitment to humanity, and the earnings are based on the care for the maintenance of the human being, welfare is bestowed on humanity thinking completely in this direction. The spiritual scientist does not assume that one can change this with dogmas overnight. Someone who stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science is clear in his mind that the soul can settle down into the active love, and that—because human beings are there who found the insights—one can work for the welfare of humanity. Then a person like Kolb has not to go to America to find out that one can easily judge about social questions on a theoretical basis, but a current in the public life will open his eyes, so that he will not have to walk blindfold through the world.

This will be the best and nicest fruit of the spiritual-scientific worldview if it does not entice the human beings into sentimental preaching of charity and fraternity but induces them to look at the true and spiritual reality with open and free sense. Humanity will thereby fulfil the Goethean sentence more and more: “from the force that binds all creatures that man is delivered who masters himself.”

This sentence applies in the enclosing sense to the national, professional, and commercial fields. It applies in such a way that only if our social structure is completely controlled by this principle that our work is not subject to wage and earnings but is made independent from acquisition, something fruitful can be created.

Of course, there are people who say, one takes care everywhere to take away all kinds of things from the subjective acquisitiveness and to transfer them on the community. Someone who says this could regard the official as the ideal of the human being, with whom earnings and occupation are separated. However, it depends on the fact that any single human being has the impulses from which the characterised welfare can arise. Community must not hover over the whole as an abstract spectre, as a cloud, but it must live in any single soul which points always to the spiritual height of the universe as it reflects itself in any human soul. Only such a worldview can succeed in realising what is salutary in the human living together.

The great human beings have felt this, a great spirit felt it about whom one talks today again more, some people even more, and the less they understand him. This spirit said that by merging in the real, true unity bliss comes about the human being, and that any misery originates from the variety and the differences. Misery comes above all if the human beings are driven in these differences that nobody does anything else than for his egoism only. Not before the single one feels that he must lay down what he can do on the altar of humanity, if this feeling and this thinking flow through the human being, it can also flow through humanity most intensely. It is true what Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762–1814) said: all bliss is contained in merging in the true one and any distress and misery in life is based on separateness and differentiation. For the true love can be attained only if the soul is not hardened in separateness and in variety, but if it finds rest and peace in the true community and in the whole spirit.

Tips to the close coherence of the human being with the physical life appear repeatedly. If we find such hints in scientific writings about variations of the grain prices within certain periods and one points in this regard to the changes of the glaciers or of the water gauge of the Caspian Sea, it seems at first sight that one could not relate these things seriously. However, always-new relations as well as also their confirmations are found. One will still be able to ascertain many facts and some mistakes will have to be eliminated, but science has furnished evidence for the mysterious interaction. Many such events relate to the activity of the sun, among other things also to the increasing and decreasing number and size of the solar spots. Their maxima and minima appear with a certain regularity. After about 11 1/9 years, such a maximum can be determined in each case. Furthermore a comparison of the observations which have been done up to now shows that, perhaps, one could also calculate on a period of twenty-two and a half years.

One cannot deny changes of the climatic conditions, caused by the activity of the solar spots. It seems that a maximum of the solar spots causes a decreased heat emission of the sun, which causes big changes then in nature. Thus, for example, the good wine years followed themselves in indeed varying distances of eleven years. How the 35-year period of Brückner's (Eduard B., 1862–1927, geographer, meteorologist, glaciologist and climate scientist) climate variations relate to it, is not yet determined scientifically.

Science also relates the ice ages—it assumes four of these immense changes of the face of the earth—to the solar activity and the position of the earth's axis. Thus, the wholly mechanical thinking relates the events on the sun to the earth evolution. In other times, one regarded these matters in another way which science discounts with its feeling of superior wisdom.

However, what we must feel if we see how one of the greatest scholars and such a careful thinker like Aristotle speaks of the fact that according to ancient doctrines the stars are gods. All remaining that folk lore tells about the gods is worthless and added by the people. Aristotle expressed himself with care concerning this doctrine, but he treats it as something that one must face with esteem and reverence.

Such an echo of ancient wisdom on which the modern naturalist looks down with a shrug has also survived in astrology in mutilated, brainless way, however, it leads still back to the old wisdom of humanity. It is not easy to make clear what such old wisdom contains. Today the human being regards the stars and the earth as wholly physical bodies wandering through the space. He says that it was a childish idea to think that the other world bodies could signify anything for the human destinies. At that time, one felt just different if one compared the human being with the remaining world. One did not think of bones, muscles and senses, but of the feelings and sensations that lived in him. The stars were to him the bodies of spiritual-divine beings, and he felt penetrated by their spirit.

Whereas today the human being recognises that mechanical forces are effective in the solar system, at that time he saw mental-spiritual forces working from star to star. The great initiates taught not wholly mathematical forces, but effects based on wholly spiritual forces from star to star.

It is quite comprehensible that this world feeling has changed in our materialistically coloured worldview, but only someone who believes that the view of the last fifty years is valid for good, can close his heart against the idea of that which lived in the not materialistic but spiritual experience of the world. This also applies to the view, which puts the earth in the centre of creation.

In the context with the existence of Christ on earth one explains that this earth is only a grain of sand among the other stars and, hence, nobody can assume who is not prejudiced in terrible hubris that just to this unimportant earth a divine being descended. Not from nothing, this change took place. At that time, the human beings raised their eyes to absorb the spiritual content of the space, and were not yet far advanced concerning the control of the physical space. With the emergence of the materialistic worldview, the physical world has been conquered most extensively. We do not want to criticise, but to understand how this change took place. It was initiated for a long time, but just in the 19th century, it made miraculous advances.

The modern worldview faces us crystal clear in Kant and his followers. The picture that they made of the origin of the solar system is known in general: in order to illustrate the formation of a heavenly body, one pours a drop of oil in some water in a vessel. One brings it in a rotary movement. Smaller and bigger spherical parts thereby separate. As well as here these oil particles, the worlds went adrift from the primeval nebula.

I only need to mention that in the 19th century the admirable advances of the natural sciences and astronomy corrected the worldview of Kant and Laplace and continued it in changed form, however, the main features remained the same. The great discovery by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, German physicist) and Bunsen (Robert B., 1811–1899, German chemist), the spectral analysis, also seems to confirm this, while they could detect a big number of those mineral materials that compose our earth on the other heavenly bodies. On the sun itself, one has detected more than two thirds of all known elements. It is very typical and more significant that one of the best experts of this worldview (Simon Newcomb, 1835–1912, Canadian astronomer) pronounced the sentence: if one pursues the figure of the world edifice, it turns out that the primeval nebula formed with a necessity similar to that of a functioning clock, which shows that one has winded up it once.

You can visualise the emergence of the world body by that experiment. However, the logical thinking demands to think all things to an end. Then it turns out that one has forgotten something, namely just the most important by which the globules separate. By the movement that the experimentalist carries out! However, one forgets him applying the results of this experiment to the hypothesis of the emergence of the heavenly body. One completely ignores this “trifle” with the worldview proven this way. One wants to know nothing about the experimentalist. Without being opponent of modern natural sciences, you can put this question to yourselves.

One can completely stand on the ground of scientific thinking without forgetting the uncomfortable experimentalist. He is the spirit who stands behind everything, the sum of the spiritual beings who reveal their nature in the phenomena of the sense-perceptible world, as the results of exact research of spiritual science can show them. Spiritual science does not need to deny anything that modern science has investigated. It admits its results completely, as far as these are obtained by strict and objective observation, experimentation and thinking. It recognises the necessity of such, only to the sense-perceptible world directed research. However, it also knows that the time has come where humanity must be pointed to the fact that the spirit is the reason of all matter and that the matter is the external expression of the spiritual beings.

Spiritual science looks not only at the mechanical processes of attraction and repulsion; it examines which spiritual forces correspond to them. In order to gain a living picture of the plant according to its method at first, one has to proceed as follows:

The plant turns its root downward, its stalk upwards. We see two forces active, one of which assigns itself to the centre of the earth whereas the second tries to wrest the plant from the earth's tentacles. Someone who does not look at the plant only with the outer eye realises how root and blossom show the expression of both forces. Supersensible forces of attraction and repulsion are active here. The former ones come from the earth, while the other forces shine down from the sun. If the plant only faced the solar forces, its development would happen very fast, it would develop leaf by leaf and atrophy, if the other force were absent, the restraining force working from the earth.

Thus, the plant becomes the result, the expression of the forces of sun and earth. We do no longer regard it as a separated thing. It appears as a being that is a member of the entire earth organism, as the hair is a part of the human organism. The earth becomes a living entity, a manifestation of the living, of the spiritual, as the human being is the expression of soul and spirit.

The animal is more independent, not as plant and hair only a part of an organism. It owes its partial independence that the animal soul ensouls it. This is, in contrast to the human soul that is an individual soul, a group soul. The animal is its revelation and relates to it like the finger to the entire organism. The animal is thereby less tied to the earth organism.

In order to understand this, one must think that the spiritual research recognises the forces of attraction and repulsion as the earthly images of that which corresponds in the spiritual to these forces causing the planetary motions, which the Kant-Laplace worldview knows, with all its later modifications and additions, like gravity. These as well as its consequences arise as facts of the sensuous observation of the things. Their spiritual prototype that causes and carries the physically discernible appearance is also a fact, which arises as a result to the exact spiritual research. The animal group souls orbit their planets, and thereby the animal realm is independent from the planet. Any planet has its plant realm in common with the solar system with which it is connected. However, any planet has its own orbital forces and thereby its own animal realm, as far as it is able to have the animal realm.

If one looks at the human being now, one must draw the attention to a fact that is deeply significant. As an embryo, the human being is subject to the lunar influence. The human embryo needs ten lunar months for its development. Lunar forces control it, as long as the human being does not yet appear as an independent being. The creative plant forces that press forward to the blossom and fruit are solar forces. The human body depends on the moon as far as it concerns its form. These formative forces relate to the solar forces in a certain way. Sun and moon form the contrast of life and form necessary for the human development. If only the persisting lunar forces were effective, any other development would be excluded and a kind of lignification would take place, while the solar forces solely would lead to combustion. The light that shines from the moon is not only reflected sunlight, but it contains formative forces. The sunlight is not only light, but forces of light, of too intense light, so that the human being would be immediately very old after his birth [if he were exposed to it only]. The human form is the result of the moon, his life that of the sun.

The spectral analysis can recognise the mineral-chemical compounds of the sun, not the spiritual forces of vitality, which flow down to the earth. With the help of the telescope, one sees the moon only as stiffened heavenly body, not the formative spiritual force. In the sun, the physical researcher recognises glowing gas masses, flooding movement, metals surging up and down, solar spots and protuberances, but not the body of a spiritual being, the regent of the processes of life. This is a chapter of a new research that only starts developing and has to conquer field by field only. Nevertheless, these things are of the highest significance.

Goethe is one of the first modern naturalists who saw more than only mechanical-physical processes in the light without receiving acknowledgement. Already years ago, on the occasion of a birthday celebration of Goethe I pointed to the fact that Schopenhauer deplored bitterly that those who celebrated Goethe did very wrong by him concerning his theory of colours. The scholars speak only reluctantly about that. For the physicist it is more a nice, poetic but impossible thought compared to the wholly physical theory of colours. However, spiritual science stands completely different towards that. If once the time is ripe to understand Goethe's theory of colours properly, one will also realise that the light consists not only of seven basic colours, of material oscillations, but that behind the earthly light life is flowing down from the sun. Then one also understands what Goethe meant if he says of the rainbow colours that they are deeds of the light.

From the stars, from the sun and moon flow not only light beams, but spiritual life streams down to us. As long as one only sees the physical light, one cannot understand this, because one can guess the spiritual only with artistic imagination, can experience it in the sensuous-extrasensory beholding as a picture by spiritual research.

The human being is a multi-membered being. If he sleeps, only his physical and etheric bodies rest in the bed. The astral body with the ego separates from the lower members and lifts out itself in the spiritual world. It receives forces, more elated ones than the human being gets from the sun and moon during the day.

Because the astral body is integrated in the much lighter substantiality of the astral world, the stars can influence it stronger. As in the wake state the physical forces work on the physical body, the stars work on the astral body now, because the human being is born out of the universe, by the same universal spirit as the starry sky.

If we raise the eyes to the sun, moon and stars that way, we can understand which forces work there, get to know the spiritual in the universe.

We cannot guess a manlike universal God, however, we can guess the spiritual forces behind the universal nebula and realise only in which way the worlds originate. We start experiencing the forces of leading beings behind the working forces.

Schiller thought also that way calling to the astronomers who investigate the physical stars only: “Do not chat so much to me about nebulae and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you to count them? True, your object is the most elated one in space; but—friends—the elated does not live in space.”

If we look only at the outer forces, we do not find the elated. However, if we search the spiritual, and return from the immense universe to ourselves, we are able to see a drop of the spiritual life in ourselves that flows through the space.

If we face the heavenly bodies with such attitude, we understand Goethe's word better: oh, what they would be, the countless millions of suns, if they did not reflect themselves in the human eye and did not delight a human heart at last?

It could sound presumptuous, and, nevertheless, it is modest if we understand it properly. If we look up at the sun from which life streams go out it works so powerfully that we could not stand them if the lunar forces did not paralyse them. Thus, we see the spirit in the universe; however, we know that we have organs with which we can perceive the spirit in the universe. Then we let it reflect in the organs as the sun is reflected to which we can also not see directly, but its shine is reflected in the waterfall, as well as it is expressed in Goethe's words where he lets Faust say, after he has led back him again to the life on earth:

I am content to have the sun behind me.
The cataract there storming through the cliff—
the more I watch it, the more is my delight.
From fall to fall it swirls, gushing forth
in streams that soon are many, many more,
into the air all loudly tossing spray and foam.
But see how, rising from this turbulence,
the rainbow forms its changing-unchanged arch,
now clearly drawn, now evanescent,
and casts cool, fragrant showers all about it.
Of human striving it's a perfect symbol—
ponder this well to understand more clearly
that what we have as life is many-hued reflection.

(Faust II, Verses 4715–4727)

The human being is distinguished from the other beings on earth because he does not arrange his life only according to vague, instinctive impulses, but to clear ideas and thoughts to get strength, power and certainty for his work if he is able to look not only at the present, but to determine his future out of ideas or ideals independently. The human being attains that only if he is able to survey life in its entirety. We learn from the past; we work for the future best of all if we anticipate in our ideas and ideals what we want to do in the future.

It could seem now that the today's topic Outset and End of the Earth extends too far to the past and to the future, as if we wanted to deal with ideas that hover high over our everyday existence. However, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte already said a right word against those people who turn against ideas and ideals out of their ostensible life praxis because they think that the practitioners of life have no use for ideals and ideas. Speaking about the great ideals and about the determination of the human being to his Jena students, he coined the nice words against those people: we, as idealists, know as well as the practitioners, maybe better, that the ideals are not directly applicable in the real life. However, if they want to state that life—if it should be practical—must not be arranged according to ideas and ideals, they show only that one does not count on them in the further evolution. Hence, a benevolent god may give them rain and sunshine at the right time, the necessary food and, as far as I am concerned, clever thoughts, too.

If we look back at the becoming of our earth, then the present human being thinks of the miraculous, immense achievements of the scientific thinking at first, of course. As well as already at other opportunities I want to emphasise also here that it can never be the task of spiritual science—if it understands itself correctly—to argue anything against the justified findings and results of the modern natural sciences. Therefore, allow me to say first something, before we tackle this enclosing issue from the spiritual-scientific point of view, also here again as with other considerations.

What has the modern science to say about our today's issue? I want to answer to the question only briefly and sketchily.—The natural sciences reveal the earthly past with great, enclosing astuteness. They conclude from that what the earth is now, from that what we have as remains of extinct worlds and beings how it has looked once on our earth maybe millions of years ago, and which beings walked on it. You know, history, the historical documents lead us only a short time back in the evolution, some millennia only. Then it becomes dark, so to speak, if one wants to count only on the historical documents. A second time leads us back to that what could not be committed to the written documents, also not to other documents, what our ancestors gave their dead to their graves as burial objects of their culture that they manufactured and that stayed behind as remains. Then, however, the natural sciences go back even further.

They show which beings lived successively on our earth based on the skeletons and other remains of primeval plants and animals that are included in the layers of our earth. One can easily realise that that what lies in the upper layers of our earth has found its grave at last, that that what lies in the deeper layers which were covered by later ones must contain the documentary remains of older, former times. Admittedly, it is not so easy to do research scientifically in this way. Geology has some difficulties. For that, what has been stacked within the earth surface has not so remained, as it has been stacked originally. Overburdens, faults, any possible mixture of the whole have taken place, so that sometimes that what lay originally at the bottom have come with the faults at the top. A great astuteness is necessary to get an idea of the earthly evolution from that what the layers of our earth enclose.

We do not want to go more into details than the spiritual researcher can justify in this respect; we also do not want to explain in detail what we would have to say from the spiritual-scientific point of view. There is still something to be corrected. However, we do not want to get ourselves into it. On the contrary, we prefer to accept thankfully as a great achievement for humanity what the industrious natural sciences have observed and the scientific astuteness has performed in this field. We would like to think ourselves back to a former state of the earth with the physical research where our earth looked very different for the most part from today, where the simplest living beings must have lived no remains of which were preserved. We pursue the development of our earth of the layers and remains that lie at the bottom and at the top. We find there simple animals, which are subordinate to the vertebrates, to those which have a skeleton.

We go on and see how the various animal classes and plant classes develop gradually, as well as they seem to appear on the changing earth gradually. We go back with the naturalist to the time when in our earth evolution fish appear. Many of them have quite different forms than the today's ones. If we go back further, we come to a strange developmental phase of our earth when those monstrous, miraculous animals that belong partly to the amphibians and reptiles inhabited it. These animals were gigantic, whose eyes were maybe as big as a child head, they were provided with huge teeth, animals that one calls ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs etc. and whose remains are excavated in the most different regions of the earth from the Cretaceous layer, the Jurassic layer. There we come to the time when more perfect plants have originated, in a relatively young time, although it comprises millennia. We arrive at that time when in scientific view the human being appeared, when he appears for the first time on our earth, so to speak, according to the documents that the concerning layers contain, after the higher mammals, related to him, had preceded him. Briefly, we use that picture again which we already used recently when I talked about sun, moon, and earth, and imagine anyone could observe the evolution from a seat in space for millions of years. He would see the surface of the earth forming, the distribution of water and earth, conditions of cold and heat changing, the various classes and forms of plants and animals appearing, and the physical picture would be the same for such a hypothetical observer as natural sciences describe it.

But again I emphasise that one cannot go on from spiritual science farther than, so to speak, up to the point where the natural sciences themselves will be obliged to correct the things in the future. Where does a conflict exist between the natural sciences and spiritual science now? One says repeatedly from the natural sciences, spiritual science does not stand on scientific ground. Can one stand more on scientific ground than to admit that everything that the natural sciences knows and can recognise also finds recognition with us?

However, there are people who say, they firmly stand on the ground of the scientific facts. They demand from the spiritual scientist that he should know nothing else than what they themselves know. They do not demand only that one concedes to them what they themselves say, but they also demand that one subjects to the dogma that one cannot say more than they say. These people do not notice at all that such inner intolerance was never there in the entire human development, also not in the times when the outer intolerance went far. Indeed, as we said already last time considering the sun, moon and stars: the outer sensuous picture gives no cause for quarrel between spiritual science and the natural sciences.—However, does result from this outer sensuous sight that behind the sensuous, behind the physical no extrasensory, supraphysical forces are effective? We could bring in the Plateau experiment already last time where one shows how a world system originates in microcosm in a liquid from an oil drop by rotation with a crank. However, the good man did completely forget that he himself turned the crank! He did not consider at all that this is quite impossible without the thoughts of that who turns the crank.

What one sees with the physical eyes is the outer expression, the outer process of that which happens internal-spiritually and what the human being can never get to know looking at the world only with his eyes and their ancillary tools, only with the outer physical tools. However, if we want to look back, to the physical beginning of the world and do not look at the physical only, then we have to imagine the true nature of the human being first. Someone who looks from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint at this true nature of the human being to whom the human being disintegrates, as I have often stressed, in a number of members. Above all the spiritual science shows us that the true reason of those varying states, which the human being experiences every day within 24 hours between wakening and sleeping, that a part of the human members separates from the other part in sleep. We see every night when the human being falls asleep sinking down in dreamless sleep, in an uncertain darkness what surged up and down as most manifold pictures and impressions in the soul during the day. We see everything sinking down that lives in the human being as instincts, desires, and passions, as joy, sorrow and pain. For somebody who stands on the ground of spiritual science, of course, also for everybody with common sense it would be a big folly if one wanted to assert that with falling asleep the bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires and passions would disappear and would rise again in the morning. Spiritual science shows that—when the human being lies in the dreamless sleep in his bed—only the physical body lies there connected with the etheric body. He has the physical body in common with the lifeless beings around him and the etheric body in common with the plants.

Two other members are lifted out from the human being in the dreamless sleep. Joy and sorrow, desires and passions, all sensations surging up and down, all that is quiet at night. The astral body is their bearer, and this is lifted out in the dreamless sleep from the physical and etheric bodies that stay behind in the bed. The astral body and the ego are lifted out.

By which does the existence of the astral body differ at night from its existence during the day? We can understand this remembering that the astral body has its reality outdoors in another world that is round it. I have explained that in other series of these talks. What does it depend on that one perceives anything? There can be countless worlds round you, the world of the tones, the world of the light, the world of the smells, the world of the tastes etc., if you had no senses for them, these worlds would not be there for you. It is the most illogical what one can do—however, the majority of the present human beings does it—to assert that a world which one does not perceive is not there. Spiritual science shows that the human astral body is lifted out at night in the dreamless sleep from the physical and etheric bodies and lives in another world; not in a transcendent, somewhere concealed world, but in a world that penetrates us, as light and air penetrate the space. For the spiritual-scientific observation that world differs from the physical-sensuous one only by the fact that it requires other organs with which one can perceive it.

This astral body is in a spiritual world that is in our environment as the air is round us. Who still has no idea of the fact that air is round him, says, it is nothing round him. Someone says this who has no idea of the fact that he lives perpetually in spirit, and means that there is no spirit in our surroundings, that no spiritual facts, no spiritual beings are there. The astral body, the bearer of desire and pain, is in this spiritual world at night. It does not perceive it because it does not yet have organs in the present evolution, no cognitive ability for this world in which it is.

It could appear like a hypothesis if one says that there is an astral body and the human being is in the dreamless sleep in a spiritual world except his physical and etheric bodies. But apart from the fact that somebody whose spiritual eyes are opened by initiation knows the astral body separated from the physical body by own observation and own experience, one can show, so to speak, experimentally that such an astral body exists, even if not with usual instruments. For the only instrument, which makes clear the secrets of the higher, supersensible world to the human being, which really leads him in the spiritual world, is the human being himself. This instrument, the human being, is capable of an infinite perfection, an infinitely subtle development, and just the initiation perfects the human being. It delivers to that who wants to apply it to himself, so to speak, the experimental evidence of an astral body that can become independent of the physical body.

Let us recall some of the viewpoints that we have discussed in the talk on the initiation. We have said there that the human being can do certain exercises of meditation, of contemplation according to particular methodical instructions by which he makes his worlds of thought, feeling and will-impulses stronger and stronger than feelings and will-impulses can be strengthened by any outer sensory observation. There are just such instructions as we have heard in the talk on initiation by which the human being can gain more than he gains by the mere outer observation of the reality. Something particular appears in a human soul which applies the instructions to itself. It appears that really the astral body receives spiritual eyes and ears by the subtle inner work of the human being. We can show that meditation of thoughts, feelings, and will-impulses make the feelings and the will-impulses more powerful. We can show how they work on this astral body: the astral body shows after some time, if the human being has patience and perseverance, that it has acquired the spiritual eyes and ears returning in the early morning in the physical and etheric bodies and it can experience now what one calls enlightenment. The human being is able to work on his astral body—working here in the awake consciousness by meditation of certain feelings and will-impulses according to certain methodical regulations—in such a way that it is able to react on us. Thereby one shows the reality of the astral body. We work on it and it works on us. It shows its existence by the fact of the initiation.

Just as the astral body is separated from the physical body at night, the bearer of the ego, of the human self-consciousness is also separated from him. This also disappears at the present developmental state of the human being still in an uncertain darkness. With the sleeping human being, we have the physical body in the bed that he has in common with all minerals, as well as the etheric body that he has in common with all plants. From the physical body and the etheric body the astral body is lifted out which he has in common only with the animals, and the ego that the human being, as a crown of the creation on earth, does not have in common with any other realm of nature. In the present developmental stage where no higher senses, no “spirit eyes” and no “spirit ears”, to speak with Goethe, are developed the impressions of the day disappear falling asleep, and other do not appear in the world for which he has no senses. Hence, darkness, lightlessness, and muteness surround him at night. In the morning while waking, the human being dives in the physical and etheric bodies. These are equipped with the physical eyes and ears. The spiritual human being dives in the physical-sensuous human being, uses the instruments for the physical-sensuous world, and has this world around himself. One should understand what Fichte said: one shall not believe that the eye sees, but that the human being sees by the eye; one shall not believe that the ear hears, but the human being hears by the ear. The same applies to the sense of smell and the sense of taste. They are tools for the inner human being.

Spiritual science recognises and must recognise this spiritual, inner human as the original, the first of the human being. The physical and the etheric bodies do not exist as the first, but the astral body and the ego existed before them. Indeed, some people who are influenced deeper suggestively by the very effective present ideas sticking to the material will argue: do you imagine in your fantastic spiritual science that this spiritual, this bearer of joy and sorrow, of desires, passions, and self-consciousness hovered once freely somewhere without being tied to a physical body?—Spiritual science answers: certainly, this is the case! Before anything physical, even before anything etheric existed, this astral body existed. The inner life was before the appearance.

With it, we are placed immediately at the earth's beginning.—Can you imagine that anybody can deny completely, even under the strong materialistic suggestions that something underlies like a spiritual state that condenses only afterward and comes into being? I have often emphasised here that spiritual science regards the matter as compressed spirit. We use a comparison that we have often applied to show how the spiritual researcher thinks about spirit and matter. Imagine once, somebody has transparent air before himself, and clouds form in this transparent air, as the effect of cooling. What was transparent before is clouded; what was vapour and was not visible once becomes water. Maybe it goes on: the water freezes to ice. The ice falls down in pieces. Let us assume that anybody comes and says, it is nonsense, stupidity that the water was distributed before in the air. I have seen nothing of it! The first I saw were the clouds. Then someone comes who can also not yet see the clouds, he sees something only if the water freezes if ice originates. If one says to him: what is there as ice today was there already sooner than water, then he answers: I have seen nothing, ice is there and nothing else.

From such thoughts, the answer must be taken if anybody wants to accuse a spiritual researcher of speculative fiction who says that the human being did not exist materially at first, also not as an etheric body, but his astral body and ego existed first. In the beginning of our earth existence, the astral body and the ego existed. Yes, there was even, as we see soon, the human being as a spiritual being on the earth, before animals, before plants, before minerals existed. At first, the earth existed as an agglomeration of nothing but such spiritual human beings who consisted of the ego and the astral body. This is the outset of the earth. The spiritual researcher goes on describing: as the water was distributed invisibly in the air, is condensed to clouds, the astral was condensed once to the etheric condition. Then human beings existed who had an ego, an astral body, and an etheric body. At last, the physical body originated, as the ice from the water, the water from the water vapour forms, as the densest part of the human being. Thus, we have the course of the earthly development: the human being is there as a spiritual being at first, then as an etheric being, and last the spiritual crystallises the human physical body.

We capture the picture of the condensing water vapour on camera. Assume that you have a lump of water. You would treat this lump of water artificially so that a part freezes in the middle. Imagine, you have many such lumps with which a part freezes in the middle; there originate many ice granules. Something very peculiar happens now: from some of these lumps of water the ice lumps fall out and remain only with little water coated for themselves, while the mother substance, the water withdraws, from which the ice has formed. With the other lumps of water, the ice granules remain in the water lumps and keep on freezing. More water changes into ice, bigger ice cores originate there. With a number of the resulting formations such bigger ice cores precipitate and keep some water, while the mother substance withdraws. This goes on that way. Such ice lumps rise to a higher stage, they develop more ice from the water. Always ice stages form back on earth, while other lumps transform more and more of the water into ice, until they have such ice lumps at last which have transformed all water into ice and whose mother substance is included, so to speak, only between the pores of the ice.

Let this picture of the earth's evolution arise in you from the outset until our time. Imagine the human being as a spiritual being at the beginning of our earth's existence and only existing as a spiritual being. He begins first to densify a small, unimportant part, which becomes denser. There are certain beings that stop like the ice granules on an early stage, while they separate from their spiritual mother substance. These are the most imperfect animals that originated once from the human mother substance; from the astral human being only a part became material and densified. These are the lowest animals. The other human beings developed to higher stages. Higher animals precipitated again from the spiritual mother substance. Thus, in the course of the earth development more and more differentiated and perfect creatures developed, up to the today's human being who is in his external physical expression an image of the spiritual arrangements and possibilities that were included originally at the earth's beginning in spirit, in the astral body of the human being. As the ice lumps, which precipitated, represent the stages of the becoming of the big ice lump, all beings that are more imperfect than the human being is constitute the entire animal realm and plant realm, the backward stages of the human evolution on earth.

The human being is the first-born of the earth as a spiritual being, and he has densified as a spiritual being if I may use the expression the material gradually from himself. On every stage subordinated beings stopped, so that we have to see in the whole range of the more imperfect earthly beings not ancestors of the human being, but on the contrary descendants of the spiritual human being who did not come along. These are the backward brothers, backward beings on the preliminary stages, which continued their life until our time and that is why they became decadent.

Thus, considering the evolution we see members falling out. If anybody could put a chair in the space and watch the Hyperborean human being, he would see if the premises of spiritual science were right the external-physical picture that the spiritual researcher shows: how the human being first left behind the imperfect animals and then the more and more perfect ones. Really the human being originated externally latest in his today's figure, as the latest one of the creatures; spiritually he is the first-born; spiritually he leads the way of all beings. From the human being all the other beings have developed who fall out on an imperfect stage of the human being as it were, which represent the repelled ones of the human evolution. Thus, in the earth's evolution everything imperfect goes back to the higher. The higher, the original is not in our physical figure, but in the spirit. The modern natural sciences suffer almost from the question, which they put repeatedly and which is so intimately connected with our topic of the outset of our earth: how can anything living develop from the lifeless? If on our earth only lifeless material is, how could life develop from it? The only answer is that one puts the question wrongly. Life has never developed from the lifeless; however, everything lifeless has originated from life.

You can easily realise how the lifeless arises from the living if you look at the hard coal, which is dug out like a rock even today. Once the coal was plants, ferns and horsetails which have stood on certain regions of the earth, and sank in the ground and which you can dig out now after millions of years, after they have become stone. For the spiritual researcher not only the coal originated from plants, but everything mineral leads back to an original plant, even if the materialistic researcher cannot imagine a plant realm without mineral basis. Such a researcher cannot imagine that the denser, coarser processes arise from the subtler processes.

There is an example how such a materialistic view strikes in the face of any common sense how materialism haunts in some European scholars. There is, for example, the materialistic theory of soul phenomena by William James (1842–1910, American philosopher and psychologist) which even wants to be idealistic with which the materialistic ideas mingle in the entire thinking. I have already quoted the symptom that is contained in the sentence: “The human being does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries.” There the person concerned supposes that the existence works materially on the human being: it works on the lachrymal glands, and then the human being feels the process and becomes sad. This is in our present this way: the inventor of this theory is consequent in his materialism, also if it strikes in the face of common sense. In truth, the processes are in the mental-spiritual world, and the material processes are the results of them. The mental-spiritual processes are the original ones. Everything solid, everything material-mineral around us has originated from the spiritual. The question is not how life has originated from lifeless but how the lifeless has originated from the living. However, as something lifeless originates from the living the living was there before the lifeless, the spiritual was there before the living. Thus, we come back to the outset of our earth and see that our earth was a spiritual being even at its starting point. It was a spiritual being, the material developed successively from itself that from the spiritual the living, and from the living the dead has originated. The dead is the latest product.

Thus, we look back to the outset of our earth and feel as human beings as the first-born of the earth, spiritual at the starting point of the earth evolution. Now we let the spirit look from here at the future. We can understand the easiest how the spiritual researcher achieves a picture of the future perspective if we realise what has also already arisen briefly from other indications in this series of talks that in the today's human being the single organs are of quite different value. It is not in such a way as it appears to the materialistic anatomy with the investigation of the human being. For the materialistic anatomist everything is there only in such a way as it presents itself after its physical peculiarity. However, for that who pursues the human organs with spiritual sight there are those which are in decadence, in withering, as the tree forms the bark, as well as others, which are at the beginning of their development as they look today. Certain lower organs that today serve the reproduction of humanity are dying away. However, we have an organ which is in the beginning of its development, and which attains a much higher stage in the future. This organ is the human heart. Not only the spiritual part, but also the physical organ, the heart, is a wonderful perspective for our future. The heart is a crux for the anatomist because, otherwise, every voluntary organ has fasciated muscles. The heart is an organ, which is a voluntary muscle according to its structure, although it is used as an involuntary organ. Where from does this come?

No physical anatomy can explain this! The reason is that the heart is intended to be a much higher organ in the future. It is fasciated because it is a voluntary muscle in the future. We correspond voluntarily with a movement of the heart in the future to that what the soul feels as an impulse. The human being will perform his work not only by the tools of the hand, but the heart will be the tool of the soul in a way, as the human being does not at all anticipate it even today.

Take another organ, the human vocal organ. What is it capable of today? If I speak to you what happens there? My words that I speak to you live in my soul at first. If I did not pronounce them, they would not penetrate into your soul. I pronounce them, set the tools of my larynx in motion. The air here in this room is set in vibration, and there are the oscillations of each of my words in this hall that penetrate you. What is language? It is an aerial embodiment of the thoughts. If I have pronounced anything, the thought sounds there, it is embodied in the air, and someone who could see the aerial waves in this room would see the physical creation of my thoughts bustling about in the room. Spiritual science shows that the future human being gets around to producing not only aerial-shaped figures by his words, but also denser matter as image of that what lives in his soul. He will learn to shape denser and denser this way, and he will produce his equals by his transformed vocal organ, by his word. If the human being keeps on developing, important changes of his corporeality take place. Certain organs decline, other organs keep on developing. The heart becomes an important tool of the soul. The vocal organ becomes the reproductive organ of the future human being who will produce his equals from his thoughts.

As he embodies his thoughts in the air today, he will embody himself by the organ that is becoming the future reproductive organ. Like a shade of that what our head will be is that what he is today. The coherence between the human vocal organ and the reproductive organ is indicated by the fact that with the male individual the voice changes with the sexual maturity.

May the human beings better consider such changes which spiritual science imparts! What the spiritual research says points to that what humanity will have later to the creation of its equals: it is the word. A human being speaks the word, and the word will be a human being. This happens when the human being has spiritualised himself more and more. For he spiritualises himself and returns to the spirit at the end of the earth because he puts his physical tools at the disposal of the spirit, as we have seen it with the heart and with the larynx. With the predecessors of the human being, the creators who started their earth's existence at that time who stood at the earth's beginning where the human being will stand at the earth's end one recognises that it was with them the same way. The human being will originate by the word at the end, he will speak the word at the primeval end, and the word will be a human being. Of those beings, the divine-spiritual beings which already stood at the earth's beginning at the height to which the human beings will develop once it is said to us in one of the deepest religious documents, in the John's Gospel, properly and appropriately: in the primeval beginning the word was, and the word was a God.—As the word was in the primeval beginning, and the word was a God, the word will be a human being at the primeval end, and the human being will be the word.

If we look at the beginning that way and see how the human being has originated from the spirit and has become the today's human being in the sense of the earth's evolution, and look at the changes of our earthly human being, the perspective of the spiritualisation of the earth presents itself to us. There we have spirit at the beginning and spirit at the end. Spirit was the origin and spirit is the goal. This is the secret of the earth's evolution. If we see the more and more condensing matter in the middle, we know that this matter is a converted and transformed spirit if we regard it not as an outer vision, but go into its being. It is nothing else than that what has developed from the spirit and what becomes spirit again. If we look forward, everywhere we look at spirit. According to Jacob Boehme, we originate in the spirit, and we strive for the spirit. The activity of the spirit is that knowledge of the spirit that raises the human being really which makes him a useful being because he will be a hopeful, spiritually and physically healthy being. It is the knowledge that everything is rooted in spirit and that that what we perceive and see in the world evolution is the actions of the divine spirit.

We have to go far back in the human striving for a solution of the world riddles if we want to envisage the origin of both ideas that soon force themselves on the human being if he approaches the world riddles in a deeper sense, above all in a spiritual sense: the ideas of bad and good.

The human thinking will always try to rise to the mysterious forces that cause our development from the spiritual world. All the time we notice the attempt in the most different forms to relate the beneficial and progressive forces of life to the destroying forces, the reluctant ones, the impedient ones. However, the human being repeatedly faces the intimate relationship between both forces which exists for the precise observant in spite of the apparently strong contrast. We need to think only of Schiller's words about the fire already mentioned at another opportunity:

Benevolent is the fire's might
If man tames and watches it,
For what he builds, what he creates,
He owes to this heavenly power,
But terrible this heavenly power is,
If she, casting off her shackles,
Strides along on tracks her own
This free daughter of nature.

One could say, in such words lies the question that has to occupy us today and in the next talk. The question has dressed itself in the words hell and heaven at different times. One must not imagine at all that these words appear where they have that superstitious meaning which many followers of these ideas add to them, but also not less many of those who would like to fight against them today without knowing their deeper meaning.

If we look around only briefly, we see our question already arising in the ancient Persian culture where the realms of the good forces, of Ormuzd, and of the bad forces, of Ahriman, are sharply contrasted to each other. If we see how in a strange mental image the hating, the impedient forces mingle into the concealed forces which penetrate the world in the good sense and finally the light power is victorious, we have one of the great pictures before ourselves in which human imagination dresses our problem. From the Greek Tartaros up to the Nordic mythology a realm of the hell faces us; we hear names with which the concept “hell” is connected. It is that region in which all are condemned who did not die an honourable death in the physical world.

A peculiarity can strike us if we remember this legend of the hell. Let us follow it exactly, because one has to say from the start, in the dress of mythology a deeper wisdom is sometimes found than that is which is fathomed with abstractions in our time.

It is strange how the old Nordic mythology derives the present condition of the world from a cold nebulous “Niflheim,” the northern land that was foreign to the sun according to the Germanic idea in ancient time, and from another realm, “Muspelheim,” the warm realm. By the cooperation of both realms, the present condition of the earth originated. From the cold, nebulous Niflheim and not from the warm Muspelheim the most important forces serving now humanity were derived. There have first developed the higher forces underlying the today's culture. However, at the same time,—and this is the strange that touches our question in a miraculous way—it is said to us that Hel who receives the unworthy dead people is exiled by the gods to this nebulous home where those arrive who died of no honourable death. It is strange that the realm and the forces of the rise are brought together with the place and the personality who represents the force of death, of decay.

Approaching our times, we find those taking the mental picture of a world in which the evil is concentrated who want to explain our existence from the depths of the world existence. How magnificently and greatly Dante describes this world immediately at the beginning of his overpowering poem that shows the purification and development of the human being to the higher spiritual worlds! Again, a poet was urged to take these mental pictures to show the forces living in the human soul when Goethe wrote his Faust. Hence, he contrasted that what should lead Faust to the bright powers with the representative of the infernal powers, with Mephistopheles.

You can find many important remarks in Goethe's Faust that describe the peculiar relationship of Faust to Mephisto and of both to the world existence. I would like to mention two of them in this context in which Goethe puts both concepts strangely side by side and in a certain way reminiscent to the Nordic legend. The one quotation is that where Mephistopheles is called “a part of that force which, always willing evil, always produces good.” In a very intimate coherence with the whole world existence, the concepts of good and evil are put there. And another quotation of Goethe should not go unmentioned which on the one side leads us deeply into Goethe's soul, on the other side, however, also rather deeply into our problem; for it deals with the whole relation of the good powers in Faust to that what Mephisto, the evil, wants to attain with him. Very typically, Goethe lets Faust say the words when he should make the pact with Mephisto that determines under which conditions he belongs to Mephisto:

If I should ever say to any moment:
Tarry remain—you are so fair!
Then you may lay your fetters on me,
then I will gladly be destroyed!
Then they can toll the passing bell,
your obligations then be ended—
the clock may stop, its hand may fall,
and time at last for me be over!

(Verses 1699–1706)

“If I should ever say to any moment: Tarry remain—you are so fair!” is an expression by which Goethe makes comprehensible to us that Mephistopheles has not understood it in its entirety. However, Faust knows that he can only fall for the infernal powers if he is placed in the position to say to the moment: “Tarry remain—you are so fair!”

I want to put this at the beginning of our today's consideration because it can show in which direction that is turned what occupies us today, on one side, from the world of legends, on the other side, from a deep human thinking, dressed in a poetic garment. Indeed, those who believe today to be able to build up a whole worldview from some pieced together concepts of the material world, very easily are ready with the concepts hell and heaven. They do not care about what we have put at the head of our consideration now. One simply says, we need only to go back the developmental way of the different religions and childish worldviews. Then we realise that either the peoples or some human beings invented something in their misery that one calls heaven and hell, partly to comfort the peoples for the grief which they suffer on earth, partly to encourage them by the fear of the hell to transform their selfish desires into the good.

Who talks in such a way knows nothing about the real motives by which one introduced such ideas like heaven and hell in the souls and hearts of the human beings.

Today we search an answer to this question not in any accidental observations, in any pictures, judgements and conclusions, but we want to gain mental pictures of what is to be said about this question.

We remember the talk about the topic Man, Woman and Child. We could speak there of the big development of the human being on earth and impart knowledge of various forces which are active in the human evolution. If we survey this human development in the sense of spiritual science, then we take the way up to attain a relationship to it as the spiritual-scientific viewer looks at the growing child approaching us from the first moments of its life and working out its forces and abilities more and more.

Someone who looks with the sight sharpened by spiritual science at this growing human being sees the abilities of the child developing from the rudiments in a lovely way. A materialistically minded science would like to make us believe that that what gradually works its way out so attractively is to be led back to the merely inherited attributes of the parents, grandparents or other ancestors. The word “inheritance” plays a big role concerning this question in this day and time. Often enough I drew your attention to the fact that spiritual science has to play a role which before not too long time—300 years have not yet passed—a great scientist played, the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi (1626–1697). He first pronounced something that is common property of any unprofessional and academic knowledge today. At his time, it was not only an unprofessional faith, but also the faith of all naturalists that from something unliving, from river mud, not only lower animal beings but also earthworms, fish can originate. One believes today that these are only religious prejudices, which prevented the human being to lead back all things to a wholly mechanical world order. However, not only the few worldly scholars who lived at that time supposed that from something unliving life could originate, but also St. Augustine represented this view. You learn from this fact that it did not contradict the piety of St. Augustine at all to represent such a conception.

However, what contradicts such an assumption? A real, in the depths of the world existence going outer and inner observing, physical and not supersensible experience of the things. Physical and not supersensible experiences forced the quotation upon the human beings gradually which then Redi did: life can originate only from life.

In the same position in which in those days the naturalist Redi was—he escaped the destiny of Giordano Bruno (1544–1600, Italian monk and philosopher, burnt at the stake) only by the skin of the teeth—, is the modern spiritual science today. The sentence, which one denies today, is applied to the spiritual realm: the spiritual can originate only from spiritual.—We cannot lead back to physical processes what we see developing first from the dispositions of the embryo. We lead it back to the spiritual as we lead life back to life. Then the spiritual leads us back to a spiritual-mental. If we see this spiritual-mental dressed, as it were, in those attributes connected with the physical or the other covers of the human being, then we only lead this physical back to the entire line of inheritance that colours and shades the spiritual-mental abilities and peculiarities. If one wants to draw our attention repeatedly to the way in which the qualities sum up in the inheritance line gradually which appear then last with a descendant, we are not at all surprised from the viewpoint of spiritual science. It is a matter of course for us that in the bodies in which the spiritual germ appears the attributes of the physical inheritance appear. For, how do we look at this physical inheritance? We choose the following example:

We take a sprout of a plant and plant it in fertile soil with all possible substances that can well supply the plant. Then we plant the same sprout in another soil that contains small quantities of the substances, which the plant needs. The plants carry the qualities of the ground in themselves from which they have arisen. Thus, we see the plant unfolding what is its own deeper origin, we see its sprout, and on the other side that what this sprout developed and unfolded in which it is wrapped what appears as attached and filled from the ground from which the plant has arisen. Thus, the human being has arisen, like the plant from a former plant, from a spiritual-mental of prehistoric time. He has grown on a ground that was prepared in the line of inheritance, and this spiritual-mental germ contains qualities that it brings from the ground of the inheritance line. We are not surprised that the complete process is in such a way and presents itself for the external, physical world viewer in such a way that one can be addicted to the indicated mistakes. If it means, one should observe how in an especially gifted personality the qualities of the ancestors are added up and that a musician is descended from a family of musicians and a mathematician from a family of mathematicians, the spiritual scientist does not at all deny these things or show them in another light.

For spiritual science, the matter is in such a way: there are large periods, within which our spiritual-mental arises repeatedly. We speak in the spiritual research of repeated earth-lives, while we say that our spiritual-mental existence points us back to former lives in which the spiritual germs of the current life were prepared. Everything that we now contain and that we now gain develops in future time and has its effect. This spiritual-mental germ has nothing to do with that what reproduces in the physical line. If the human being enters the existence, this spiritual-mental germ enters the physical body, and the forces that are handed down in the family build up the physical body, which he inhabits. Thus, a duality is really assembled in the human being one of which, the spiritual-mental, goes back to an only spiritual evolution line, while the other, the physical one goes back to the inherited line of evolution. Inheritance and reincarnation are both things, which intermingle here, as it arises from any reasonable consideration.

Nevertheless, one says then, realise that in one ancestor these qualities exist and in another those qualities. At last, these qualities accumulate and become Goethe or Beethoven. The genii normally appear at the end of a long line. Let us consider this sentence once: the genius appears at the end of a line of generations.—It is weird that the genius is led back to inheritance because it has a body that is organised for the genius. If the Bernoullis (famous Swiss family of mathematicians and scientists) become mathematicians repeatedly, it is obvious that they need special bodies. It is not miraculous that if the spiritual-mental germ disappears in an inheritance line, in that what is the ground for the mathematical head, he also brings these qualities. On the other hand, does it surprise one that anybody who dives in the water comes out wet? Thus, it is also natural that if anybody is born out of a family he carries the qualities of the family in himself.

It is something natural that the cited sentence can really mean something completely trivial. However, when would it have to appear that the genius itself is inheritable? If it stood at the beginning and not at the end of a line of generations! If it stands at the end, it is a proof of the fact that just the ingenious qualities are not transmitted! It is already a weird kind of arguing if one says that one realises that the qualities are transmitted, and if one asserts that the genius stands at the end of a line. A healthy logic can only say that the reincarnating genius cannot transmit the spiritual qualities; since, otherwise, it would have to stand at the beginning of the generation line. We come there to two developmental lines, a spiritual one, and a physical one. If one does not accept this, one also does not manage with the healthy logic.

We see a child that went through another life centuries ago developing and using those qualities which present themselves to it now. We see the child entering life that way. How do we see the human being leaving life? We have already pointed to this. Now we want to look at the events that occur if that what has entered the physical existence by birth leaves it again, while it walks through the gate of death. There we must not only consider death, but something that we already mentioned in the last consideration, the alternating states of sleeping and waking, and the alternating states of life and death.

We know from the last consideration that if the human being sinks in the dreamless sleep certain members of his being separate from the real human inside, the innermost being, his essence. We distinguish in such a sleeping human being in the sense of the spiritual science what lies, so to speak, in the bed, from this essence. In the bed lies the physical body that is handed over at death to the earthly elements. However, if the human being lies in the bed, the physical body is not in such a way as it is when it is handed over to the earth. The physical body is there still infiltrated by the etheric body or life body. The physical body lives, the vital functions are maintained, so that in the bed there lie the physical body and the etheric body or life body. However, the bearer of joy and sorrow is lifted out, it is the bearer of any sensory sensation surging up and down during the day like heat and cold, smell and taste, and it is the bearer of the whole life of thought and imaging, starting from the instincts and passions up to the moral ideals. All that sinks in an uncertain darkness with sleep. However, this also appears again in the morning like light streaming inside. It is the light of the consciousness.

We must exactly distinguish something else within that what is lifted out at night from the human body, from the physical one and the etheric one: It is the human self-consciousness and its bearer, the human ego. We call the bearer of joy and sorrow, of instincts and passions, of sensuous sensations surging up and down the astral body, and the bearer of the self-consciousness, the fourth member of the human being, the ego. These both members, the ego-bearer and the bearer of desire and pain, are lifted out during the dreamless sleep from the physical and etheric bodies.

Why can you not perceive in that world? We have found the answer of this question in our talks; because of the present developmental stage of the human being, the ego and the astral body have no organs. The human being perceives his physical environment because he has organs, eyes, and ears. In the morning when the ego and the astral body disappear in the physical body and use these organs the human being perceives the surroundings. We have a four-membered being: a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego-body.—This is the nature of the alternating states of waking and sleeping.

However, we want to imagine the moment of death now. We can do this, using what such a human being perceives who has applied the methods of initiation and has learnt to use the higher senses slumbering in the human being. In addition, a usual logic can realise this because these facts are portrayed in such a way that they can demonstrate the way of the human being through death. At death, something happens that only happens during the whole life between birth and death in special cases. During the whole life, the etheric body is united with the physical body. Only at death, it separates from it, and thereby the physical body becomes a corpse. Now it follows the merely physical-chemical forces from which it was wrested between birth and death because the etheric body worked in it.

This etheric body is a faithful fighter against the decay of the physical body during the whole life; for the physical body has the chemical and physical forces in itself. This becomes obvious if it is left to its own resources after death: it disintegrates, it is an impossible mixture. The etheric body separates from the physical body and remains together with the astral body and the ego for a while.

This coherence is of big importance. At the moment of death, a comprising painting of his life between birth and death faces the human being. It is, as if an immense panorama of this life which we have experienced stands before our souls. This view, a feeling of extension, of increasing accompanies this reminiscent picture. It is, as if the human being extended and on the inner side the pictures of the past life appeared like in a miraculous panorama.

Where from does this come? It originates because the etheric body is the bearer of memory. As long as it is in the physical body, it is bound to the physical body, and it can only survey what it has experienced in the physical body between birth and death. The physical body is an obstacle. Because the etheric body is an unclouded, pure bearer of memory, the entire past appears in one single picture after death. Some people who were almost drowning or fell off a rock and were close to death remember that the whole life stood before their souls at this moment. I could tell a lot to you, however, I only want to mention what you can read in a book to which I have pointed once. However, the criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt (1835–1920, Austrian neurologist), a man who would regard everything that was said here as the biggest nonsense and fantasy—this does not matter—, tells that when he was close to drowning his whole life faced him like a big painting. What happens in such a case? A spontaneous relaxation of the physical body and the etheric body happens which is removed immediately again. The result of this fact is that the commemorative contents of the whole life stand before the human soul for a quite short interval.

Thus, this reminiscent picture stands before the human soul first. Then the time comes in which the etheric body separates from the astral body and from the ego. However, there remains a rest of the etheric body that is connected with the human being, the essence of the last life. Imagine this extract, this life essence in such a way, as if you could summarise the contents of a thick book skilfully on one page, but in such a way that a human being could rebuild the contents of the book. A sort of such a life essence is attached to the human being for all future, after he has removed what he cannot use for his further development. We especially want to notice this. What is attached there to the human being for his future development is the fruit of the last life. Each life constitutes something like a page in the big book of life and all our earth-lives are put down in such a page. They are attached to our being. We take such a fruit from a life with us in all the coming ones. This fruit has a great significance for the further development of the human being.

However, before we can go into the significance of this life essence, we must closer consider the further course of the human being after death. After this life painting was there for a quite short interval, the human being experiences another time after death that we can characterise in the following way. The human being has his ego, his astral body, and the above-mentioned extract.

Let us take one of the usual experiences, the experience of a gourmet who enjoys a tasty dish. By which does the enjoyment come about? Somebody may attribute it only to the physical body. However, this would be absurd. Not the physical body, but the astral body is the bearer of desires, of joy and sorrow. The astral body has the enjoyment, and it develops the desire for the tasty dish. The physical body is an apparatus of physical materials, of physical and chemical forces. It delivers the tools that the astral body can satisfy these desires. This is the relation of the astral body to the physical body in life. The astral body cries for satisfying its desires, and the physical body delivers the tools, the palate, the tongue etc. by which it can satisfy its desires. What does now happen at death? The physical body is cast off and all instruments of satisfaction with it. The astral body, however, is there, and it is easy to realise that this astral body does not break of its hedonism, its desires automatically only because the physical tools are taken from it. The astral body keeps the desire, the addiction after death, although it lacks the physical tools by which it can satisfy it. The astral body develops the desire for tasty dishes etc., but there is no palate. On the other hand, it is, as if a human being suffers from burning thirst in surroundings where no water is far and wide. For no other reason it cannot satisfy the desire after death because it has no organs for it. Thus, it suffers pain because of the desire, until it has eradicated the desire root and branch by non-satisfaction.

This time of purification can appear to any possible degree. We take two human beings, the one is completely merged in the sensuous enjoyments, his life is filled with any possible enjoyment from the morning to the evening which one can have only in the physical world where the tools exist to its satisfaction. He identifies his whole inside with his physical body. A human being who identifies himself in such way with the physical body will have a more difficult existence after death than someone who already sees through the sensuous things what is spiritual-mental, supersensible. On the other side, take someone who beholds a nice scenery or enjoys a musical work. This human being can realise a manifestation of the spirit in the smallest, most unimportant things. One likes to choose the pleasure of a nice scenery or of a good composition as examples because the matter can be illustrated easier with it. Somebody who hears the riddles of the everlasting in the world rushing in the harmonies and melodies of a composition who can open his soul in a nice scenery to the spiritual harmonies and relations breaks away as a mental-spiritual being already in this life between birth and death from that what is bound to the physical. What shines through the physical, what is felt sounding through the physical is a possession that remains to us and which we have not to purify; for that what drops from us is only the outer garment. Contemplate once in your deepest inside how something makes known itself in the musical work that is purely spiritual. It is concealed in the sensuous manifestations and penetrates it by the means of the sensuous manifestation. That belongs to the spirit, to the soul, from which the human being does not need to break away after death.

Thus, you realise that there are degrees of that what one has to endure, and these degrees are determined by the fact how strongly the human being has identified himself with that what he only can experience and enjoy by his organs in the physical world.

There is now, so to speak, a perspective that needs not to be an immediate reality for the present human being because there is no one with whom the conditions come true to this perspective completely. Nevertheless, it exists. We take a human being who gives his ego completely up to that what only the physical body and its organs in connection with the physical outside world can enjoy and who has no interest in anything that forms the basis as spiritual-mental contents of this sensuous outside world. Briefly, we take a human being who looks only at the earth and identifies himself only with that what forms his body. What will be the result? We can recognise this if we investigate the riddles of the human being even more exactly.

We have to adhere if we want to do this to that what the human being takes as a life essence of his etheric body. What originates from this life essence? From this fruit of the preceding life, the human being builds up his next incarnation, the body of his next life. For that, what the human being develops gradually is a product of inheritance. However, this product of inheritance is elastic in certain way.

The human being cannot be built up only by the attributes of the inheritance, but—as in an elastic corporeality—that works and weaves what he has brought from former lives. Thus, we see the incorporated fruits of the former life and of all former lives in a human being except the inherited attributes. If we ask ourselves, what does this entail if the human being lives from embodiment to embodiment in such a way? Then we can say, it is the way of perfection by the earth-lives. The human being entered his first life with forces that were primitive in relation to the forces that work with the most human beings today. When he entered his first incarnation, he had little mental power by which he could direct the mental to the physical and etheric bodies. Then he enjoyed the fruits of the first life, took the fruit of the first life and the result of it was that the next life could become a more perfect one. Because the human being can add the experiences of the following lives to those of the first life, he creates a more and more perfect, self-contained harmonious earth existence. Any new life appears to us on a higher level. However, you see two forces working into each other. You see, after the human being has passed the gate of death, the life essence, the forces of the former life that are preserved for the future, the forces which can make the human being more and more perfect. Thus, the power of the human being is increased from life to life.

However, when the ego leaves the physical body, you see the forces that chain him repeatedly to the past physical existence. Indeed, after death the human existence consists of advancing and of retarding forces.

Now look once again briefly at these retarding forces about which we have spoken, that from which the human being must break away after death root and branch. If nothing else were added, the human being would be only equipped with the fertile forces of his past life for the future existence. Indeed, the human being breaks away from all that what chains him, so to speak, to the former lives, he breaks away from all desires. However, he cannot break away from one thing. A rest remains. This rest is prepared between birth and death. It is not there when the human being enters life. After he has entered life, he grows into the physical world, and his adhering to the desire of the physical world is something that the human being causes only in the course of this life that he only draws in his being. Now we can form the mental picture that that what the human being draws gradually in his being is something that does not contribute to his further development that would make this further development even impossible if he were exposed solely to these forces. Because he brings that all in his life and because it can be taken up by life, it is the life between birth and death that brings the retarding forces in the human being.

On one side, there is the experience of life that we take as a fruit, and on the other side, it chains us to the physical world that we carry then continuously in ourselves. On the one side, it is that what wants to lift out of the embodiment, on the other side, it brings us repeatedly to this world, until we are so far that we have completely overcome everything that brings us together with the physical world at the end of our existence. Thus, the human being has a power permanently in himself that furthers him, and another that is a retarding one. We see the human existence consisting of advancing and of retarding, hampering forces.

You can see in detail how these advancing and hampering forces affect each other. Take the human eye; it is formed, as Goethe says, “in the light for the light.” If we had no eye, we would not see the light. However, if the light were not there, the eye would also not be. The light has developed the eye. Because the light creates the eye, it inhibits the development and the developmental stream, which has preceded. Because in the distant past the light worked on the human body, this eye was elicited from it. For that purpose, it had to retard the force only that would have been vitality in another direction. After long work of the other forces, the eye will be only ripe to become an organ that furthers the development again. Thus, you see at this example, that the retardations, the hampering forces, are substantially necessary.

Now we see how wonderfully wisely it is established in this human life, while on one side the forward pressing forces of evolution are there, and on the other side the repelling forces. These repelling forces chain the human being to the physical world, which give him the organs in the physical world between birth and death by which he acquires the strength for the progress again. If the hampering forces were not there, the human being would not enter the life between birth and death and would not grow into the covers through which the spiritual-mental appears to him. Now he works by the life that the hampering forces created. Thus, the human being owes the fruits of progress to the hampering forces.

There is a big riddle concealed that in life the progressive forces must co-operate with the hampering ones. Now it can happen that the human being balances the progressive forces and the hampering ones, or that he connects himself completely with the hampering forces that he grows together completely with the forces which are generated only in the physical body as means of progress, however, he regards them not as means, but as an end in itself. In this case, the spiritual-mental of the human being would break away from any progress. It would fall out and the time of kamaloka, the time of purification, which consists of the fact that the human being casts off what connects him in microcosm with the physical world, this time would become something absolute.

This faces us as an extreme. However, because the human being grows never together completely with the sensuous world because he is able to avoid this extreme perspective in his mental, in his inside, he escapes from the extreme. However, if he were in such a way that his interest never stuck to that what shines through as a spiritual-mental—this faces us as a perspective, however, it is not reached in this life—, then it would squeeze in the active forces of life. Then it would become obvious there that the human being would tear out himself from all spiritual-mental because he has grown together with the physical-sensuous world. We assume this case. Now the human being should be placed into the spiritual-mental world after death. He brings nothing for the spiritual-mental world but the invincible tendency to the physical-sensuous world. This reminiscent picture sticks to him and presses like a weight of lead. The human being gets the hardened material, converted into the spiritual, into the spiritual world. He is connected inseparably with the forces that detain and hamper any development and evolution. This is the idea of the infernal existence.

Hence, the time of purification extends in the last perspective to that state where without understanding of the spiritual-mental world the ego has stuck to the wholly physical-sensuous and brings nothing but the understanding of the physical-sensuous. This understanding of the physical-sensuous is the infernal torture in the spiritual even if it also is an infinitely satisfying enjoyment in the sensuous existence. We try to understand the above-mentioned words of Faust now. If the infernal messenger wants to have him, what must be achieved? It must be achieved that Faust does not suck out the germ of further development from the moments of the bodily existence, but that he has to get stuck into it at these moments of the physical existence in such a way that he wants to retain them in his sensuousness. “If I should ever say to any moment: tarry remain—you are so fair!” Then you have me! The human being can make this pact with the infernal powers that he combines with these forces hampering the progress. However, we see at the same time that it was necessary that these hampering forces came into being in the human evolution.

We examine next time what the human being was at that time when he appeared in the physical body for the first time, and where from he brought it. Now we know that the human being consists of progressive and backward forces. If the human being had no hampering forces in those days when he entered the physical body for the first time, he would have remained in that spiritualised form in which he was before the incarnation. Because the hampering organs developed in him, the spirit penetrated the sensuous and could take the fruits of the sensuous, could get rich more and more. The progressive forces are those, which had to create the organs of progress only. They have to hamper a former development, so that a later development becomes possible. Nobody has the right to complain obstacles in life.

The conservative element is a benefit, as long as it is in the service of humanity; it becomes an impediment if it is made an end in itself. The same applies after life. The impediment is, considered in the service of the spirit, the highest bearer of progress. If one regards it, however, as an end in itself or uses it egoistically, then it is the germ of the hell. Thus, that from which all human faculties originate on earth can become an end in itself, a germ of the hell if the human being unites with it at an inopportune moment.

We now understand the Nordic legend. The spiritual germ of the current culture has arisen from Niflheim. It had to go through the old cultures, but it also had to go beyond them, while it took the fruits in the present incarnation. Those human beings who do not use the present incarnation in the spiritual-mental sense condemn themselves to be thrown back to a level which was beneficent in its kind at its time as means of progress but which now hampers. Thus, that which is a means of progress at its time becomes the infernal element if it survives in the human existence. The hell did not always control Niflheim. The good elements of the human being held on Niflheim up to the time when they have developed beyond this stage.

Thus, we really see bad and evil, infernal and heavenly forces working in the human life and flowing out from him as Schiller says it in the cited poem. The beneficent element becomes a consuming, hampering element if it is not used in the right way,—as well as the fire is beneficent if the human being controls it, while it can become “terrible,” if “it, casting off its shackles, strides along on tracks its own.” The infernal powers also appear, if they enter the human life “on tracks their own.”

We understand why the great spirits have thought or felt such deep connections, and thought and felt the same that spiritual science puts before our souls. We have recognised the infernal element as something that is necessary for our life; we will get to know that element even closer next time, which will give us light about the whole. We get to know the bright heaven in the light of true spiritual science. However, already from the today's talk we can see that it is right what Dante (D. Alighieri, ~1265–1321, Italian poet) pronounces in the last line of his song about the hell. Dante just also believed at first to have to look at the strong, hampering forces in life, before he formed a mental picture of those progressive forces in which all welfare and all human development is contained. We will also attain clues for the usual, everyday life if we can balance regression and progress properly. It will become obvious where the hampering forces threaten to become the infernal ones, and where they turn out to be beneficent, while they rise to the advancing powers. Dante describes it if he sees himself beguiled by the infernal powers under the guidance of Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 B.C., Roman poet), then he comes out as a victor over all hampering powers, and the luminous stars appear at the distant firmament to him whose soul “is swollen with pleasure.”

In an equally difficult position like already last time, when I spoke about the concept of the “hell,” I am today where I want to summarise the different considerations and results of the winter talks in a consideration of the concept “heaven.”

We face a concept there the true meaning of which the faith of the different confessions have already largely lost even if these adhere to the concept due to an absolutely right and suitable spiritual instinct. At the same time, however, we face a concept that those people mock and reject in the strictest way who not only want to be regarded as leading in the today's spiritual currents but also are regarded as such by many people. The goal and contents of the deepest longing is enclosed for many human beings in the concept “heaven” even today; the basis of this concept forms the contents of the devoted faith of many souls. It is something that gives them comfort in the most difficult problems of life, while many people understand this concept as something in which the deepest superstition expresses itself. We only need to call our attention, just in our days, to spiritual phenomena much discussed in certain circles and we see very soon which immense obstacles stand in the way of understanding if people want to come to a pure, unprejudiced view of that what shall occupy us today.

Nobody needs to be surprised, and at least that who speaks about these matters in such a way as I want to speak today if a big part of that what I say is regarded as the model of empty speculative fiction and mystic daydreaming. In spite of that, just the today's consideration will show that it is very necessary just in our time to point again to the bases of such concepts as strongly as possible.

Many of you know a man with whose name some people connect the concept of real enlightenment, a man whose works made a great stir within the German cultural life just in the last time. Of course, it is abstruse to disparage the great service even in the slightest that this man has rendered to his narrower field of natural sciences. You have also realised in the other talks that my concern was just to talk about the spiritual-scientific research in accordance with the scientific results of the present and in full harmony with them. At different places one could listen to August Forel's (Auguste-Henri F., 1848–1931, Swiss myrmecologist, psychiatrist, philosopher) talk about Life and Death (1908). To someone who wants to inform himself only a little about how one can misunderstand thoroughly what spiritual science puts forth about these matters, I can only recommend to study this talk by Forel thoroughly. The viewpoints of spiritual science concerning such phenomena are explained in my magazine Lucifer-Gnosis where you also find something about the relation between spiritual science and natural sciences. Forel's talk about Life and Death is fulfilled with refusal, namely of a thorough refusal of this concept which is the contents of our talk today.

Immediately at the beginning of Forel's talk, our attention is called to the fact how someone who wants to establish a worldview from the wholly scientific facts gets to the following thoughts. There he says, the natural sciences have brought big progress to the human beings, they can illuminate the world edifice beyond the stars that are next to us in space. The natural sciences are able to look into the smallest parts of the cells of the living body, at least up to a certain degree. The natural sciences have succeeded in overcoming space and time in the field of technology to a certain degree. They achieve the most unbelievable things like wireless telegraphy and telephony over almost all continents. They have succeeded in demonstrating the components of the sun, of the moon, the stars etc. They have succeeded in liquefying the air. They have succeeded in showing how the single parts of the brain co-operate when the human being thinks, feels, and wills. Of course, everything up to a certain degree; but this degree is rightly called admirable.

However, the author of this talk continues: nevertheless, the natural sciences, in spite of their admirable results, nowhere discovered anything that one calls “paradise,” a spiritual world. Everything that humanity has dreamt of a heaven or hell originates from its imagination. The natural sciences have discovered nothing of them, in spite of their admirable results.—Then he boldly concludes as many people echo today: because the natural sciences have not found them, we must abandon all these concepts. We have to stand on the ground that nothing at all can be true that once people dreamt of an immortal essence in the human being that outlives the decay, which the natural sciences experience in such a miraculous way.—And then the consideration is attached like an outpour of feelings that, nevertheless, it is much nicer, greater and more tremendous to know that the human being, before he has come to this personal, individual existence, has lived completely only in his physical ancestors, and that he will keep on living in his physical descendants only. The entire existence is condensed in the physical world.

Then the author has a real outpour of emotions and says, is it not nicer that that which the human being has created is connected with his physical ancestors and keeps on working in the physical descendants, than that there is a world in which beings of all kinds outranking the human being are, a world in which angelic choirs are to be heard and the like?—He insinuates that it is unworthy of a scientifically thinking human being to adhere to a worldview that even in the least deals with such concepts.

This talk can remind one of that which I heard one of the leaders of the modern progressive movement saying many years ago. This person said almost the following. The human being speaks of any supersensible heaven—and then he made clear that our earth is a ball which freely hovers in the space, and that it also applies to the other planets that the space is the heaven, and that the soul does not need to be in another heaven, because we are in heaven. Such persons do not understand much of the deep feelings out of which Schiller (Friedrich Schiller, 1759–1805, German poet) formed the all too justified dictum To the Astronomers:

Do not chat so much of nebulae and suns to me!
Is nature only great, because she gives you something to count?
Indeed, your object is the most elated one in space,
But, friends, the elated does not live in space.

From all these remarks, someone can recognise who has taken up something that was discussed in the course of these winter talks here which deep misunderstanding forms the basis of such things. It is a deep misunderstanding, and we can express this deep misunderstanding best of all saying: if spiritual science once spoke of that what these persons declare as superstition, daydreaming, as speculative fiction, then all these persons would be right. However, the fact is that the modern spiritual science is young and that its message has not yet come to a big part of humanity, above all not to those who speak in such a way, as I have indicated. These persons form mental pictures of the supersensible worlds that are only the outflow of their fantasy and their own daydreams. They fight against these things of their own daydreaming, their own fantasy. However, they also know nothing at all of that, what the true spiritual science has to say about these things. Thus, a big part of the enlightened people fights a battle against their self-created windmills like Don Quixote. Someone who understands this thoroughly will find in that what is said nothing but words, which are quite appropriate to battle the phantasm that these people have in mind. However, this has to do nothing with that what spiritual science understands by it. We could prove a weird logic in the course of these talks, namely where one refuses theosophy, apparently on the ground of the natural sciences, although one knows nothing of its contents. I want to inform of something only.

You know how deeply I appreciate Haeckel's (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist, philosopher) scientific works. However, what he brings forth as refusal of the ideas of heaven and hell that he himself has formed stands on weak logical feet. One can easily prove this weakness. It is rather nice for numerous persons who want to be enlightened if Haeckel says: “There is a faith of the old time that points to the heaven and asserts, there above lives God! Who speaks in such a way does not know that this “above” is somewhere else if the earth turns, and if it has completely turned round, one would have to point downward instead of upwards.” This seems to be rather appropriate. If you still want to become engrossed somewhat logically, his conclusions stand on no other feet, as if anybody wanted to state that one goes with the head down and not upwards if the earth has turned. The gentlemen start from the fallacy that it concerns spatial things, and not the relationship to the spiritual to the physical. I have to say all that repeatedly because just the object of our today's considerations is something very significant.

We go back to what I have said in the last talk. If we imbue ourselves with the spiritual-scientific attitude and turn to that what develops gradually from the growing up child, then we have the sensation that increases more and more to bright and clear knowledge that something appears in the increase, in the transformation of the childish body that gets its existence in this world, coming from the supersensible worlds. We attain the mental picture which spiritual science can completely ascertain that the essence of the human being entering the physical existence by conception and birth already existed before conception and birth, and that the physical body is the dress of the supersensible spiritual essence.

There we come to the question: where is that what enters the physical existence only by conception and birth?—We have also further explained the thought, and this has made us recognise that this physical existence of the human being is not the first, but that we have to speak of repeated earth-lives that the human being enters the physical existence repeatedly in the course of evolution. We have recognised the thought that that what the human being experiences in his life what he goes through in thinking, feeling and enjoyment, in love and desire, wish and action has not died down, but that the fruit remains and continues, and that the next earthly existence takes up this fruit of the former earth-life. If the child reveals its dispositions, abilities, and actions gradually, this represents the result of former earth-lives. The human being has struggled through many stages of existence, and what he has gone through in the former life has transformed itself into the germ and has become contents, so that his new life is more perfect, seems to be more complete than his preceding life.

This is the ascent of the human being. We speak in spiritual science of the fact that that of the human being entering by conception and birth in the physical existence and leaving it at death again is in the interim, between death and new birth, in a spiritual, supersensible world. We have discussed a part of the spiritual, supersensible world in the last talk about the “hell.” We have to discuss a big part today under the concept of the “heaven.” Thus, the heaven is in spiritual science not anything that is far away and dreamt of, anything transcendent, but it is something that is there where we are also. We have to answer the question now, why can the heaven, the supersensible existence be where we are also if the human beings do not perceive it with their physical eyes if it is true that the physical science that has achieved such big and tremendous progress could discover this paradise, this heaven nowhere?

However, I have also drawn your attention to the fact that every human being can really attain the full view of the supersensible world and the heaven. In the essays How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, I have pointed to the methods, by which the human being penetrates into the supersensible world. Today it should be indicated only briefly, what it depends on. You have only to visualise repeatedly what it means to perceive this sensuous-physical world around you. You have read certainly that the completely developed human ear developed from an indifferent organ. Look at the primitive organs of the animals, consider that round these imperfect animals the world of the tones, the physical harmonies, the melodies and the world of the other sounds exist. Remember what was necessary for the fine arrangement of a human organ up to its today's height, so that the human being could become acquainted with the field of the tones surrounding him. You can also look at the other organs in the same way.

Look at the eye how it developed gradually so far, that the wonderful world of the light and the colours can light up. As much of our surroundings exists as our organs are able to perceive these surroundings. Would the organs of the human being be on a less perfect stage—imagine the human auditory organ on an imperfect stage—what would be a world of the sounds, the harmonies and melodies for such beings with undeveloped hearing? A world that they could not perceive, a “transcendent” world! As this relates to the sensuous human being in the world, the spiritual world relates to that what one usually calls world. And as well as imperfect beings with imperfect senses have developed to bigger perfection and have attained new fields of their perception, the today's human being can also develop as the human being of the prehistoric time was able. In all details the methods are given by which the human forces and abilities can be raised to a higher level. It occurs to nobody, to call “heaven” what Forel refused. Spiritual science only says this: if the human being has the renunciation, the energy, and perseverance to develop the ability slumbering today in him, he perceives the spiritual worlds.—One understands by the spiritual world what lies inside of every human being. If he develops the organs, the transcendent world also becomes his surrounding world as the world of the tones becomes a perceptible world. This happens to such an extent more and more, the more the physical organ is perfected.

However, no one is allowed to imagine that this development is something similar as the present methods of development of a physical sense. This would be a misunderstanding. One can be easily asked as a spiritual scientist, how does this sixth sense form?—The human beings possibly imagine that it must grow out like an eye from the organism. However, the higher, supersensible senses are not of that kind. They relate to our physical senses quite different. I characterise briefly how these higher senses—the word does not well meet their being, but never mind—relate to the physical senses. The way of development by which the human being raises himself to the supersensible worlds is not an exterior, tumultuous, but an inner, intimate one. What the human being has to experience, so that the spiritual world shines into his present existence, happens in all silence and subtlety. The three basic forces of the soul, thinking, feeling and willing, are capable of a higher development. If we briefly ask ourselves, what the human being has to do with thinking, feeling and willing if he wants to become a citizen of the supersensible world, the heavenly world, already within this existence, we get the answer that this is a fine, subtle work. You can read up in my magazine, starting from number thirteen, how the human being settles in a world cultivating his world of thinking, feeling, and willing in particular.

Remember everything that penetrates our souls from the morning to the evening when our consciousness sinks in an uncertain darkness. Consider how different it would be in our soul if we lived not in our time and at this place of Central Europe but hundred years ago and at another place of our earth. Then we understand how much of that what flows through the human soul from the morning to the evening is the result of the outside world changing permanently. Subtract what flows through the soul, try to remove everything that is given by the age, by the place, and all thoughts from the soul, which anyhow go back to place and time, and ask how much then is left of such contents. All thoughts, feelings, and will actions that flow through the soul and are determined by place and time are inappropriate for a higher spiritual development, for the experience of a supersensible world. Do not understand these things in such a way, as if I want to say anything against the life of the human being at that place where he is positioned. However, he must find so much time to tower completely above that what faces his soul in the everyday life. He must dedicate himself, even if only for minutes, to such thoughts and feelings that are independent of place and time that are everlasting. Such thoughts and feelings are given. They are there; they are developed with that who has gone through the training of the higher spiritual life. If the human being lets such thoughts of eternity live in his soul repeatedly, then they are effective forces in his soul that awake the slumbering abilities.

Then read up the immense transformation if the human being dedicates himself to the thought of eternity with strictly prescribed methods if he knows to live in subtle way with such eternity thoughts. I describe this for the thought life at first. Who may deny that there are such thoughts? The human thoughts, as they are today, which special nature do they have? They have the nature that the human being lives with them most intimately, since, what lives more intimately in our soul than our thoughts and mental pictures?

However, these thoughts and mental pictures, as far as they refer to the external world, are the most ineffective, the most passive in relation to this “real” world of the trivial. But a deep wisdom is concealed in it if one says, for example, may anybody adhere to his figures ever so much which express the thought of a bridge, the thought of a bridge in all details may be quite correct—the thought may be right, however, the bridge is not there. The thought is the most intimate that lives in the soul. However, in this world in which we spend the physical existence the thought is the most ineffective. It has an inner existence. However, when the human being starts—he must start with patience—dedicating a quite low part of his time at least to the thoughts of eternity, he learns to come to know something he would not have dreamt of. He gets to know a world that is different concerning the thought from our physical world. If in our physical world the thought is the most intimate and, nevertheless, at the same time the most ineffective, the most passive, we are introduced by a training in thoughts of eternity which we experience in the physical life, in a world in which the thought itself is creative. That is the point. Then another world starts living around the human being. He learns to know from his experience: if we see in the physical world, we see the light; it flows from the sun; we see the plants withering and dying if we take away the light from them; we see the light working creatively on the plants. The thought becomes such strength, which flows through the space, which is reality, as only a sensuous thing can be reality, for that who penetrates by the training into the supersensible world. The thought that has an ineffective existence in the darkness of the inside is recognised due to the training as something that flows through the space creatively that is much more real than the sunlight.

The human being notices now if this light of the thought about which he then speaks as a real world which spreads out around him, flows into his soul that is animated by creative forces as the physical plant is penetrated by the sunlight. Thereby we learn how the space that is round us is filled with a reality that the human being, as long as he does not have the necessary abilities, cannot perceive, as well as somebody who has no ears does not perceive tones. However, there are also certain feelings in the supersensible world that originate different from the feelings of the everyday, usual life. How do the feelings of the everyday life come into being? The human being turns his attention to an object. He likes it. The feeling of desire ascends in him. The feeling of desire appears by means of the external object. We feel elated because of the impression of a nice outside world, we feel full with revulsion if we face something ugly in the outside world. Thus, the feelings surge up and down in the human soul. Spiritual science has to lead the human being deeper into the true, real.

If the human being wants to awake the inner abilities of the supersensible world, he must make himself able for the feelings that are not stimulated by the outside. By a method, he settles down into a feeling world where the feelings surge up and down in him, without needing the external sensation. The feelings that are stimulated by the outside can be woken in the human being by the perception of the outer things. If he learns to develop particular feelings in himself, the excitement of such feelings works as a force that awakes slumbering abilities again. He knows now from experience what the initiate can see: the world of the light is active in the spiritual world as in the physical world. It tiers itself also in the spiritual in manifold colours as the physical light; he knows that there is a world in which the spiritual colour lives. We call it the astral world. It puts itself in this physical world for the human being who wakes the abilities and forces slumbering in himself if he develops a feeling of a particular kind more and more only by spiritual experience, which is not stimulated within the sensuous world by any outer sensation. Who is able to wake this feeling of love, an innermost experience, has attained the connection with the spiritual world.

Then still another world is added to the described element. To the colours, still another world is added. The love that the physical objects produce can never lead to the spiritual. That love which is satisfied, even if the object of this love only exists in the spiritual, that love which remains in the deep inner experience is a creative force for a higher kind of elements which penetrate the spiritual space. This love is the real love. The preliminary stage of it is that which the artist feels in his creating. He has it only if he produces spiritual works from his soul. That love transforms the before dumb and colour-filled spiritual space of light into a world of tones, a world speaks to us in spiritual tones.

Thus, you see the human being developing gradually to another world. Here is nothing else than a real continuation of that what also exists in the natural existence of the human being, in the natural events. As the ears have arisen from indifferent vesicles and thereby the world of the physical tones originated from the toneless, that world arises from the uncertain which I have just described. Those do not speak of these worlds who fight against wind mills as I have mentioned at the beginning of the talk. He who says, the heavens were nowhere found, does not know that he has to search them not anywhere else; for the heaven is where we are. It only matters that one does not adhere to the assertion: what I cannot perceive does not exist, and if another states that there is something that I cannot perceive, he is a fool, a dreamer, or a swindler.—This sentence is the logically wrongest sentence that there is at all, because nobody is allowed to assert that the border of his percipience is also the border of existence. Otherwise, the dumb one could regard the entire world of tones, of harmonies and melodies as daydreaming and fantasy.

If one speaks in spiritual science of the heaven, one speaks of it in this way as I have did. One has also not spoken different in the primary sources of the confessions when one still understood them. In this visible world, a non-sensuous world exists, as for the dumb human being the world of the tones.

We ask ourselves now, why does the human being not perceive this supersensible world in his present developmental state? He does not perceive it, because just the sense-perception which was a necessity of the human development, spreads like a cover, a veil about the supersensible world. I did not mean it different when I described what someone has to experience who aims at the supersensible world. He must lift out himself from the sense-perceptible world; he has to quieten the sensuous world for a while. Then he comes to that what is behind this sensuous world, and then he perceives how the sensuous world spreads out like a cover about the supersensible one. He who towers above his body in the true sense can perceive what is behind this veil.

We must know for what one uses the forces in the usual human life, which can become abilities to enter the supersensible world. One cannot understand this different than if one considers the fact of the matter: what is, actually, the physical world, what is the most imperfect physical body, and what is the perfect physical body which faces us as human body? All physical beings are creations of the spirit. The spiritual forms the basis of any physical thing. We have emphasised this in manifold way in the course of these talks repeatedly. As the ice hardens from the water, any physical hardens from the spiritual. It is as it were a compression of the spirit. Look at the physical ear of the present human being. What does form the basis of this physical thing? Spiritual creativity forms the basis of it! The tone that lives as a physical tone in our surroundings is something that belongs to the physical world and has the spiritual tone behind itself. In the same world that flows to our physical ear, we hear the physical tone, and in the same world, the supersensible spiritual tone lives. What is the spiritual tone? This spiritual tone is the creator of our ear just as the spiritual light, concealed in the physical light, is the creator of our eye. Therefore, Goethe says who pronounced so many deep spiritual truths: “The eye is formed in the light for the light.” The force that flows out from the sun to us, which enables our eye to see the objects in their borders in the light-filled space also contains those beings that have formed the wonderful construction of the eye. Thus, what the eye sees and the ear hears would mean the same as penetrating into what is behind them, rising to the spiritual forces. In a certain case, we do it already, looking at the young child developing its abilities gradually in the physical body. We see these abilities appearing from a world concealed behind the sensuous world, we see them dashing into matter and creating an existence in the matter for themselves.

We go back to spiritual science and ask ourselves, where was this being before it has accepted a physical existence by conception and birth, where was it between its last death and its last birth? It was not in a dreamt spiritual world but in the same world in which we are too. The only difference between this being, before it enters the material existence by conception and birth consists of the following. Before birth, this being consists of such elements that one can only behold if the just described spiritual abilities are developed. It is invisible, as long as this supersensible ability is not developed. As for anybody the water is not visible, as long as it is liquid, but becomes visible, as soon as it freezes, the human being becomes invisible if he becomes like water—and visible if he “freezes,” that is he becomes physical.

Thus, we speak of two conditions of the human being, of a state between death and new birth, only visible to the spiritual senses, and of a state in which he has woven a dress around himself, so that he is visible for the physical senses. Thus, we realise that the human being is connected in the interim between death and new birth with the creative forces flowing through the space. Someone who develops his supersensible abilities gets to know them as the heavenly forces already here. The human being is connected with these creative forces. Here in the physical world he lives with the physical forces, with the physical tones, with the physical light; in the spiritual world, he lives in the spiritual-creative behind the tone, behind the light. He lives in a world that is different from the physical world. Here in the physical world, the eye sees by the light. In the spiritual world, the human being perceives what has created his eye.

He lives in the spiritual light, he lives in the spiritual world of tones, he lives in that what builds up his physical body with the help of birth and conception, he lives where our physical world is built up which spreads like a cover about the spiritual one. This cover flows into the spiritual world itself. The human consciousness flashes in another state. The only difference between the disembodied and the embodied human being is that the disembodied one lives in another state of consciousness, and that he perceives the creative forces. Now we understand what it means: the human being is taken up in a supersensible world at death. It is no dream world, no world of lower reality than our world; it is a world of denser and stronger intensity and reality, because in it the creative beings are for our physical world. Now we understand what works there between death and new birth.

We saw last time when we discussed the retarding forces that when the human being passes the gate of death a memory tableau of the entire last life appears before him. We saw that this tableau is taken up like an essence and remains with the human being for all following times. We saw him going through the kamaloka time, the time of purification. After he has gone through this purification, he becomes something that he has taken from the last life, something particular, and something new. We know that the human being going through the gate of death comes into the spiritual supersensible world. Regard it as a field, as a fertile ground and regard what he brings from the last life as a fruit of his thinking, feeling and willing, the fruit of the last life as a sprouting seedling. Thus, the fruit of the last life sprouts in the spiritual ground, and the human consciousness notices and perceives this sprouting, this developing of the germ of the last life.

Everything that the human beings have taken from the life of their time impregnates itself in this last fruit of life. Everything that approached the human being from the outside increases and grows like a germ. This becomes the world of perception and consciousness between death and new birth. One can make clear that to someone who cannot perceive the supersensible only by a comparison. With deeper contemplation, you understand the comparison. One rightly calls bliss what the human being feels unfolding the germ of the last life. It is the converse feeling of that what the human being can perceive if he feels the objects. Now he feels them unfolded, before they flow out; now, however, the being flows out and he is penetrated by a feeling which one can compare with that of a chicken hatching an egg. This bliss causes that the human being develops that in the spiritual what chains him to the physical birth what brings him in the physical existence. Because he has collected new experiences which he adds to the basic core, every life becomes—with the exception of the ways going up and down which must also be—more complete.

Thus, we must get clear about the fact that the state of consciousness is different from that in the supersensible world. By a comparison, we can still bring to our mind how the state of consciousness is different between the physical world and the supersensible world. Imagine a human being who listens to a symphony. He lets the tones approach him from the outside. He enjoys them. Imagine now, it would be possible that a human being creates this symphony spiritually without touching a text without sounding an instrument, that he creatively composes tone by tone of his own accord in spirit. As the perception of the former relates to that in which the symphony budded, the physical world relates to the perception in the supersensible. Hence, we must say, in order to perceive the heaven, the human being has to refrain from something that faces him spiritually in the physical world. As long as he has not refrained from that, he cannot behold.

However, the spiritual world does not appear to us as a world to which also the logical thinking could not rise. The human being normally argues only that he cannot perceive it.

Thus, the concept of the “heaven” gets a significance for the future human being again. It is no concept of a dream world in which we shall be. The creative consciousness is much brighter and more intense than in the physical world. Hence, we have to imagine the life, the consciousness of the human being in the creative world also as more intense than in the physical world.

How does the physical world relate to the supersensible world? It is a matter of course that the human being is interested in this relationship first. I would like to express this with the counter question: knows the human being anything in the supersensible world about those who are near and dear to him? Will that what happened here continue in any way? It will! You can understand this properly if you contemplate what I have just said making clear that an intimate coherence exists between the physical and the supersensible worlds. That which is laid here as a germ rises there and becomes fruit. Nothing in the world is without spiritual background.

In the physical world, the human being already works for the supraphysical world. An example: we assume that a mother is attached to her child with love. This love develops; one would like to say, on the physical basis at first. Then, however, this love changes into spiritual love. To such an extent, in which the love is transformed into a spiritual motherly love, the human being grows into the spiritual love. This love becomes truer in the spiritual. As the earthly cover drops from the human being, the physical-earthly drops from the spiritual being. The whole net that is woven from human soul to human soul exists already in the supersensible world. The spiritual, the essence of the human being settles in the supersensible world, and everything that the human being has tied on here in this physical world, is continued as something spiritual in the spiritual world. Everything that is connected here spiritually is found in full consciousness, in an even brighter consciousness again in the spiritual world. Depending on how it is found, a tie forms again with a new life, so that those who meet in often strange sympathy have to explain this to themselves that they themselves have spun it in former lives.

Thus, we realise that our entire sensuous world is embedded in this supersensible, invisible world. As the human being is a citizen of the sensuous world between birth and death, he is a citizen of the supersensible world after death; he does only not know it in our time between birth and death.

We have shown the concept of the “hell” in the last consideration and the concept of the “heaven” today which contain all spiritual influence on the human being. Last time we have gone into the hardening forces, while that appears as the opposite what I have described today: the principle of development. Life advances from existence to existence, and the more is transformed by the last life into creative forces, the higher rises the next existence. While the human being wants to enjoy what he takes up in himself not only, but enjoying it he also wants to penetrate to that what transforms itself into spiritual forces, he is perpetually in the heavenly world. All that can help the human being is contents of the heavenly elements; all that restrains the progress is the contents of the infernal worlds.

Someone who wants to harmonise such a concept of the heaven with that what the natural sciences have performed can easily do it. He can harmonise it completely. Our contemporaries only do not want to get involved in these higher worlds. Our age is tired of the consideration of the supersensible world, and, hence, this age is very gullible toward those who put up the sentence: what I cannot perceive is not true, and if anybody asserts, it is true, he is a poor devil or a fool.—Too many people become believers of such an opinion in this age. Even if we also realise which big and immense progress our age has performed concerning the physical science, nevertheless, we also see on the other side how little the predominating part of our contemporaries is inclined to penetrate into the supersensible world. One means that the penetration in the supersensible world makes the human being weak and foreign towards the sensuous world. This is a prejudice. If anybody has a piece of iron and says: this iron has magnetic force; touch it with another iron and you have a magnet—another may come and say, nonsense! The piece of iron is good for hammering down nails.—These are the true daydreamers who take the sensuous, the practical only in such a way as that man who hammers down nails only with the magnet.

The realists, the monists, the utilitarians, and others are the true daydreamers. They know the forces of the physical world only and triumph if the immense progress is done by merely revealing the forces of the physical world. Spiritual science has to argue nothing at all against this physical world. However, it also knows that it is high time that the human beings learn again that in the physical the spiritual is concealed, and that just the human beings become dreamy when they close their spiritual eye to the spiritual world. Today true realists, apostles of reality are those who point to the spiritual forces! What do these truthful realists want? They want that the real forces slumbering behind the sensuous are introduced in this world that they settle down in our whole development that we do not only introduce the telegraph, the telephone and the railway, the usual forces but also the spiritual forces.

If anybody goes into these matters, he is still twitted today; he does not care this twitting. He knows that even the great naturalists found few followers once; also, those who tell something of the spiritual worlds have to find the ways just in the big world. Even if only few people can create telegraphs, telephones and railroads, the other can use them, nevertheless. However, everybody must gain the spiritual world on his own accord.

The great physicists Thomson (William T., first Baron Kelvin, 1824–1907, British physicist), Clausius (Robert C., 1822–1888, German physicist and mathematician) and others have their successors who can recognise the physical principles. One of the biggest physical principles is at the same time that what the human being pushes to the spiritual world. For those who have dealt a little with physics I say nothing unknown if I draw the attention to the fact that there is a principle of entropy, this is due to Carnot (Nicolas Léonard Sadi C., 1796–1832), the uncle of the French president (Marie François Sadi C., 1837–1894).

What does it mean? It pronounces one of the most certain principles, which we have in the physical world, namely how the physical forces of the world change into each other. Hit with the hand on the table and measure the effect on the table with a sensitive thermometer. You will find that the place has become warm. You see the heat of the railroad engine being transformed into locomotion and this again into heat. A big principle forms the basis of all that, the principle of entropy. From the consideration of the world, it becomes clear that this conversion of energy shows, nevertheless, a certain guideline, a certain sense. The entropy principle shows that all energy must change into heat at last, and this heat scatters in the space. Today one has proved by the physical principle that the earth, our physical world, once experiences the heat death. This principle exists. That has to deny this principle who asserts that in our world only physical forces are; for this would have to say if he recognised the principle: then everything is over.

Therefore, also Haeckel takes the view that this principle of entropy is nonsense because it contradicts his principle of matter. It is a physical principle that the things are transformed perpetually. A Russian physicist has proved in a writing how firmly founded just this principle is which shows the physical end of our present world. Just in this writing of Professor Chwolson (Orest Ch., 1852–1934, Russian physicist), the “twelfth commandment” was put up (Hegel, Haeckel, Kossuth and the Twelfth Commandment, 1906). You can realise there how competent a physicist can be in the physical field, just as you can also realise how unknowing such scholars can be concerning the spiritual fields. The “twelfth commandment” is “you should never write about anything that you do not understand.” Chwolson obeys it in his field where he speaks about physics, but he does not obey it in the spiritual field. Everything that he says concerning the physical is excellent; however, what he says concerning the spiritual matters is of little value and a big sin against the principle: “you should never write about anything that you do not understand.”

A passage follows that the stenographer did not write down apparently in which Rudolf Steiner probably explained that Chwolson did not understand Hegel. However, Rudolf Steiner admits that Chwolson is correct concerning his remarks about an article by Kossuth in a scientific magazine. Kossuth claims that the law of mass conservation is nothing else as the sentence: the whole is like the sum of its parts, and the principle of energy conservation is nothing else than the sentence: the cause is like the effect.—With reference to the discoveries of Lavoisier Rudolf Steiner continues:

Someone who knows something of the spiritual research knows what it means that one has shown that if substances combine chemically with each other the weight is that of the sum of the parts. If one says then: this law contains nothing else than the old mathematical law: the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, one would already have to get clear about the fact that it concerns only the weight of the whole that is equal to the sum of the weight of its parts. Kossuth just forgets that if one proceeds to the spiritual the law does not apply at all there. So short is the thinking. Chwolson says, Mr. Kossuth may only take his pocket watch and crush it in the mortar; then he can see whether the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. Goethe also already pronounced the thought that is often repeated:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit,
he then holds all its parts within his hand,
except, alas!, for the spirit that bound them together.

(Faust, Verses 1936–1939)

The fewest people who believe to stand on the ground of certain facts know that the natural sciences are often nothing else than taking no account of the spiritual tie. On one side, we realise if we survey all the circumstances and connect them with that what I have stated about the supersensible world that in many human souls the longing lives to penetrate into the supersensible world. However, they suspect those details of which someone has to speak who really knows something of these matters. We see the longing for the supersensible world stirring; but we do not see the strength and the energy to penetrate into these supersensible worlds according to the instructions of spiritual science. On the other side, we have the facts in our time. We have a competent physical science in our time: Thomson, Clausius, and Carnot have found good successors. If the development advances in spiritual science in the same spirit, the researchers in the spiritual field will find also capable successors like Thomson, Clausius and Carnot have found. Then the result will be that from this humanity which has almost shut itself off today from the heavenly world, another arises which draws the strength of the supersensible world into the sensuous one. Spiritual science does not want to alienate the human being from the world but to make him strong, energetic, and vigorous for existence, while it enriches reality.

We only need to join two things, and this will fit together: in the same strict way as now in the physical science, a big part of the human beings will have the possibility to satisfy the need of their hearts out of the spiritual world. It is the task of spiritual science as a cultural stream to bring together these two spiritual streams, the satisfaction of the sensuous needs by the natural sciences and the satisfaction of the longing for the spiritual.

These talks are continued in the same sense in the next winter. We shall further pursue what has remained sketchy and penetrate deeper into it. The most enclosing, the most significant concept should be the object of the last talk. Indeed, a wisdom will once be there which can be a religion again, which can satisfy the deepest religious needs of the heart. There will come up a spiritual current that satisfies all needs of the logical thinking like the longing for the supersensible life. It is this longing to which spiritual science talks. If the way is found to that what exists in this anticipating, then wisdom flows out, it introduces in this supersensible world and flows into the human soul so that our culture experiences a spiritual rebirth that goes back to the fire, which lives in many people and wants to penetrate to the supersensible worlds. From this fire, the spiritual-scientific wisdom will penetrate into the supersensible world, because this is its true ideal.

It should be owed to the great ideal that wants to spark the wisdom of this supersensible by the fire of the enthusiasm for the supersensible; since this will always be the course of the spiritual culture that the light of wisdom develops from the fire of love and enthusiasm.

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It has frequently been emphasized that man's greatest riddle is himself. Both natural and spiritual science ultimately try to solve this riddle—the former by understanding the natural laws that govern our outer being, the latter by seeking the essence and purpose inherent in our existence. Now as correct as it may be that man's greatest riddle is himself, it must also be emphasized that each individual human being is a riddle, often even to himself. Every one of us experiences this in encounters with other people.

Today we shall be dealing not with general riddles, but rather with those posed to us by every human being in every encounter, and these are just as important. For how endlessly varied people are! We need only consider temperament, the subject of today's lecture, in order to realize that there are as many riddles as there are people. Even within the basic types known as the temperaments, such variety exists among people that the very mystery of existence seems to express itself within these types. Temperament, that fundamental coloring of the human personality, plays a role in all manifestations of individuality that are of concern to practical life. We sense something of this basic mood whenever we encounter another human being. Thus we can only hope that spiritual science will tell us what we need to know about the temperaments.

Our first impression of the temperaments is that they are external, for although they can be said to flow from within, they manifest themselves in everything we can observe from without. However, this does not mean that the human riddle can be solved by means of natural science and observation. Only when we hear what spiritual science has to say can we come closer to understanding these peculiar colorations of the human personality.

Spiritual science tells us first of all that the human being is part of a line of heredity. He displays the characteristics he has inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and so on. These characteristics he then passes on to his progeny. The human being thus possesses certain traits by virtue of being part of a succession of generations.

However, this inheritance gives us only one side of his nature. Joined to that is the individuality he brings with him out of the spiritual world. This he adds to what his father and mother, his ancestors, are able to give him. Something that proceeds from life to life, from existence to existence, connects itself with the generational stream. Certain characteristics we can attribute to heredity; on the other hand, as a person develops from childhood on, we can see unfolding out of the center of his being something that must be the fruit of preceding lives, something he could never have inherited from his ancestors. We come to know the law of reincarnation, of the succession of earthly lives and this is but a special case of an all-encompassing cosmic law.

An illustration will make this seem less paradoxical. Consider a lifeless mineral, say, a rock crystal. Should the crystal be destroyed, it leaves nothing of its form that could be passed on to other crystals.¹ A new crystal receives nothing of the old one's particular form. When we move on to the world of plants, we notice that a plant cannot develop according to the same laws as does the crystal. It can only originate from another, earlier plant. Form is here preserved and passed on.

Moving on to the animal kingdom, we find an evolution of the species taking place. We begin to appreciate why the nineteenth century held the discovery of evolution to be its greatest achievement. In animals, not only does one being proceed from another, but each young animal during the embryo phase recapitulates the earlier phases of its species' evolutionary development. The species itself undergoes an enhancement.

In human beings not only does the species evolve, but so does the individual. What a human being acquires in a lifetime through education and experience is preserved, just as surely as are the evolutionary achievements of an animal's ancestral line. It will someday be commonplace to trace a person's inner core to a previous existence. The human being will come to be known as the product of an earlier life. The views that stand in the way of this doctrine will be overcome, just as was the scholarly opinion of an earlier century, which held that living organisms could arise from nonliving substances. As recently as three hundred years ago, scholars believed that animals could evolve from river mud, that is, from nonliving matter. Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, was the first to assert that living things could develop only from other living things.² For this he was attacked and came close to suffering the fate of Giordano Bruno.³ Today, burning people at the stake is no longer fashionable. When someone attempts to teach a new truth, for example, that psycho-spiritual entities must be traced back to earlier psycho-spiritual entities, he won't exactly be burned at the stake, but he will be dismissed as a fool. But the time will come when the real foolishness will be to believe that the human being lives only once, that there is no enduring entity that unites itself with a person's inherited traits.

Now the important question arises: How can something originating in a completely different world, that must seek a father and a mother, unite itself with physical corporeality? How can it clothe itself in the bodily features that link human beings to a hereditary chain? How does the spiritual-psychic stream, of which man forms a part through reincarnation, unite itself with the physical stream of heredity? The answer is that a synthesis must be achieved. When the two streams combine, each imparts something of its own quality to the other. In much the same way that blue and yellow combine to give green, the two streams in the human being combine to yield what is commonly known as temperament. Our inner self and our inherited traits both appear in it. Temperament stands between the things that connect a human being to an ancestral line, and those the human being brings with him out of earlier incarnations. Temperament strikes a balance between the eternal and the ephemeral. And it does so in such a way that the essential members of the human being, which we have come to know in other contexts, enter into a very specific relationship with one another.

Human beings as we know them in this life are beings of four members. The first, the physical body, they have in common with the mineral world. The first super-sensible member, the etheric body, is integrated into the physical and separates from it only at death. There follows as third member the astral body, the bearer of instincts, drives, passions, desires, and of the ever-changing content of sensation and thought. Our highest member, which places us above all other earthly beings, is the bearer of the human ego, which endows us in such a curious and yet undeniable fashion with the power of self-awareness. These four members we have come to know as the essential constituents of a human being.

The way the four members combine is determined by the flowing together of the two streams upon a person's entry into the physical world. In every case, one of the four members achieves predominance over the others, and gives them its own peculiar stamp. Where the bearer of the ego predominates, a choleric temperament results. Where the astral body predominates, we find a sanguine temperament. Where the etheric or life-body predominates, we speak of a phlegmatic temperament. And where the physical body predominates, we have to deal with a melancholic temperament. The specific way in which the eternal and the ephemeral combine determines what relationship the four members will enter into with one another.

The way the four members find their expression in the physical body has also frequently been mentioned. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood. For this reason, in the choleric the predominant system is that of the blood. The astral body expresses itself physically in the nervous system; thus in the sanguine, the nervous system holds sway. The etheric body expresses itself in the glandular system; hence the phlegmatic is dominated physically by his glands. The physical body as such expresses itself only in itself; thus the outwardly most important feature in the melancholic is his physical body. This can be observed in all phenomena connected with these temperaments.

In the choleric, the ego and the blood system predominate. The choleric thus comes across as someone who must always have his way. His aggressiveness, everything connected with his forcefulness of will, derives from his blood circulation.

In the nervous system and astral body, sensations and feelings constantly fluctuate. Any harmony or order results solely from the restraining influence of the ego. People who do not exercise that influence appear to have no control over their thoughts and sensations. They are totally absorbed by the sensations, pictures, and ideas that ebb and flow within them. Something like this occurs whenever the astral body predominates, as, for example, in the sanguine. Sanguines surrender themselves in a certain sense to the constant and varied flow of images, sensations, and ideas since in them the astral body and nervous system predominate.

The nervous system's activity is restrained only by the circulation of the blood. That this is so becomes clear when we consider what happens when a person lacks blood or is anaemic, in other words, when the blood's restraining influence is absent. Mental images fluctuate wildly, often leading to illusions and hallucinations.

A touch of this is present in sanguines. Sanguines are incapable of lingering over an impression. They cannot fix their attention on a particular image nor sustain their interest in an impression. Instead, they rush from experience to experience, from percept to percept. This is especially noticeable in sanguine children, where it can be a source of concern. The sanguine child's interest is easily kindled, a picture will easily impress, but the impression quickly vanishes.

We proceed now to the phlegmatic temperament. We observed that this temperament develops when the etheric or life-body, as we call it, which regulates growth and metabolism, is predominant. The result is a sense of inner well-being. The more a human being lives in his etheric body, the more is he preoccupied with his internal processes. He lets external events run their course while his attention is directed inward.

In the melancholic we have seen that the physical body, the coarsest member of the human organization, becomes master over the others. As a result, the melancholic feels he is not master over his body, that he cannot bend it to his will. His physical body, which is intended to be an instrument of the higher members, is itself in control, and frustrates the others. This the melancholic experiences as pain, as a feeling of despondency. Pain continually wells up within him. This is because his physical body resists his etheric body's inner sense of well-being, his astral body's liveliness, and his ego's purposeful striving.

The varying combinations of the four members also manifest themselves quite clearly in external appearance. People in whom the ego predominates seek to triumph over all obstacles, to make their presence known. Accordingly their ego stunts the growth of the other members; it withholds from the astral and etheric bodies their due portion. This reveals itself outwardly in a very clear fashion. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that famous German choleric, was recognizable as such purely externally.⁴ His build revealed clearly that the lower essential members had been held back in their growth. Napoleon, another classic example of the choleric, was so short because his ego had held the other members back.⁵ Of course, one cannot generalize that all cholerics are short and all sanguines tall. It is a question of proportion. What matters is the relation of size to overall form.

In the sanguine the nervous system and astral body predominate. The astral body's inner liveliness animates the other members, and makes the external form as mobile as possible. Whereas the choleric has sharply chiseled facial features, the sanguine's are mobile, expressive, changeable. We see the astral body's inner liveliness manifested in every outer detail, for example, in a slender form, a delicate bone structure, or lean muscles. The same thing can be observed in details of behavior. Even a non-clairvoyant can tell from behind whether someone is a choleric or a sanguine; one does not need to be a spiritual scientist for that. If you observe the gait of a choleric, you will notice that he plants each foot so solidly that he would seem to want to bore down into the ground. By contrast, the sanguine has a light, springy step. Even subtler external traits can be found. The inwardness of the ego, the choleric's self-contained inwardness, express themselves in eyes that are dark and smoldering. The sanguine, whose ego has not taken such deep root, who is filled with the liveliness of his astral body, tends by contrast to have blue eyes. Many more such distinctive traits of these temperaments could be cited.

The phlegmatic temperament manifests itself in a static, indifferent physiognomy, as well as in plumpness, for fat is due largely to the activity of the etheric body. In all this the phlegmatic's inner sense of comfort is expressed. His gait is loose-jointed and shambling, and his manner timid. He seems somehow to be not entirely in touch with his surroundings.

The melancholic is distinguished by a hanging head, as if he lacked the strength necessary to straighten his neck. His eyes are dull, not shining like the choleric's; his gait is firm, but in a leaden rather than a resolute sort of way.

Thus you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle. Only when one seeks to encompass reality in its entirety, which includes the spiritual, can knowledge bear practical fruit. Accordingly, only spiritual science can give us knowledge that will benefit the individual and all mankind. In education, very close attention must be paid to the individual temperaments, for it is especially important to be able to guide and direct them as they develop in the child. But the temperaments are also important to our efforts to improve ourselves later in life. We do well to attend to what expresses itself through them if we wish to further our personal development.

The four fundamental types I have outlined here for you naturally never manifest themselves in such pure form. Every human being has one basic temperament, with varying degrees of the other three mixed in. Napoleon, for example, although a choleric, had much of the phlegmatic in him. To truly master life, it is important that we open our souls to what manifests itself as typical. When we consider that the temperaments, each of which represents a mild imbalance, can degenerate into unhealthy extremes, we realize just how important this is.

Yet, without the temperaments the world would be an exceedingly dull place, not only ethically, but also in a higher sense. The temperaments alone make all multiplicity, beauty, and fullness of life possible. Thus in education it would be senseless to want to homogenize or eliminate them, but an effort should be made to direct each into the proper track, for in every temperament there lie two dangers of aberration, one great, one small. One danger for the young choleric is that he will never learn to control his temper as he develops into maturity. That is the small danger. The greater is that he will become foolishly single-minded. For the sanguine the lesser danger is flightiness; the greater is mania, induced by a constant stream of sensations. The small danger for the phlegmatic is apathy; the greater is stupidity, dullness. For the melancholic, insensitivity to anything other than his own personal pain is the small danger; the greater is insanity.

In light of all this it is clear that to guide and direct the temperaments is one of life's significant tasks. If this task is to be properly carried out, however, one basic principle must be observed, which is always to reckon with what is given, and not with what is not there. For example, if a child has a sanguine temperament, he will not be helped if his elders try to flog interest into him. His temperament simply will not allow it. Instead of asking what the child lacks, in order that we might beat it into him, we must focus on what he has, and base ourselves on that. And as a rule, there is one thing we can always stimulate the sanguine child's interest in. However flighty the child might be, we can always stimulate his interest in a particular personality. If we ourselves are that personality, or if we bring the child together with someone who is, the child cannot but develop an interest. Only through the medium of love for a personality can the interest of the sanguine child be awakened. More than children of any other temperament, the sanguine needs someone to admire. Admiration is here a kind of magic word, and we must do everything we can to awaken it.

We must reckon with what we have. We should see to it that the sanguine child is exposed to a variety of things in which he has shown a deeper interest. These things should be allowed to speak to him, to have an effect upon him. They should then be withdrawn, so that the child's interest in them will intensify; then they may be restored. In other words, we must fashion the sanguine's environment so that it is in keeping with his temperament.

The choleric child is also susceptible of being led in a special way. The key to his education is respect and esteem for a natural authority. Instead of winning affection by means of personal qualities, as one does with the sanguine child, one should see to it that the child's belief in his teacher's ability remains unshaken. The teacher must demonstrate an understanding of what goes on around the child. Any showing of incompetence should be avoided. The child must persist in the belief that his teacher is competent, or all authority will be lost. The magic potion for the choleric child is respect and esteem for a person's worth, just as for the sanguine child it was love for a personality. Outwardly, the choleric child must be confronted with challenging situations. He must encounter resistance and difficulty, lest his life become too easy.

The melancholic child is not easy to lead. With him, however, a different magic formula may be applied. For the sanguine child this formula was love for a personality; for the choleric, it was respect and esteem for a teacher's worth. By contrast, the important thing for the melancholic is for his teachers to be people who have in a certain sense been tried by life, who act and speak on the basis of past trials. The child must feel that the teacher has known real pain. Let your treatment of all of life's little details be an occasion for the child to appreciate what you have suffered. Sympathy with the fates of those around him furthers the melancholic's development. Here too one must reckon with what the child has. The melancholic has a capacity for suffering, for discomfort, which is firmly rooted in his being; it cannot be disciplined out of him. However, it can be redirected. We should expose the child to legitimate external pain and suffering, so that he learns there are things other than himself that can engage his capacity for experiencing pain. This is the essential thing. We should not try to divert or amuse the melancholic, for to do so only intensifies his despondency and inner suffering; instead, he must be made to see that objective occasions for suffering exist in life. Although we mustn't carry it too far, redirecting the child's suffering to outside objects is what is called for.

The phlegmatic child should not be allowed to grow up alone. Although naturally all children should have play-mates, for phlegmatics it is especially important that they have them. Their playmates should have the most varied interests. Phlegmatic children learn by sharing in the interests, the more numerous the better, of others. Their playmates' enthusiasms will overcome their native indifference towards the world. Whereas the important thing for the melancholic is to experience another person's fate, for the phlegmatic child it is to experience the whole range of his playmates' interests. The phlegmatic is not moved by things as such, but an interest arises when he sees things reflected in others, and these interests are then reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child. We should bring into the phlegmatic's environment objects and events toward which “phlegm” is an appropriate reaction. Impassivity must be directed toward the right objects, objects toward which one may be phlegmatic.

From the examples of these pedagogical principles, we see how spiritual science can address practical problems. These principles can also be applied to oneself, for purposes of self-improvement. For example, a sanguine gains little by reproaching himself for his temperament. Our minds are in such questions frequently an obstacle. When pitted directly against stronger forces such as the temperaments, they can accomplish little. Indirectly, however, they can accomplish much. The sanguine, for example, can take his sanguinity into account, abandoning self-exhortation as fruitless. The important thing is to display sanguinity under the right circumstances. Experiences suited to his short attention span can be brought about through thoughtful planning. Using thought in this way, even on the smallest scale, will produce the requisite effect.

Persons of a choleric temperament should purposely put themselves in situations where rage is of no use, but rather only makes them look ridiculous. Melancholics should not close their eyes to life's pain, but rather seek it out; through compassion they redirect their suffering outward toward appropriate objects and events. If we are phlegmatics, having no particular interests, then we should occupy ourselves as much as possible with uninteresting things, surround ourselves with numerous sources of tedium, so that we become thoroughly bored. We will then be thoroughly cured of our “phlegm;” we will have gotten it out of our system. Thus does one reckon with what one has, and not with what one does not have.

By filling ourselves with practical wisdom such as this, we learn to solve that basic riddle of life, the other person. It is solved not by postulating abstract ideas and concepts, but by means of pictures. Instead of arbitrarily theorizing, we should seek an immediate understanding of every individual human being. We can do this, however, only by knowing what lies in the depths of the soul. Slowly and gradually, spiritual science illuminates our minds, making us receptive not only to the big picture, but also to subtle details. Spiritual science makes it possible that when two souls meet and one demands love, the other offers it. If something else is demanded, that other thing is given. Through such true, living wisdom do we create the basis for society. This is what we mean when we say we must solve a riddle every moment.

Anthroposophy acts not by means of sermons, exhortations, or catechisms, but by creating a social groundwork, upon which human beings can come to know each other. Spiritual science is the ground of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of a life enhanced by it. Thus spiritual science may claim to lay the foundation for humankind's most beautiful goal—a true, genuine love for man.

• 1. Translator's note: The reader may conclude from this remark—for it was, after all, a remark, not a published claim—that Steiner was ignorant of the concept of seed crystals. However, a likelier explanation is that Steiner, whose audience was very likely not a scientifically knowledgeable one, was simply indulging in a bit of rhetorical hyperbole. He doubtless knew that a seed crystal will hasten the crystallization process in a saturated salt solution, but this fact is not really relevant to his point, which comes out only gradually in this paragraph. His point is not that a newly-forming crystal cannot receive some contribution from a previously existing one, only that it need not; this is in contrast to living things, which require a progenitor.
• 2. Francesco Redi, 1626-1697. Refuted spontaneous generation of living beings out of mud.
• 3. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600. Italian philosopher, Dominican monk, burned at the stake as heretic. Taught that the world is infinite in space and time and filled with innumerable suns.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814. German Idealist philosopher.
• 5. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821. French ruler and emperor 1804-1814 and 1815.

Goethe has repeatedly pointed out how a man who draws near the secrets of nature yearns for the worthiest exponent of her secrets, namely, for art. And all through life Goethe showed in his creations how art was to him the interpreter of truth. It may be said that in this conception Goethe lit on something that has been a basic conviction, a basic theme, throughout all ages and epochs of human evolution.

In the different arts more or less consciously we are presented with different languages that give expression to certain truths living in the human soul. They are often the most secret truths, the most secret knowledge, which cannot readily be reduced to rigid concepts nor clothed in abstract formula but seek artistic expression.

Today our attention is to be drawn to a secret truth of this kind which for centuries has endeavored to find expression in art; it is true this has always found its scientific formulation in certain narrow circles, but for a wider public it will only become a matter of popular knowledge in the future through spiritual science. Goethe himself was able in his soul to approach this truth from very many angles. In one of my lectures here on Goethe I pointed to the significant moment in his life that was an instance of this kind of experience. In the second of the lectures on Faust I told you how Goethe on reading the Roman writer Plutarch came across the remarkable story of Nikias, who wanted to make subject again to the Romans a certain town in Sicily belonging to the Carthaginians, and on that account was being pursued. In his flight he feigned insanity, and by his strange cry: “The Mothers, the Mothers are pursuing me!” it was recognized that this insanity was of no ordinary kind. For in that region there existed a so-called “Temple of the Mothers,” set up in connection with ancient Mysteries; hence it was known what was signified by the expression “the Mothers.” When Goethe was able to let the full significance of the expression “the Mothers” sink into his soul, he realized that if he wanted to reach the highest point of awe-inspiring beauty in one of the scenes in the second part of his Faust, he could not express this better than by sending Faust himself to the Mothers.

Now what does this journey to the Mothers signify for Faust? We have made brief mention of this in the lecture referred to. Mephistopheles himself cannot enter the realm where the Mothers are enthroned although he gives Faust the key. Mephistopheles is the spirit of materialism, the spirit contained in the forces and powers of man's material existence. To him the realm of the Mothers is the realm of nothingness. Faust, the spiritual human being, with his bent towards the spirit is able to answer: “In thy nothingness I hope to find the All.” Then follows the highly remarkable and significant description of the realm of the Mothers, and we are told how they weave and live in a sphere out of which the forms of the visible world are fashioned; how man, if he would penetrate to the Mothers, must rise above all that lives in space and time. Formation, transformation, this is the essence of their realm. They are mysterious Goddesses holding sway in a spiritual realm behind the reality of the senses. Faust must penetrate to them if he is to obtain knowledge of all that transcends the sensory and physical. Only by widening his soul to this realm of the Mothers can Faust worthily unite in Helen the eternal with the temporal. In that lecture on Faust it was possible to indicate that Goethe fully understood how in this realm of the Mothers one has to do with a sphere into which man is able to penetrate when he awakens slumbering spiritual forces in his soul. This is for him the great moment in which are revealed to him the spiritual beings and facts which are always around us, but which with the eyes of the senses we see as little as the blind man sees color and light. It is the moment when the spiritual eyes and ears are opened to a world lying behind the physical world. Entrance into this realm is portrayed by the journey to the Mothers.

In these lectures it was repeatedly indicated that when man practices certain inner exercises on his soul, certain minutely-prescribed methods for sinking deeply into the world of his conceptions, feelings and will, then his spiritual eyes and ears actually become open and new realms are unfolded around him. It was also shown that whoever enters this realm is confused by all the impressions that work upon him. Whereas in the physical world we perceive objects in sharp outline from which we take our bearings, in the spiritual world we have a confused feeling of inter-weaving, hovering form, just as Goethe describes it in the second part of Faust. But it is out of this realm of the Mothers that there is born all that is given to our senses, just as in the mountains metal is born out of the mother-ore. And because this mysterious realm, the Mother-realm of everything earthly and physical, the realm containing, so to say, the divine substance of all things—because this mysterious realm is resounding in Goethe, the expression “the Mothers” works with such fascination and awesome beauty. Thus, when he read in Plutarch that someone cried “The Mothers, the Mothers,” he recognized that this was not a mad vision into an insane and unreal world, but a vision into a world of spiritual reality. The Mother problem of the world stood before Goethe while he was reading Plutarch, and in the way he did with much else he inserted this Mother problem as a mystery into the second part of his Faust.

Now anyone wishing to enter this realm of the Mothers, the realm of the spiritual world, has had at all times to undertake, besides other exercises that may be found in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, what has invariably been called preparatory purification, catharsis of the soul. He must so prepare himself that his soul, out of which the higher spiritual forces are to be derived is free of all urge and passion for the ordinary world of the senses. The soul must be purified from all those things which have sensuous attraction and provide food for the senses and which hold the understanding captive in the physical body. The soul must be free, then it can awaken within itself the spiritual eye and penetrate into the spiritual realm. The so-called purified soul, the soul that has passed through catharsis and is no longer turned towards the physical world of the senses, wherever knowledge of this mystery has existed has always been called the higher being of man, that inner being of which it has been said that it does not originate in anything the outer eyes can investigate, but in sources of a higher soul and spiritual nature; it has not an earthly but a heavenly home. It was thought that the ennobled, purified soul was connected with this true origin of man, for what has been spiritual science through the ages has never been able to speak of a purely material evolution, of a perfection or imperfection in accordance with the senses. Spiritual science does not condemn as erroneous what today is called evolution, the ascent from the lowest to the most perfect physical being wandering on the face of the earth, namely, physical man. As I have often emphasized, that is fully recognized. The scientific theory of evolution and descent is fully recognized by spiritual science, but at the same time it is pointed out that the whole being we call man is not included in this evolution, which evolution only applies to the external side of man's development.

Now when we trace man back through all the changes of time we find that the further we go back to ever more imperfect physical forms the more we meet with man's origin as a soul spiritual being. We have often gone back to an age of human evolution when the being we now call man had as yet no kind of physical existence and was securely sheltered within an existence of spirit and soul. Attention has repeatedly been drawn to how, in the sense of spiritual science we look upon the material form, man's physical body, as a densification of a being who was once only spirit and soul. This being of spirit and soul has been densified, as it were, to present-day man, as water is solidified into ice. This picture has often been made use of, when it is said: Let us imagine a quantity of water condensed to ice so that finally we are left with a certain amount of water together with the part that is changed into ice. Here we have an image of man's origin. In the man who was once just soul and spirit there existed as yet nothing of the physical, material bodily nature today perceptible to the eyes and tangible for the hands. Man becomes gradually ever more physical, until he comes to his present physical form. The age to which orthodox science can look back reveals indeed man in the physical form we see today. But spiritual science looks back into a primordial past when man was born out of the spiritual world and was still of a spirit and soul nature. When we contemplate the soul of man today we can say that the soul element in him is the last remnant, so to speak, of the spiritual and soul nature that once was his. We look at the inner nature of man, learning to know his spiritual and soul being, and come to realize that as he is in his inner being, so he was once long ago when he was born out of the womb of the spiritual world. This being of soul is sheathed from outside in the lower elements of the sense world, but he can be purified and cleansed, can raise himself to a perception free of the senses, thereby regaining the spirituality out of which he was born. This is the process of spiritual knowledge that passes through purification. Thus in spirit we gaze into man's being of soul, and speaking not merely in imagery but with reality say: Knowing this soul being in its truth, we perceive that the being is not of this world. In the background of this soul being we see a divine spiritual world out of which he was born.

Now let us try to turn what has been said into a physical picture. Let us ask ourselves: Do we not possess a physical picture of what has been described, where the spiritual world is represented by cloud formations out of which the spiritual is born in the form of angels' heads portraying the human soul? Have we not in the Virgin's figure in Raphael's Sistine Madonna a picture born out of the divine spiritual world?

Let us go on to ask: What becomes of a man whose soul has been cleansed and purified, who has ascended to higher knowledge and has unfolded in his soul those spiritual images that give life within him to the divine, living and weaving through the world? This human being who gives birth in man to the higher man, to a man who represents a little world in the great world, who out of his purified soul brings forth the true higher man—what is he? He cannot be otherwise described than by the word clairvoyant. If we try to make a picture of the soul that gives birth to the higher man out of himself, out of the spiritual universe, we need only call to mind the picture of the Sistine Madonna, the Madonna with the wonderful Child in her arms.

Thus in the Sistine Madonna we have a picture of the human soul born of the spiritual universe, and springing from this soul the highest that a human being can bring forth—man's own spiritual birth, what within him is a new begetting of cosmic creative activity.

Let us try to experience in our feeling what clairvoyant consciousness does. There was once a time when the structure of the world was founded on divine spirituality; for it would be senseless to seek in the world for spirit if this spirit had not originally built the world. All that surrounds us in the world has sprung from the spirit we seek in the soul. Thus the soul has sprung from the divine Father-spirit living and weaving throughout the universe, bearing the Son of wisdom Who is like unto this Father-spirit, of Whom He is a repetition.

We understand now the way in which Goethe approached this problem in all its mystical significance when he tried to gather the whole content of Faust together in the “Chorus Mysticus”, where he speaks of the human soul as the “eternal feminine” that draws us onward to the universal spirit of the world. This was Goethe's attitude to his Madonna problem at the very end of Faust. From the figure which the portrayal of the Madonna has assumed, even today it is hardly possible to recognize fully what is here expressed as in a picture which is nevertheless founded on profound truth. If, however, we trace this Madonna problem back to its origin, we shall realize that in very truth the mightiest human problem, though closely veiled, confronts us in the figure of the Madonna. These Madonnas are, it is true, greatly changed from the simple figure of the catacombs in the first Christian centuries, where we find Madonnas with the Child groping for the mother's breast. From this first simple figure, having little to do with art, it is a long way to the fifteenth century, to Michaelangelo and Raphael, where after many transformations the Child and the Madonna have become in the modern sense much more in accordance with art—in accordance with the art of painting. It is, however, as if these supreme artists proceeded from no very full knowledge but a definite feeling of the deeper truth of the Madonna problem. Very beautiful experiences arise in us when we stand before the so-called Pieta of Michaelangelo in St. Peter's in Rome, where the Madonna is sitting with the corpse across her knees—thus the Madonna is at the age when Christ had already passed through death but is portrayed with all the beauty of youth. In Michaelangelo's day it was a much discussed question why at her age he had given the Madonna this youthful beauty. When asked about it he replied how it was well known that virgins long preserve the freshness of youth—and this is no mere belief but spiritually derived knowledge. Thus why should he not be right in representing the Mother of God at this age still with all the freshness of youth? It is a remarkable conception here expressed by Michaelangelo! Although it is not openly expressed by Raphael, nevertheless we feel it to be there in his pictures. We can, however, understand this conception only by going far back into the times when what meets us in the Madonnas as unconscious art was still outwardly living. We might go very far back, and actually we should find the Madonna problem all over the world. We might go to old India and there find the Goddess with the Krishna child at her breast; in a Chinese cult we might find similar pictures.

We will not, however, go back into these far-off regions, but keep the representations repeated so impressively in olden times and which is given us again with such beauty in the Madonna. We will turn to the representations of Isis with the child Horus. These representations which have grown entirely out of Egyptian wisdom may in a certain sense be the key for the correct understanding of the portrayal of the Madonna. Here, it is true, we must direct our attention to the nature of the wisdom that led to this remarkable figure of the Egyptian Goddess, fix our attention on what this wisdom, expressed in the Isis Osiris saga, means to us. For when we understand it aright, this saga leads us deep into the actual problem of humanity. Wherever we look in the religion of Egypt, the saga of Osiris is still what is most significant and full of content—this King who in primordial times ruled as if in a golden age among men, and married his sister, Isis, who brought happiness and blessing to mankind. He stood before the eyes of ancient Egypt as a human King of divine power and divine virtue; and he ruled until he was killed by Set, his evil brother. He was killed in a strange way. At a banquet the evil brother Set, in later times called Typhon, caused a chest to be made, and craftily induced Osiris to lie down in it, when the lid was quickly closed. The chest was then thrown into the water and swept away to the unknown. His sorrowing spouse Isis seeks everywhere for her husband, after long searching finally discovering him in Asia. She brings him back to Egypt where he is dismembered by his evil brother Set, his fragments being interred in many graves. Hence the great number of tombs of Osiris in Egypt. Osiris now becomes King of the Dead, as previously he was King of living men on earth. From that other world a ray pierces the head of Isis and she gives birth to Horus who becomes the ruler of this world.

According to the Egyptian legend Horus is the posthumous son of Osiris. Horus, who has come into existence as the result of impregnation from the world beyond, is ruler of the earthly world of the senses; Osiris is ruler of the realm of the dead. Whereas the soul while enclosed in a body is subject to the rulership of Horus, when it abandons the body—so the Egyptian Book of the Dead testifies it enters the realm of Osiris, itself becomes an Osiris. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describes in what a deeply impressive way the soul is arraigned before the tribunal in these words: “And thou, O Osiris, what hast thou done?” Thus the soul by passing through the gate of death itself becomes an Osiris.

According to the old Egyptians, then, we look towards two realms, the realm perceived by the senses, the realm of Horus, and the realm into which the soul enters after death where Osiris holds sway. But at the same time we know that according to the old Egyptian initiates, the initiate who had acquired the faculty of clairvoyance already in his lifetime entered the same region which otherwise can be entered only after death—that he could be united with Osiris. The initiate therefore himself became an Osiris. He tore himself from the physical, renounced all habits of the physical plane, all passions and desires, cleansed himself of the physical, became a purified soul and as such was united with Osiris.

Now what does this legend tell us? It is a childish idea to maintain that this legend is supposed to represent the yearly course of the sun round the earth. The learned ones of the earth in council have created the legend that Osiris is the sun, whose disappearance signifies his conquest by nature's wintry powers said to be Set, the evil brother Typhon. And in Isis we have the representation of the moon who seeks the sun in order to be irradiated by his light. Only those who spin theoretical myths about nature out of their own minds can make such statements. The truth is that this is the external, pictorial expression of a most profound truth.

What is this age when Osiris ruled over men? It was the time when men were still beings of soul and spirit dwelling in the world of soul and spirit among beings who also had their being in soul and spirit. When, therefore, the realm of Osiris is spoken of, it is not the physical realm that is meant, but a realm of the past in which man held sway as a being of soul and spirit. And the brother, the enemy of Osiris, is that being who enveloped man in a physical body, who densified part of this spirit and soul being into the physical body. Now we see how the once purely spiritual Osiris was laid in a chest. This chest is simply the human physical body. But because Osiris is a being who in accordance with his whole nature cannot descend so far as the physical world, who is meant to remain in the divine spiritual world, the laying in the chest, the human body, has for him the same meaning as death.

Here, then, is represented in a wider sense the passage from the realm of soul and spirit to the physical evolutionary epochs of humanity. Osiris could not enter this physical realm; he died to the external physical world and became King in the realm the soul enters on leaving the physical world of the senses, or on developing clairvoyant powers. Hence the initiate is in his soul united with Osiris.

What has remained to man from that realm of soul and spirit, to man who did not withdraw like Osiris from the physical sense world but entered into it? What has remained to him? It is his soul, his being of spirit and soul that will always draw him onwards to the original source of spirit and soul—to Osiris. This is the human soul dwelling within us, Isis, in a certain sense the eternal feminine who draws us onward to the realm out of which we are born.

Isis, when she is purified and has laid aside all that she has received from the physical, is impregnated from the spiritual world and gives birth to Horus, the higher man, who is to be victorious over the lower human being. Thus we see Isis as the representative of the human soul, as that in us which as the divine spiritual is born of the universal Father and has remained within us, seeking Osiris and only finding him through initiation or death. By conjuring this Osiris and Isis saga in a picture before our soul we are looking into the realm that lies behind the physical world of the senses, into a time when man was still among the Mothers, the primordial grounds of existence, when Isis was not yet enclosed in the physical body but still united in the golden age with her spouse Osiris.

Then there is revealed to us the most beautiful flower of mankind, the highest human ideal, which is born out of the human body impregnated by the eternal world-Spirit. Hence how could it be other than the most sublime ideal, the highest peak of humanity, the Christ Himself—for He is the ideal of what they represent—Who would naturally enter the realm of the Mothers. In Goethe's Faust we meet with three Mothers seated on golden tripods—three Mothers. The human soul has passed through its evolution during the ages when it was not as yet in a human body. What we today have as human conception and human birth appears to us only as final emblem and symbol of the earlier form of the same thing. In the physical Mother we see the ultimate physical form of a spiritual Mother who is behind her; and we see the impregnation of this spiritual Mother taking place not in the way happening on earth today but out of the cosmos itself, just as in higher knowledge our souls are fructified from out the cosmos. We look back to ever more spiritual forms of fructification and reproduction.

Therefore in the true sense of spiritual science we do not speak only of one Mother but of the Mothers, realizing that what we have today as the physical Mother is the last development of the soul-spiritual figure out of the spiritual realm. There are in fact images of Isis representing not one Mother but Mothers, three Mothers. In front we have a figure, Isis with the Horus child at her breast, resembling the oldest representations of the Madonna. But behind this figure in certain Egyptian representations we have another figure, an Isis, bearing on her head the two familiar cow horns and the wings of the hawk, offering the “crux ansata” (see Figure left) to the child. We see that what is physical, human, in the foremost figure is here more spiritualized. Behind there is yet a third figure, bearing a lion's head and representing the third stage of the human soul. This is how these three Isis figures appear, one behind the other. It is an actual fact that our human soul bears in it three natures—a will nature, found in the inmost depths of the being, a feeling nature and a wisdom nature. These are the three soul Mothers; we meet them in the three figures of the Egyptian Isis.

That behind the physical Mother we have the superphysical Mother, the spiritual Mother, the Isis of spiritual antiquity, with the hawk's wings, the cowhorns, with the globe of the world between them on the head of Isis—this is profound symbolism. Those who understand something of the ancient so-called theory of numbers have always said—and this corresponds with a deep truth—that the sacred number three represents the divine masculine in the cosmos. This sacred number three is pictorially expressed by the globe of the world and two cowhorns which are, if you like, a kind of image of the Madonna's crescent, but actually represents the fruitful working of the forces of nature.

The globe represents the creative activity of the cosmos. I should have to speak for hours were I to give a picture of the masculine element in the world. Thus behind the physical Isis stands her representative the superphysical Isis, who is not impregnated by one of her own kind but by the divine masculine living and weaving throughout the world. The process of fructification is still portrayed as being akin to the process of cognition. The consciousness that the process of cognition is a kind of fructification was still living in ancient times. You may read in the Bible: “Adam knew his wife and she brought forth ...” What today we receive as spiritual gives birth to the spiritual in the soul; it is something that represents a last remnant of the ancient mode of fructification. What comes to expression here shows us how today we are fructified by the spirit of the world receiving this spirit into the human soul as spirit of the world in order to acquire human knowledge, human feeling, human will.

This is what is represented in Isis. She is fructified by the divine male element, so that the head is fructified; and it is not material substance that is offered the child, as in the case of the physical Isis, but the “crux ansata” which is the sign of life. Whereas here from the physical Isis physical substance of life is offered, there is offered the spirit of life in its symbol. Behind the physical Mother of life there appears the spiritual Mother of life; behind her again the primal force of all life, represented with the life force, just as the will dwells behind everything in the still spiritual, far distant past. Here we have the three Mothers, and also the way in which out of the cosmos these three Mothers impart vitalizing force to the sun. Here we have what is not an artistic expression, nevertheless a symbolic expression of a profound cosmic truth. What lasted throughout the Egyptian evolution as the Isis symbol was received in more recent times and transformed in accordance with the progress made by humanity as a result of the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth; for in Christ Jesus we have the great prototype of everything that the human soul is destined to bring forth out of itself. The human soul in its fructification out of the spirit of the world is given tangible form in the Madonna. In the Madonna we meet, as it were, with Isis reborn and in an appropriate way enhanced, transfigured.

What could be portrayed in pictures at the beginning of the lecture now comes before our souls as bound up with the evolution of humanity, streaming forth from hoary antiquity, artistically transfigured and given new form in the modern pictures presented throughout the world to the human souls thirsting for art. Here we see how in very truth art, as in Goethe's words, becomes the exponent of truth. We see how in reality when our gaze falls on the Madonna, when this gaze is permeated with deep feeling, the soul partakes in certain knowledge of the mighty riddle of the world. We realize that in such surrender our soul, seeking in itself for the eternal feminine, is yearning for the divine Father-Spirit born out of the cosmos, to Whom as the Sun we give birth in our own soul. What we are as man, and how as man we are related to the universe, this is what meets us in the pictures of the Madonna. That is why the pictures of the Madonna are such holy things, apart altogether from any religious stream, from any religious dogma. Hence we can feel it as something born out of the cosmos when the hazy masses of cloud form themselves into the heads of angels, and out of the whole the representative of the human soul comes into being. The Madonna also includes what can be born out of the human soul, the true higher man slumbering in every human being, all that is best in man, what as spirit flows and weaves through the world. Goethe too felt this when he gave final form to his Faust when he had led him on through the different stages up to higher knowledge and the higher life. This is why he makes Faust go to the Mothers and why the name “Mothers” sounds to Faust so awe-inspiring and so beautiful, instilling in him a feeling for the wisdom echoing down from ancient times. Thus Goethe felt that he must send Faust to the Mothers, that only there could Faust seek and find the eternal through which Euphorion can come into being. Because the human soul appeared to him to be represented by the Madonna Goethe gave expression to the riddle of the soul in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards.”

Whatever modern times may have to say, this is the reason why Raphael in his wonderful picture of the Madonna, succeeded so well in leading us back to the realms to which the old figures of Isis belong. From what is spiritual, from what can no longer be expressed in a human figure because it would be too material, from that Isis whose force can be represented symbolically only by the lion's head, we descend to the human Isis who transmits her force to Horus through physical substance. Raphael unconsciously expressed this in his Sistine Madonna. But spiritual science will lead man consciously back to the spiritual realm out of which he has descended. Two lectures that I shall be giving here will furnish examples of how man has descended out of spiritual heights and will ascend again to this higher existence. Both lectures (5/1/1909 not translated. 5/6/1909, see Anthroposophical Quarterly, IV, 3.), that of 1st May and that of 6th May, 1909, will show us in a strictly scientific sense how these Madonna pictures and representations of Isis are indeed dearly and definitely artistic exponents of the very deepest secrets of Nature and of the spirit, and how in reality they are just a transcription of Plato's sublime words: “Once man was a spiritual being; he descended to earth only because he was robbed of his spiritual wings, and was enveloped in a physical body. He will struggle out of this physical body again and re-ascend to the world of spirit and soul.” This was proclaimed by the philosopher Plato. Pictures of the Madonna proclaim the same, for in the most beautiful sense they are what Goethe wished to express in the words: “Art is the worthiest exponent of the recognized mysteries of the world.” Man need not fear that art will become abstract or wholly allegorical if it is once again compelled, I repeat compelled, to recognize the higher spiritual realities; nor need he fear that it will become stiff and lifeless when it finds itself unable to continue using outer, crude physical models.

Because man has forgotten the spiritual, art has become bound up with the outer senses. But when men find the way back to spiritual heights and spiritual knowledge, they will then realize that true reality lies in the spiritual world, and that those who perceive this reality will create livingly, without being slavishly bound to physical models. Goethe will be understood only when it is more widely recognized that art and wisdom go hand in hand, when art again becomes a representation of the spiritual. Science and art will then again be one; in their union they will become religion, for the spiritual will work in this form as divinity once again in the heart of man, and give birth to what Goethe called the true, genuine piety. “A man who has both science and art also has religion,” says Goethe. “If anyone does not possess these two then let him have religion.”

In truth, whoever has knowledge of the spiritual secrets of the world and knows what speaks through Isis and Madonna sees in them something of primeval life, something much more living than all it is possible to express in any slavish imitation of a physical human model. A man of this kind whose gaze penetrates as through a veil through the living quality these Madonnas portray, and beholds the spiritual behind it, can, free from all dogma and prejudice, again feel piety in complete spiritual freedom. He will unite in his soul science or wisdom with art and give new birth to genuine free religious feeling—to genuine piety.

First appeared in the Golden Blade 1977.¹

Translated by Dorothy Lenn

In the course of these winter lectures I have repeatedly said that there is such a thing as knowledge of supersensible worlds. We have discussed bow the human being can attain to such knowledge, and we have many times spoken of its fruits. I want now to give two lectures which will serve to illustrate what we mean by knowledge of the higher worlds.

With the help of two examples, out of many that might have been selected, I propose to show how clairvoyant knowledge developed in a certain region—the kind of clairvoyant knowledge that has been, or ought to have been, left behind by present-day humanity. Clairvoyant knowledge given by natural forces, by natural capacities, will be my subject to-day. Next time I will discuss, again by means of examples, how clairvoyant knowledge can be acquired through strict training, by specific methods. To-day we will speak of the knowledge that led our ancestors to a form of spiritual perception which has now been superseded; next time I will deal with the kind of clairvoyance which has existed in all ages, but which has to undergo a different training from epoch to epoch.

I have already pointed out that Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of human consciousness. What we call our consciousness to-day, the consciousness whereby we recreate the outer world within us in thoughts, in mental images, in ideas, is only one stage of evolution. Another stage preceded it, and yet another stage will follow it. When anyone speaks to-day of the theory of evolution, he usually means the evolution of outer form, of the forms of material existence. Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of the soul, of the spirit, and therefore of consciousness. We can look back to an earlier form of consciousness which has been superseded by the present form, and we can look forward to a future form of consciousness which will develop only gradually. The earlier state of consciousness we may call subconsciousness, and the consciousness to which our present consciousness can be developed, by spiritual-scientific methods, we may call superconsciousness. Thus we can differentiate three consecutive stages—subconsciousness, consciousness, superconsciousness.

In a certain sense all consciousness to-day is a stage of development of consciousness in general, just as the forms of the higher animals are developments of the universal animal form. Present-day consciousness has evolved from a lower stage. It is surrounded by external objects, which it perceives through the senses—hearing, sight, taste and so on. From what was first perception it makes concepts, mental images, ideas. Thus an external world of objects which work upon us is mirrored in our consciousness.

Subconsciousness was not like that. It was of a far more direct nature. We may call it a lower clairvoyant consciousness, because whoever possessed it did not approach objects with sense-organs and straightway seek to make concepts of them, but the concepts were there directly. Pictures arose and faded away. Let us suppose that the clairvoyant consciousness encountered an external object which was dangerous to it. To-day we see the object, and the mental image called forth by the sight of it brings about the consciousness of danger. It was not like that in the earlier clairvoyant consciousness. The external object was not perceived in clear outline, especially in the earliest times. Something like a dream-picture arose and revealed whether the object was sympathetic or unsympathetic. The fluctuating pictures in dreams to-day will serve to illustrate this for us. The dreams of a normal person to-day have no real connection with any outer world. But suppose something quite definite were to correspond to every picture which arose in us like a dream-picture, one picture occurring in case of dangers another in the presence of a useful object, then we could say that it was immaterial whether we were awake or dreaming, for we could direct our lives according to these pictures!

Our present consciousness has developed out of such a dream-life, which allowed the inner nature of things, their inner soul-quality, to rise up before us. And this dream-consciousness has passed through manifold forms before reaching its present form. If we look back in history as it is revealed to us by Spiritual Science, we reach at last, in the far-distant past, a state of soul in which the external was not perceptible, but in which the surrounding world, possessed inwardly by the soul, was perceived by an old clairvoyant consciousness. But this consciousness had in consequence one attribute which, contrasted with the fundamental attribute of the soul to-day, must be designated as imperfect. It was not self-conscious; the soul could not say “I” to itself, could not distinguish itself properly from its environment. Only because external objects with sharp contours confront the soul can it distinguish itself from them. Thus man has had to purchase his self-consciousness by the surrender of his old clairvoyance. All evolution is an advance which at the same time involves the renunciation of certain advantages of the earlier stage. Now at each stage something from the earlier stage lingers on into later times, and in certain circumstances we can, from such legacies of the past, see the earlier conditions projected into the present where they rank as abnormalities.

We find traces of such atavisms even in the human body, as for example in the muscles round the ear, which in an earlier stage moved the ear. In animals these muscles still have a purpose; in human beings they still exist, but few men are able to move their ears voluntarily. At one time human beings had a form of body in which such muscles were needed. To-day they are just relics of the past—vestiges of an earlier stage of evolution.

Just as we find certain organic survivals in these outer structures, so, too, we find remains of other early evolutionary conditions. Thus we see traces of the old clairvoyance projected right into our own time, but clouded and changed by our present stage of development, and hence abnormal. This throws light upon the old European clairvoyance, which differs in a certain way from the clairvoyance of the East. To-day I want to go into these differences.

What are these survivals of the old clairvoyant state of mankind? We can distinguish two kinds. One of them speaks for itself and is a true legacy of the past. I am referring to the dream and to dream experiences. The other vestiges of the past are in quite a different category. They are very much coloured and altered by present-day development, whereas the dream has not been changed by man, but by advancing evolution. The other remnants of the past are vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight.

Let us first take the dream. It is something left behind from the old picture-consciousness But into that ancient consciousness the nature of the object really penetrated, whereas the dream to-day, although it still shows certain characteristics of the old picture-consciousness, has lost its real value, its reality. Let us take an example. Someone dreams that he sees a tree-frog, snatches at it and catches it Then he wakes up and finds a corner of the bedcover in his band. The dream symbolised the external event. Had the man met the dream with objective consciousness, he would have seen that he had the bedcover in his hand. But this is how the dream symbolises. It can become very dramatic. For example, a student dreams that on leaving the lecture-room he is jostled by another student. It comes to a duel. The seconds are chosen, they go to the agreed place, the distance is measured, the pistols are loaded, the first shot is fired. But in that moment the student wakes up, and knocks over the chair by his bedside. There we have the same thing. If the student concerned had seen the event with his objective consciousness, had he been awake, he would have seen that the chair had been knocked over, or possibly it would not have been knocked over. Now, however, the dream gives a more or less symbolic expression to what happened.

There are all kinds of such dreams; they may even have some element of reality. But in typical cases we have to do with an arbitrary connection between what is pictured and the outer event. The dream itself shows that one is dealing with a picture; but it does not show any direct connection between the picture and the inner qualities of the outer world. In direct consciousness a man would not have been obliged to touch salt with his tongue in order to recognise it, but a quite definite dream-picture would have arisen before him, and there would have been one for vinegar, another for sugar, and yet another for a dangerous being, and so on. With every being in nature there went a specific picture.

Something of this survives in dream-consciousness. But because present-day man has contracted his whole being into self-consciousness, because he has cut himself off from the outer world, differentiated himself from it, his dream-pictures no longer have any connection with it. Through having made the normal transition from dream-consciousness to self-consciousness, he has lost connection with the outer world.

It is different as regards the other three survivals—vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight. We have often described the course of human evolution somewhat as follows. The human being, as he is to-day, consists of four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The ego is the last member to develop, and it is through the attainment of the ego that man has become a self-conscious being; he has thereby wrested his being from the life in his lower members. When the ego was not so far developed as it is to-day, when man still lived in his astral body, when the astral body was the bearer of his consciousness, this consciousness was pre-eminently a dream-consciousness. It was the astral body which caused these pictures to come and go. Hence it is easy to understand that man was then more closely united with his lower members. Thus it is as if man had become free in his astral body, as if he had disengaged himself from it and had thereby acquired his present objective consciousness.

As man was once submerged in his astral body, so in still earlier times he was submerged in his etheric and physical bodies. Then he had still lower forms of consciousness. Thus we have three states of subconsciousness below the present objective consciousness.

Imagine that a man is swimming below the surface of the sea. It is then possible for him to see what is in the sea. He sees what happens at the bottom of the sea, what swims and moves there, and so on. What he encounters there is quite different from what confronts him if he rises to the surface and looks up at the star-strewn heavens. Similarly, man has been lifted out of that stage of consciousness in which he was aware of what was conveyed to him by astral, etheric and physical bodies; he has risen to self-consciousness. In certain abnormal cases, however, he can revert to the sea of subconsciousness. In dreams this happens involuntarily. What he has won by rising out of this sea he can take back again into it.

Imagine a man plunging back into this sea and able to compare all that he perceives below with what he has learnt above. That is what it is like to-day. The man takes with him what he has experienced here above. It is not as it is with a diver who takes nothing but his memory with him, who can make comparisons only with the help of his memory. Whoever plunges into the sea of subconsciousness after having become a modern man colours everything below with his experiences above. What has been experienced above is carried as a sheath into the subconscious, and man receives no clear picture of that world, but a picture clouded by the world above.

When a man plunges into his astral body, he transplants himself artificially into the sphere occupied by his consciousness when he himself still lived in his astral body. This is how what to-day we call visions come about. Were man to descend into his astral body without knowing anything of the modern world, he would really experience the inwardness of objects; they would appear to him in their true guise. To-day, however, they appear to him as a distorted reflection of what can be experienced only in the upper world of consciousness. Therein lies both the truth and the deceptiveness of visions. Anyone who descends into the world of vision may always be sure that the cause of what he sees lies in the soul-environment; but it is also certain that the vision confronting him will be distorted, that it will not show him things in their true guise, but will imitate what occurs in the world above. Hence a man’s visions usually indicate what the men of his own day are experiencing. This can be checked in full detail, from decade to decade.

Let us suppose that a man plunged into that world at a time when there were no telegrams and no telephone. Then he would have seen no telegrams and no telephone in the world below, whereas in our own day the incidence of telegrams and telephones in visions becomes more and more frequent. That, too, is why the pious Catholic, who in his objective consciousness has so often seen the figure of the Madonna, takes this figure with him, and she appears to him down there too. It is not an expression of the reality, but something which the person has taken down with him, and in which he clothes the reality. In such a case he has carried down into the world below what he has experienced in the world above. Thus when a man returns in vision into the world from which he has emerged, he gives an abnormal colouring to what he experiences.

If he plunges back again into the etheric body, he experiences what we may call premonition. But this is even more dangerous, because his state of consciousness has gone still further back. There man becomes involved in all the tangled threads of existence out of which he had raised himself into ego-consciousness; but in that case, too, he carries below all that he has acquired above. He is unable to see the threads in their true form.

Just think how little of what is all around man comes within his range. The thoughts which he makes (about cause and effect for example) are limited to a small section of the world. But the whole world in its entire circumference hangs together, and there are other relationships involved. Man is, as it were, standing upon an island of existence, and the island is all he sees. But this island is related to the whole cosmos. In his etheric body man is much more closely connected with the cosmos than he is in his present consciousness. If he were able to receive in its purity what his ether body tells him, he would see future events, because down in his etheric body things converge. He would see that an event, which might not emerge into reality for perhaps ten years, was already there in germ. But man takes down with him his little intellect, his narrow little mind soul. Hence what emerges as premonition is falsified; that is why so little reliance can usually be placed upon premonitions, just as generally there is no objective truth in visions which occur by way of nature.

When man plunges into his physical body, premonition can pass over into penetration of space. Whereas in premonition he sees other times, in deuteroscopy he can see what happens in the far distance, beyond the range of the physical eye. These pictures are like a Fata Morgana. Abnormal phenomena such as those reported by Swedenborg come into this category.² But here the deceptions are even greater, and nothing ought to be accepted which has not been tested by a trained, disciplined seer. Such conditions, which to-day are morbid, are survivals of an ancient clairvoyance which was once thoroughly healthy, was once something which placed the man in a relationship of complete understanding with his environment.

In the evolution of European peoples, in particular, we find everywhere a picture-consciousness of varying antiquity which saw the world in its inner, soul-spiritual nature. But the ego-consciousness of these peoples was still quite undeveloped. Have we anything left of what was seen and related by these people of olden times, who had not yet got the mature ego-consciousness, who had a transitional consciousness between the old picture-consciousness and the objective consciousness? We have indeed a beautiful and precious survival of it in myths and sagas, in the whole range of mythology. The content of mythology is so often described to-day as folk-poetry. Clouds will be described as flocks of sheep, and thunder and lightning as something else. There is nothing more arbitrary than such interpretations. Sagas, myths and fairy tales, too, tell us about what we experienced in the subconscious. All sagas and myths were experienced, not composed—experienced not in our present-day consciousness, but in the ancient, clairvoyant state.

We can penetrate deeply into this consciousness and into the origin of myths and sagas if we turn to an important passage of the Scriptures. You will remember the significant verse in the Old Testament which reads. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. II, 7). A certain formation of the breathing process is here associated with human evolution. We shall see later that this is a reference to the fact that man owes his present-day ego-consciousness, his capacity for living with and in his blood, to the peculiar structure of the breathing process which he has acquired in course of time and still has to-day. Only through having learnt to breathe as an upright being did man raise himself above the picture-consciousness. Animals still have picture-consciousness to-day, either directly or indirectly, because their lungs have not the upright position. It has quite rightly been observed that the dog is much more intelligent than the parrot, and yet it is only the parrot which has learnt to speak. Much depends on the direction in which an organ is placed. The parrot has a larynx in the vertical position, and that is why it learns to speak. It is because of the special configuration of his organs that man has been able to advance to his present objective consciousness.

If we have understood the words of the Bible just quoted we shall say: “Man has been so formed in conformity with the laws of the cosmos that his present breathing process has developed.” Those who understood this process from its spiritual aspect, who knew that a spiritual element lives in all things, said to themselves: “The spiritual element of the air has to penetrate us in the way that this process makes possible; then the free ego-consciousness will evolve.” When this process takes place in us in an irregular way, when the spirits of the air are unable to work into our blood in a way which corresponds to our present state of consciousness, then consciousness is forced back into an earlier stage. That is why the ancient European experienced every irregularity of the breathing process as a suppression of consciousness and an inner experience.

The physical expression of irregular breathing is the nightmare (Alpdruck). The word comes from Alb or Elf, so that it signifies the spiritual which enters into the human being even though it cannot unfold itself fully. When the breathing process becomes irregular, when the ego has to descend into a lower kingdom, the host of lower spirits, which can make an appearance in the astral realm, have access to man. And though you may say this is a kind of illness, that is not the point; the important thing is what the conditions bring about. From our higher standpoint to-day, the condition must of course be called unhealthy.

Although to-day it is a reversion to an earlier condition, it was once a transitional state between the normal and the abnormal. Our present-day breathing has arisen from a breathing process which is found as a survival in the nightmare; the nightmare is the last vestige of it. At one time man needed less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. When that was the normal condition, when man was nearer the state of the plant, he had a different form of consciousness, he was plunged into the ancient clairvoyant consciousness. Then he emerged from this condition, and what was formerly healthy became unhealthy, and during the transition period, when he oscillated between the one form of consciousness and the other, the ancient European experienced all that we find in the elves and sprites, which came to his consciousness before he had acquired consciousness of the self. Thus we look back by way of nature into conditions which were once normal; the nightmare represents a survival of the picture-consciousness which created myths and sagas.

But the change in the breathing has involved many other changes. The seeing of external objects has come about. Picture-consciousness did not involve seeing external contours, seeing the outer surface of things. Then came the time when pictures gradually vanished and were replaced by the world of external objects. And once again there was an intermediate stage when man had already developed sight, but when his external sight might in abnormal circumstances withdraw and he might revert to a state of clairvoyance.

There is a popular expression in German, an expression of ancient origin, for looking at something without seeing it. It is Spannung, Staunen, Spahnen, and the last word has the same derivation as the German word Gespenst (ghost), so that here you have the ghost before you, so to say; you have before you something which is seen by means of inner, astral forces. To-day that is abnormal. In the transitional period, whenever it occurred, the man was admonished to say to himself, “But I will see, I do not wish to be stared at, I wish to see.” Thus what he saw in this way seemed to him to be something which he had to overcome. All the stories about blinding whatever stares at one, so that it can no longer stare, derive from this. In all these stories, from the story of the blinding of the giant Polyphemus right down to the wonderful story in which Dietrich of Berne overcomes the giant Grim, we have this stage of consciousness. The very strangeness of the phenomenon, however, could have an attraction for the soul. Hence there were beings, beings who belonged to the inwardness of things, who could have a seductive influence on men, who could lead them astray.

The key word in German for this enticement is Lur or Lore. And wherever you meet this word, you have the ghost in its “alluring” form. If men were specially liable to meet it at a special place, they said that this place was its home. The word Lei is connected with this, hence the Lorelei rocks. It is there that the alluring form is to be found which withdraws into the Lei, as into its native country. We can find this word Lei in various associations with the word Lure. Thus we have the subconscious experience of seeing, with its Lore or Lure, which emerges as the specific seeing of external objects develops. The Alpe, or elves, have to do with the fact that man retains his ego-consciousness within him.

We have yet another survival, still to be found in certain Slav regions. It is the saga of the Midday Woman.³ When men go out into the fields, and, instead of returning home at mid-day, remain there, the Midday Woman appears to them, clothed in white. She questions them until the clock strikes. If they are able to answer all the time, she says, “Good, you have redeemed me.”

Here once again an ancient clairvoyant experience is expressed. Just as we breathe in with the air the spirit of the ego, so we have gathered together our entire being, our entire microcosm, out of the macrocosm. Everything within us has come from without. Our inner intelligence is a product of the outer intelligence. There is a transitional period between the time when men saw the spiritual beings who directed the structure of the world, the beings who directed the formation of the flowers and of the crystals, and the time when the outer intelligence was formed. This intelligence has taken possession of man; he has become conscious of it. The midday sun, the midday demon, obliterates the ego-consciousness through a partial, undeveloped sunstroke. Then what has entered into man to make him intelligent, the external cause of his intelligence, appears before the man, and in such a way that he has to exercise his intelligence. It is through his having to make a mental effort that the phenomenon occurs. The man is, so to say, confronted objectively by what the cosmos has made of him. He must overcome it. If he can exercise his intelligence so as to be able to answer the Midday Woman until the clock strikes, he can unite himself again with his ego.

We meet the best expression of this in ancient Greece and sculpturally in ancient Egypt, in the great questioner, the Sphinx. The Sphinx is nothing but the highest expression of the Midday Woman. It asks the ultimate question, the question to which the answer is “man.” Whoever is able to solve the riddle redeems the Sphinx. It falls into the abyss—that is, it unites with human nature.

Man has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, which has brought with it self-consciousness, as a victory over the ancient picture-consciousness. In earlier times, although he was unable to see into himself, did not find a self within him, yet when he looked outside himself he saw spiritual beings everywhere—in the waves, in the air, in the trees—all was indwelt by spiritual beings. How could he himself not be so indwelt also? When he felt, “With the air I breathe in. I receive the actual imprint of the ego,” how could he do otherwise than see in the air the embodiment of the god to whom he owed his objective consciousness? When he breathed in the air, he knew, “The air moves my ego.” When the wind blustered without in the stormy winter nights he knew that Wotan was roaming about, the same Wotan who was breathed in by him. We could go through all the myths and sagas in this way. We should doubtless find that literary composition has brought about modifications, but they can all be traced back to the old clairvoyant consciousness.

European clairvoyance, however, differs essentially from that of the East; for every people has a special mission, a special task to fulfil in the course of evolution. Whereas in the time when the Oriental was going through the transition from the old clairvoyance to the formation of the ego, he possessed only a mere rudiment of the ego, so that it very easily surrendered itself to the higher beings, the consciousness of personality developed early in European life. It was a particular characteristic of the European peoples that during the transition period the ego made tremendous inroads. The human being was able to see into the inwardness of things, but he asserted his ego very strongly, felt himself from the outset as a strong opponent of the beings who were trying to entangle him in the threads of the spiritual world around him. Therefore the beings who are man’s helpers are those who work towards the acquisition of self-consciousness, towards the liberation of the ego.

The victory over the astral Spirits, which is the aim of those Spirits who bestow personal self-consciousness, plays a great part in Germanic literature, in European literature. The Alp-spirit, who ensnares man, is present everywhere for European consciousness in the Midgard Snake, or in the forms of the giants. Everywhere we see how the gods ally themselves with men in the formation of personal self-consciousness. We see how the god Wotan, who lives in the breathing, becomes man’s ally in his fight against all the lower spirits; he stands beside man in his struggle to overcome the lower consciousness. It is Donar or Thor, with his hammer, who conquers the giants and the Midgard Snake; he it is who expresses man’s emergence into reality.

This conquest over the astral powers, who prevent men from becoming free, played a great part in preparing the way for Christianity. There was something more impersonal in the Oriental, whereas the warm-hearted European had to experience something unknown to less advanced Eastern peoples. In Europe the urge to emerge from subconsciousness was the dominant motive. Therefore the European felt intensely: “I with my ego have emerged from the spiritual world into the physical-sensible world, in primeval times my soul was in the spiritual world, the world of light. What I have acquired here has made me blind to the old astral world.” This found its strongest expression where the victory over the astral world was most strongly felt. The ancient European consciousness felt Baldur to be the leader of souls in so far as they belong to the land of their birth, to the astral world of light. The leader of the sense-world is Hodur, who slays Baldur.⁴

Thus tragically the ancient Europeans experienced the fading out of the clairvoyant soul, the provisional death of the soul. But they experienced it as a transition; they felt that something new had to follow. Hence the “Twilight of the Gods,” the downfall of the spiritual world. And because in ancient times personal consciousness was strongly marked in the European peoples, the appearance of the personal God, Christ Jesus, could be most deeply understood by the Europeans. The germ for the reception of the personal God was laid down long beforehand.

We have seen how in Europe the present-day consciousness has developed out of the earlier one. It was only a small section of the spiritual world that people could see in this way. But the initiates had their consciousness in still higher worlds. We shall show how the knowledge of the initiates was raised above the clairvoyant consciousness of the masses, what impression the appearance of the Christ made on the Mysteries, and how the Mysteries have evolved right up to the present day. What men saw at lower levels in the past they will see in the future at a higher level; for they will see into the spiritual world in full consciousness.

Man has indeed passed through this process. While still leading a subconscious form of existence, he descended in order to acquire self-consciousness. And with his self-consciousness he will rise again. His earlier clairvoyance was not his own, but a clairvoyance which other beings had instilled into him. What he will acquire for himself will be a free self-conscious possession, best described by a saying of Christ-Jesus. On the occasion (John VIII, 32) when the Christ was emphasising the relationship between truth and freedom, he spoke of the far-distant future in these terms: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

• 1. This lecture is the second of three public lectures (Berlin, April-May, 1906), which in 1955 were published in book form, in German, by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, under the title of Isis und Madonna: Alteuropäisches Hellsehen, die Europäischen Mysterien und Ihre Eingeweihten. A typescript translation of the first lecture is in the Library at Rudolf Steiner house, London; a translation of the third appeared in the quarterly, Anthroposophy, vol. iv, no. 3, 1929.
• 2. See also the following lectures by Dr. Steiner: Swedenborg's Power of Vision (Dornach, 12/9/15), printed in the Goetheanum English News-Sheet 1939; Die Geschichte des Spiritismus (Berlin. 30/5/04), published in English as the first of two lectures in the booklet, The History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism (Anthroposophic Press, 1943); and Menschlich und Menschheitliche Entwicklungwahrheiten (Cycle 46, Berlin, 1917: not translated).
• 3. See the fourth, lecture in the cycle, The inner Nature of Man between Death and Rebirth (Vienna, 1914), published by Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928; out of print.
• 4. See the lectures, The Balder Myth and the Good Friday Mystery (Dornach, 2-3/4/15); published in Festivals and the Seasons (Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928: out of print).

From ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review—Michaelmas 1929 No 3 Vol. 4. From GA# 57.

In ancient times a kind of natural clairvoyance was a common heritage of the European peoples. Indeed man's consciousness as it is to-day has evolved from that earlier state of clairvoyant consciousness. With these ancient clairvoyant faculties, man was able to perceive certain connections of his life, and what he so perceived was then expressed in the legends and myths which speak of goblins, elfin-beings, dwarfs and the like. Now these legends and myths are very different in character. They were based on what man was able to see with his clairvoyant faculties, but when we study them we find on the one hand certain resemblances and on the other outstanding differences, simply because the clairvoyant powers of men were by no means the same. There is a much greater similarity in the more important mythological figures—the figures of Gods and Heroes in the sagas. These sagas, too, were the outcome of clairvoyance, but in a different sense. The great mythological figures lead us back to the experiences of those who were Initiates in the ancient Mysteries. It is not easy for our present consciousness to form a true conception of these ancient Mysteries and their Initiates, for the nature of our education and the knowledge resulting therefrom does not conduce to an understanding of the nature of Initiation—far from it! If we were to speak of the nature of the Mysteries and their Initiates in the language of current thought, we should say that the Mysteries are schools for the training of those faculties which enable the soul of man to have actual vision of the spiritual worlds. They are schools, where in a methodical and systematic way, man's soul is so guided and trained that he can finally perceive the higher worlds with spiritual eyes and ears. Although modern scholarship knows little of the Mysteries, they are nevertheless still in existence to-day and are the means whereby man can be led consciously to the spiritual worlds.—And the whole content of Spiritual Science, everything that is communicated in Spiritual Science, is, in its essence, Mystery-wisdom.

The man who so trains his soul that he can perceive in higher worlds, is an Initiate. Through all the ages there have been centres for developing the faculty of fully conscious clairvoyance and the aim of the present lecture is to give a cursory survey of the European Mysteries.

For this purpose we must go back to ancient pre-Christian times and try to visualise what went on in the occult schools of Initiation and how they influenced civilisation and culture in general. You have often heard how man to-day can be led to the Initiates, how his thinking, feeling and willing can be so trained that he can set out on the path leading to the “Mothers.” This is the path which the pupils of all the Mysteries have had to tread in quest of fully conscious clairvoyance.

There were Mysteries of great significance, deeply influencing ancient European civilisation, in various regions of France, Germany and Britain. In all these regions the Mysteries were of a definite and unique kind, and were instituted on the basis of knowledge such as I indicated in my lecture “Isis and Madonna,” namely, that man has a spiritual origin, that his home was once in spiritual worlds whence his spirit and soul have come forth. When a man penetrates more deeply into his soul and rises to a level higher than that of ordinary sense-perception, he still feels, even to-day, that there is within him something that is a last remnant of his being as it was in the spiritual world. To-day, this last remnant—the human soul—is enclosed within the physical body, which in its turn is a densification of the primordial spiritual being. When he has conscious realisation of the spirit and soul within him, man says: ‘Now I know what I once was in my whole being; now I know that I was born out of the womb of worlds, out of the great universe.’ To-day the universe is revealed to human intelligence in everything that is spread out before the senses. But behind all that can be perceived by the senses and grasped by the intellect there is the spiritual universe—the Primordial Father and Mother from whom the soul is born. The body too is born from them but at first in spiritual form. This true form of man is now hidden.

It was known in the ancient European Mysteries that the true being of man is hidden and must be sought in its concealment. The saying went: “Isis is seeking for the Being from whom she proceeded.” To be initiated was to live through all those processes which enable the soul of man once again to behold its true origin and to unfold the faculty which will unite it again with its spiritual origin. Whether in the depths of the sacred oak-groves, or in places adapted for the Mysteries, it was always the same.—The candidate was subjected to certain processes whereby he might be united with his spiritual origin.

All that lies hidden behind the sense-world, as the sun behind the clouds, the hidden spirit, was known in these Mysteries by the name of “Hu.” “Ceridwen” was the seeking soul. And all the rites of Initiation were a means of revealing to the pupil that death is only one of the many processes in life. Death changes nothing at all in the innermost kernel of man's being.—In the Druidic Mysteries (Druid denotes an Initiate of the third degree), the neophyte was put into a condition resembling death; his senses could not function as organs of perception. A man whose only instrument of perception is the physical body or the physical brain has no consciousness in a condition where his senses cease to function. But in Initiation, the senses—feeling, hearing and so on—cease to function, and yet the neophyte is able to experience and observe. The principle which observes was called “Ceridwen”—the soul. And that which comes to meet the soul, as light and sound come to our outer eyes and ears, was called “Hu”—the spiritual world. The Initiate experienced the union between Ceridwen and Hu. Such experiences are described in the myths. When we are told to-day that the ancients paid homage to a God Hu and a Goddess Ceridwen, this is simply another way of describing Initiation. The true myths are always concerned with Initiation. It is empty chatter to say that these myths have an astronomical meaning, that Ceridwen is the moon and Hu the sun, and so on. These myths originated because their creators were conscious of an inner union between the aspiring soul and the spirit of the sun, not the physical sun. The Mysteries of Hu and Ceridwen, then, were those into which men were initiated in the regions of which we are speaking.

More to the North, in Scandinavia and Northern Russia, we find the Trottic Mysteries, founded by the Initiate who is known as Sieg, or Siegfried: Sikke. All the Siegfried myths are to be traced back to this being. These Northern Mysteries are characterised by a principle that is really common to all the Mysteries, but which here for the first time is clearly emphasised. Let me explain this principle by means of a comparison.—Think of the human being as he stands before us in life, with his head, hands, feet and other members. And now, if we imagine him without one of these members, he is no longer a whole man. Think of the most important organs, the heart, the stomach and others. Each one of these organs contributes to human life and serves its needs. The fact that these organs work together makes it possible for a soul to live and develop in the body of man. The soul lives in a physical body which is a unit composed of many members. This suggests that wherever a dwelling place has to be found for a human soul, or for a higher being, single members must be working together, each one of them carrying out their particular functions. And so even in the ancient Northern Mysteries it was realised that something can be accomplished if a number of men are gathered together and each individual is allotted a special and definite task. One man, for instance, may resolve to develop principally the thinking faculty, another the power of feeling, a third the power of will. Sub-divisions are of course also possible.

The Northern Mysteries were based upon the idea that when a number of men, each of whom has his particular task, are gathered together into a whole, an invisible influence will work in them, just as the soul works in a human body. When men come together in this way, each playing his own part, they form a kind of higher organism or body, and thus make it possible for a higher spiritual being to dwell among them. Thus Sieg gathered together a circle of twelve men, each of whom set out to develop the powers of his soul in a particular direction. And then, when they gathered together in their holy sanctuaries, they knew that a higher spiritual being was living among them as the soul lives in a human body, that their souls were members of a higher body. This was the sense in which the “Thirteenth” lived and moved among the Twelve who knew: We are twelve and the Thirteenth lives among us. Or else they chose out a Thirteenth whose function was then, within the circle of the Twelve, to be the connecting link enabling the higher influence to descend. And so the Thirteenth was recognised to be the representative of the Godhead in the sanctuaries of Initiation.

Everything was related to the sacred number three, and for this reason the one who united in himself all the knowledge was known as the representative of the ‘holy Three’ and around him were the twelve, each one with his definite functions, like members of an organism.

And so it was realised that when twelve men united together to develop a power which enabled a higher being to dwell among them, they were rising out of the physical into the spiritual world, rising to their God. They regarded themselves as the twelve attributes, the twelve qualities of the God. This was all reflected in the figures of the twelve Germanic Gods in the Northern sagas. He who desired to become a member of this noble circle was told that he must seek Baldur—in other words, he must seek Initiation. And who is Baldur? Baldur is the Spiritual in man, the principle for which the soul is seeking and which is found in Initiation. Who slew Baldur? Those who killed out the clairvoyant faculties in man, who organised his physical nature, who endowed him with material sight and who could prematurely misuse the forces of physical matter—Loki, the power of Fire, and Hodur the Blind, representing the principle in man's being that is incapable of beholding the spiritual world. This is only a way of describing processes of Initiation. Material existence has made man blind; through Initiation he again finds the path leading to the higher worlds. The trained clairvoyance of the old Initiates was a higher faculty than the innate, natural clairvoyance possessed by all human beings in those days.

The Druidic and Trottic Mysteries were the inspiring source of European civilisation and culture in pre-Christian times. Now the essential feature of European culture, namely, the development of a consciousness of personality, is likewise a danger—a danger likely to be far greater here than in other regions of the earth. Consciousness of personality is a keynote of all European culture. It was present in all Germanic lands, in a much stronger form than in the East where men loved to surrender themselves to Brahman. But this consciousness of personality brought with it the danger that those who were initiated could readily misuse what they learnt in Initiation and turn it into caricature. Initiation gives man control of spiritual forces and those who have learnt to use them can also misuse them. So it came about that the Mysteries of ancient Europe began to degenerate, the unripeness of the Initiates began to give rise to all kinds of atrocities and in many regions they were dreaded by the people. Much that we hear of the Mysteries to-day, although not everything, refers to the period of their decline. In this age we need not, after all, be so very astonished that the Mysteries are so often misunderstood. For if Spiritual Science does not help a man to realise what went on in the Mysteries and he has to rely merely on the tittle-tattle of history written down much later on, his ideas on the subject will be utterly barren. Just think what happens when people are content to draw their information about Spiritual Science from what the outside world has to say about it. They get a fine picture! And if what is being said about Spiritual Science to-day were to live on, it would do far more harm than the fragmentary knowledge of the Mysteries has done.

It would be an attractive study to trace back many things in the sagas and legends of Europe to the Mysteries. We should find a great deal in the Niebelung and Siegfried legends that points back to the ancient Mysteries. But it is difficult to discriminate in such study. The only thing that can reveal whether a certain feature in the legends is simply an improvisation of fancy or leads back to the Mysteries, is actual knowledge and the capacity to trace it back to its real source.

In all these Mysteries, no matter where we look, we find an element of tragedy. Let me put it thus: The Initiate in the ancient Druidic or Trottic Mysteries might indeed be united with Hu or Baldur, but there was something lacking in the spiritual world into which he entered. In more popular parlance, the Initiates would have said: ‘Our Gods are mortal, are doomed to downfall.’—Hence the myth which tells of the Twilight of the Gods. But then came the news of the great Christ Impulse which could work more strongly in Europe than anywhere else—the news that a sublime Spirit, the Christ, had lived in an earthly body among men. And the Initiates realised that all that had hitherto been experienced in the depths of the Mysteries had become historic fact in the Christ Event. In the ancient Mysteries the Initiate had not fully vanquished death.—But now he learnt of the Mystery of Golgotha. This historic Mystery was received with understanding in the European Mysteries—a much deeper understanding than elsewhere. The attitude of the Initiates may be described somewhat as follows: In our Initiation we rose to a divine-spiritual world, yet it was a world pervaded with the forces of mortality. But he who steeps himself with all that is bound up with the mighty impulse brought by the Christ-Being, he who can link himself with Christ, will realise that just as the sun irradiates and quickens the life of the plants, so the Christ Impulse can flow into the human soul and endow the soul with knowledge of eternity and immortality, with knowledge of victory over death. The soul is quickened by a true understanding of Christ.—And it was also known to the Initiates that besides such outer teaching as can be given, there is an inner knowledge, a quest of the soul (Ceridwen) not only for a Hu or a Baldur but for another ‘Baldur,’ for One Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates knew that the soul who experienced this acquired a bigger kind of clairvoyance than was attained through Initiation into the ancient Mysteries.

Here in Europe there was a deep understanding of these things. I have often told you of the great stimulus given to the evolution of man by the Christ Impulse. To understand this, let us think once more of ancient Hebrew consciousness. The ancient Hebrew felt himself one with his “Fathers.” He said to himself: ‘My Ego is enclosed between birth and death, but my blood streams into me from my Father Abraham. The blood in my veins is the expression of my Ego, of my individuality; it is the blood-stream which flows through the generations and is the expression of my God.’—And so the ancient Hebrew felt himself part of one great whole, secure in the blood-stream which passes down through the generations. Christ says: “Before Abraham was, I AM;” and “I and the Father are One.” The Ego of man is linked to a spiritual world by threads which everyone may discover in his own individuality. The Mystery of Golgotha brought to man a realisation of the Ego that is grounded upon itself, albeit the ties of blood are not ignored—the Ego that understands the physical world. Therefore, in the blood which flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, men saw the expression of the human Ego-principle, and the saying went: “He who quickens this blood within himself will become a true seer.” But the world was not ripe enough to understand the true essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. It was not ripe in the centuries immediately following the Coming of Christ, nor is it to-day. Paul had a vision of the Living Christ in the spiritual world, but, after all, who understands those profound Epistles of one who was an Initiate or speaks with any truth of Paul's disciple, Dionysos the Areopagite?

In the Mysteries of Wales and Britain the teachings of Dionysos were received and the influence of the Christ Mystery so permeated the Druidic and Trottic Mysteries that the Initiates realised in full clarity of consciousness that He whom they had sought as Hu and Baldur, had come to earth as Christ. But they said among themselves that mankind in general was not ripe to understand the mystery of the blood flowing from the Redeemer's wounds, that men were not fit to receive into themselves the blood that runs through all creation.

It was only in small circles of Initiates that this sacred Christ Mystery was preserved. A man who was initiated into this Mystery experienced the overcoming of the Ego that functions in the world of sense. This is how he experienced it.—He asked himself: ‘What has been the manner of my life hitherto? In my quest for truth, I have turned to the things of the outer world. The Initiates of the Christ-Mystery, however, demand that I shall not wait until outer things tell me what is true but that in my soul, without being stimulated by the outer world, I shall seek the invisible.’—This quest of the soul for the highest was called by the outer world in later times: The secret of the Holy Grail. And the Parsifal or Grail legend is simply a form of the Christ Mystery. The Grail is the holy Cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood as it flowed on Golgotha. The Cup was then taken to a holy place and guarded. So long as a man does not ask about the invisible, his lot is that of Parsifal. Only when he asks, does he become an Initiate of the Christ Mystery.

Wolfram von Eschenbach speaks in his poem of the three stages through which the soul of man passes. The first of these is the stage of outer, material perception. The soul is caught up in matter and allows matter to say what is truth. This is the “stupor” (Dumpfheit) of the soul, as Wolfram van Eschenbach expresses it. And then the soul begins to recognise that the outer world offers only illusion. When the soul perceives that the results of science are not answers but only questions, there comes the stage of “doubt” (Zwifel), according to Wolfram von Eschenbach. But then the soul rises to “blessedness” (Saelde, Seligkeit)—to life in the spiritual worlds.—These are the three stages.

The Mysteries which were illuminated by the Christ Impulse have one quite definite feature in common whereby they are raised to a higher level than that of the more ancient Mysteries. Initiation always means that a man attains to a higher kind of sight and that his soul undergoes a higher development. Before he sets out on this path, three faculties live within his soul: thinking, feeling and willing. He has these three soul-powers within him. In ordinary life in the modern world, these three soul-powers are intimately bound together. The Ego of man is interwoven with thinking feeling and willing because before he attains Initiation he has not worked with the powers of the Ego at the development of his higher members. The first step is to purify the feelings, impulses and instincts in the astral body. Out of the purified astral body there rises the “Spirit-Self” or “Manas.” Then man begins to permeate every thought with a definite element of feeling so that each thought may be said to have something ‘cold’ or ‘warm’ about it.—He is transforming his “ether-body” or “life-body.” Out of the transformed ether-body (it is a transformation of feeling), arises “Budhi” or “Life-Spirit.” And finally, he transforms his willing and therewith the physical body itself, into “Atma” or “Spirit-Man.” Thus by transforming his thinking, feeling and willing, man changes his astral body into Spirit-Self or Manas, his ether-body into Life-Spirit or Budhi and finally his physical body into Spirit-Man or Atma. This transformation is the result of the Initiates systematic work upon his soul, whereby he rises to the spiritual worlds. But something very definite happens when the path to Initiation is trodden in full earnest and not light-heartedly. In true Initiation it is as if a man's organisation were divided into three parts, and the Ego reigns as king over the three. Whereas in ordinary circumstances the spheres of thinking, feeling and willing are not clearly separated, when a man sets out on the path of higher development thoughts begin to arise in him which are not immediately tinged with feeling but are permeated with the element of sympathy or antipathy according to the free choice of the Ego. Feeling does not immediately attach itself to a thought, but the man divides, as it were, into three: he is a man of feeling, a man of thinking, a man of will, and the Ego, as king, rules over the three. At a definite stage of Initiation he becomes, in this sense, three men. He feels that by way of his astral body he experiences all those thoughts which are related to the spiritual world; through his ether-body he experiences everything that pervades the spiritual world as the element of feeling; through his physical body he experiences all the will-impulses which flow through the spiritual world. And he realises himself as king within the sacred Three. A man who is not able or ripe enough to bear this separation of his being, will not attain the fruits of Initiation. The sufferings that crowd upon him in his immature state will keep him back. A man who approaches the Holy Grail but is not worthy, will suffer as Amfortas suffered. He can only be redeemed by one who brings the forces of good.—He is freed from his sufferings by Parsifal.

And now let us return once more to what Initiation brings in its train. The seeking soul finds the spiritual world; the soul finds the Holy Grail which has now become the symbol of the spiritual world. Individual Initiates have experienced what is here described. They have gone the way of Parsifal, have become as kings looking down on the three bodies. The Initiate says to himself: ‘I am king over my purified astral body which can only be purified when I strive to emulate Christ.’ He must not hold to any outer link, to anything in the external world, but unite himself in the innermost depths of his soul with the Christ Principle. Everything that binds him with the world of sense must fall away in that supreme moment. Lohengrin is the representative of an Initiate. It is not permitted to ask his name or rank, in other words, what connects him with the world of sense. He who has neither name nor rank, is called a “homeless” man. Such a man is permeated through and through with the Christ Principle. He too looks down on the ether-body which has become Life-Spirit, as upon something that is now separate from the astral body. By this ether-body he is borne upwards to the higher worlds, where the laws of space and time do not hold sway. The symbol of this ether-body and its organs, is the Swan who bears Lohengrin over the sea in a boat (the physical body), over the material world. The physical body is felt to be an instrument.

The soul on earth who experiences a new impulse through Initiation is symbolised in the figure of Elsa von Brabant. This shows us the sense in which the Lohengrin legend—which has many other meanings as well—is a portrayal of Initiation in the Mysteries associated with the Holy Grail. Thus in the eleventh to the thirteenth century, these secrets of the Holy Grail were taught in connection with the Christ Mystery. The Knights of the Grail were the later Initiates. They were confronted in the world with an exoteric Christianity, whereas esoteric Christianity was cultivated in the Mysteries. And in the Mysteries, men sought to find that relation to Christianity whereby, through the outer Christ in the soul, the inner Christ, Who is symbolised by the Dove, was awakened to life.

The whole development of the European Mysteries is expressed in yet another cycle of legends and sagas, but it is difficult to speak of them now. We must wait for another occasion. To-day we will consider how this knowledge found its way into the outer world and made its appearance in a remarkable body of legends. Comparatively little notice has been taken of a legend which was given poetic form by Conrad Fleck in 1230. It is one of the legends of Provence and deals with the Initiation of the Knights of the Grail or the Templars. It speaks of an ancient pair, “Flor” and “Blancheflor.” In modern parlance: the flower with red petals (the rose) and the flower with white petals (the lily). In earlier times it was known that a great many mysteries were contained in this legend, of which it is only possible to-day to speak briefly. It was said: Flor and Blancheflor are souls incarnated in human beings who have lived on earth. According to the legend, these two were the grandparents of Charles the Great. But those who studied the legend more deeply, saw in Charles the Great the figure who, in a certain sense, united esoteric and exoteric Christianity. This is expressed in the coronation of the Emperor. But in the grandparents of Charles the Great, Flor and Blancheflor, lived the rose and the lily—typifying souls who were to preserve in its purity the esoteric Christianity which had been taught by Dionysos the Areopagite and others. The rose—Flor or Flos—symbolised the human soul who has received the impulse of the Ego, of personality, who lets the Spiritual work out of his individuality, who has brought the Ego-force down into the red blood. But the lily was the symbol of the soul who can only remain spiritual when the Ego remains outside. Thus there is a contrast between the rose and the lily. The principle of self-consciousness has entered wholly into the rose, whereas it remains outside the lily. But there was a union between the soul that is within and the soul that as the World-Spirit pervades the universe outside. Flor and Blancheflor symbolise the finding of the World-Soul, the World-Ego, by the human soul or the human Ego. The event recorded in the legend of the Holy Grail is also described in the legend of Flor and Blancheflor. Flor and Blancheflor must not be thought of as outer figures—the lily symbolises the soul which finds its higher Egohood. The union of the lily-soul with the rose-soul was taken to express that principle in man which can link him with the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore it was said: Over against the forces of European Initiation inaugurated by Charles the Great which were to fuse exoteric and esoteric Christianity, pure esoteric Christianity must be kept alive and continued. But among the Initiates it was said: The same soul who lived in Flos or Flor and of whom the legend tells, was reincarnated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the founder of Rosicrucianism, a Mystery-School having as its aim the cultivation of an understanding of the Christ Mystery in a way suited to the new era. Thus esoteric Christianity found refuge in Rosicrucianism. Since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Rosicrucian Schools have trained the Initiates who are the successors of the ancient European Mysteries and of the School of the Holy Grail. Many things have trickled through into outer life in regard to the Rosicrucian Mysteries, but much that is told is a caricature of the truth. Profound achievements of spiritual life were influenced by the mysterious threads of Rosicrucianism which found their way into civilisation.—So, for instance, there is a connection between Bacon of Verulam's New Atlantis and Rosicrucianism. This work is more than a Utopia. Bacon there tries to lead those who would revive the dim clairvoyant faculties of the old Atlanteans, to higher levels. But associated with the outer Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians is all the charlatanism, quackery and caricature that is unavoidable in our age since the discovery in the art of printing. Since printing was discovered it has been no longer possible, as it was in olden times, to let secrets remain secret. Everything comes out, caricatured and distorted! And the same terrible thing happens to the teachings given in the Anthroposophical Movement. If the Anthroposophical Movement were what it is said to be in entirely ignorant circles, it would be something to be avoided at all costs. But in reality, anthroposophical teachings are nourished to a greater extent than has yet ever been the case, from the wellsprings of the Mysteries. Goethe's greatest poetic achievements were nourished from Rosicrucian sources. It is not without significance that in his poem Die Geheimnisse he speaks of a man who was led to a house and found on its door the sign of the Rose Cross. “Who brought the roses to the Cross?”—Who were these Initiates of the European Mysteries who linked the mysteries of the rose to the mystery of the Cross? How deeply Goethe had penetrated these things is apparent, for instance when he speaks of the twelve gathered around the table—twelve as in the ancient Trottic Mysteries. Oh! Goethe knew all these things. But those who study him to-day, study only the Goethe they are capable of understanding. But although he was only able to speak a mysterious language, the time has now come to speak openly about Initiation. More and more it will become apparent that Spiritual Science does not produce dreamers who are remote from the affairs of the world, but men who are practical and active in life. It brings a new hope and confidence. To modern thinking we shall more and more be able to apply the words spoken by Faust of Wagner, the representative of materialistic thinking: “How ardently be grubs for treasures, and is happy when he finds rain-worms!” Truly, materialism is happy when it finds rain-worms and can prove that in a certain sense they are necessary to the re-organisation of everything that lives and moves upon the earth. But the spirit that flows from the Mysteries makes human thinking so supple and flexible that it can really cope with life. It could not be otherwise, for the meaning of world-evolution itself is contained in the mystery-teachings of Spiritual Science.

The world and “all that therein is” is born out of the spirit; man is born and called to rise to the spirit. Spiritual Science shows us more and more that the spirit lies exhausted in matter, that physical substance is the magic robe of the Spiritual. It is for man living in the material world, to charm the spirit out of this magic robe. The Spiritual finds its resurrection in man, in the human soul that rises above itself.—To enable the soul to find this path is the task of Spiritual Science. Thus does spirit find spirit. And man will realise and understand the spirit more and more as he fashions himself in its image.

Whoever follows the history of human development, not only in the usual documents and traditions, but goes rather deeper into things which though at first appearing only symptomatic of that development, really point the way to the inner and therefore true forces of evolution, will find renewed significance in a memorable scene at the end of the eighteenth century. An address based on the highest contemporary Science was given to the Natural Science Society at Jena by a very important Botanist of the day called Batsch. Two men, one some ten years older than the other, listened to this address, and it happened that they left the place together and fell into conversation. The younger said to the elder: ‘When one considers such an address, it shows once again how the scientific method of observation picks things to pieces, sets one by the side of another, and scarcely takes into consideration the homogeneous spiritual bond existing in all the different units.’ In other words it seemed wrong to the younger man that plant should be put side by side with plant without any reference to a higher something, which must also exist in the world, uniting the various plants.

The elder man replied: ‘It might perhaps be possible to find a method of studying nature, which goes to work differently, and which in spite of being a study which must lead to knowledge, has, as its aim, the unifying element, namely that which is absent in external observation by the various senses.’ The man took a pencil and a piece of paper from his pocket and at once drew a remarkable shape, a shape that resembled a plant, but no existing plant, to be seen or perceived by the outward physical senses, a shape which, as it were, exists nowhere and of which he said that it existed indeed in no individual plant, but was the ‘plant-hood,’ the proto-plant type which existed in all plants and represented the unifying element. The younger man looked at it and said: ‘Yes, but what you have drawn there is not an experience, not observation, that is an idea’—having in mind that only the human spirit could form such ideas, and that such an idea had no significance for external, so-called objective nature.

The elder man was unable to understand this objection at all, for he replied: ‘If that is an idea, then I see my ideas with my eyes!’ He meant that just as an individual plant is visible to the external sense of sight, and is an experience, so his proto-plant, although invisible by means of an external sense, was objective, existent in the outer world, living in all plants, the archetype in all individual plants. You know that the younger of these two men was Schiller, the elder Goethe.

This conversation is a symptomatic, significant indication of modern spiritual science.

What really prompted that reply of Goethe's to Schiller? There spoke in him the consciousness that one does not only grasp an external objective truth with that representation given by the external sense, and furnished by a limited understanding from external sense-perceptions, but that the human being, when he sets in motion higher spiritual forces, which are not applied to separate sense-observations, arrives at truth and reality just as one does by means of external sense perceptions.

We may well say that Schiller, who at that moment was incapable of realizing what lay behind, when he believed that Goethe had made his drawing in terms of subjectivity, has left us the finest testimony of man's capacity to scale the heights as revealed to him by Goethe. From that moment we see Schiller's ever increasing comprehension of Goethe's ideas. A letter of his provides a psychological document of the first importance, where he says: ‘For a long time, although from a distance, I have watched the progress of your spirit with ever renewed admiration, and noticed the path you have set yourself. You seek the necessity of nature, but on the most difficult road, from which indeed any weaker power would draw back. You take all nature as one in order to obtain light on each separate part, and you seek the explanation of the individual in the “all” of its phenomena. You ascend from the simple organism, step by step to the more complex, in order finally to erect genetically from the materials of all nature's structure the most complex of all, the human being. You seek to penetrate into his hidden technique, by re-creating him in the manner of nature. A great and truly heroic idea which sufficiently shows to what extent your spirit holds together the rich totality of its conceptions in a beautiful unity.’

Thus we may regard as a testimony to the objectivity of Goethe's idea-world that which in his consciousness brought forth such a reply, and which Schiller later confirmed in this letter.

It is remarkable that Heinroth, a psychologist who lived in the twenties of the nineteenth century and is to-day forgotten, uttered a very significant phrase about Goethe in his Anthropology, which is really a psychology—one of those phrases which are significant through their application, and throw great light on what they are meant to illumine. He used the phrase, speaking of Goethe's whole method of approach, ‘objective thinking’ and he enlarged upon the phrase by saying: Goethe's thinking is a quite peculiar thinking, really inseparable from the objectivity of things, resting quietly in objects, in which it is raised to ideas.

Now whoever is able to look into Goethe's whole spiritual organism—as we shall to-day and the day after tomorrow, when we shall try to penetrate still deeper into this question, when we shall consider more inwardly what we are to have presented to us to-day outwardly—will see that in this thought he adheres to facts without stopping merely at the surface of things and the experience of the senses, and finds within these facts the spiritual, the world of ideas. We see that for this reason Goethe's thought has become so important for a large part of our modern human development. We may say that there is something exceedingly remarkable in this effect of Goethe's spirit on the most diverse types of people, on the most varied views even on the different successive epochs.

Let us consider for a moment the point at issue and we shall see what unique results Goethe's spiritual standard has in fact produced. If we take three philosophers of German spiritual life, who are quite different from each other in their points of view, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer, we find from a study of their mutual relationships and of their relationships to Goethe something quite remarkable about Goethe's influence on history. Fichte reveals himself as a thinker, wandering on remote heights, especially when he had finished his Foundation of Science at Jena in 1792. It is difficult to rise to an understanding of Fichte's peculiarity, it is difficult to penetrate to him, although everyone who has succeeded must admit that he has gained food for spiritual discipline from him to an extraordinary degree. But it is not for every man to ascend to such spheres of the purest concept. Fichte, who wandered on these heights of abstraction, particularly at that moment, sent his work to Goethe with the following significant words: ‘I see and have always seen in you the purest representative at the present stage of humanity of the spirituality of feeling. To your feeling therefore, philosophy rightly turns. The spirituality of your feeling is the normal standard for philosophy.’ Thus Fichte to Goethe.

Let us look now at another philosopher, at Schopenhauer, and let us see first how Schopenhauer stood to Fichte. They were, in truth, a hostile pair—at least Schopenhauer was very hostile to Fichte. Schopenhauer never wearied of abusing Fichte. To him he is a windbag, thinking and writing empty ideas. He repeatedly emphasizes how unreal and meaningless Fichte's philosophy is. In fact there could not be a greater contrast than these two. And Schopenhauer indeed went to Goethe to be taught. For a time he experimented together with Goethe in order to learn the fundamental physical concepts, and a good deal in his first work, and even in his chief work is derived from the impression Goethe made on him. If you know Schopenhauer, you know also with what homage he spoke of Goethe. Schopenhauer and Fichte—two great contrasts unite in Goethe, and he seems like the unifying force of each.

Let us take finally Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegel is also difficult to reach with the understanding. He tries to create a fact-world of concepts in a comprehensive, systematic frame, and demands that man should lift himself to a stage where he grasps concept as fact, where he is capable of experiencing it directly. Schopenhauer finds in this something entirely worthless, merely a playing with abstract words. If we wish to know Hegel's relation to Goethe, we need mention only one instance and we shall see how they stand. There is a beautiful letter in which Hegel writes: ‘Goethe seeks behind the sense-revelations the actual spiritual phenomena, which he calls the proto-phenomena, as he calls the proto-plant the proto-phenomenon of the vegetable world. While he speaks from the heights of the spiritual world as philosopher and shows us what we can think and comprehend, he works himself on the other hand up to the point where he comes into touch with spirit-created thoughts. Thus Goethe's proto-phenomenon is united with what the pure, thinking philosophy derives from above.’

Here also we see a harmony between Hegel and Goethe, as between Goethe and Schopenhauer. In Goethe they find themselves united. And when we proceed from these older times to our own, what do we find?

In Goethe's lifetime research in Natural Science was different. More than then the only right method of strict Science to-day is considered to be a research relying on external sense-observations and the formal working out by the mind of what is limited by the obscuration of the results thus obtained. But a Haeckel, as he shows in every book, is determined to stand on the firm ground of Goethean world-conception, and so we see a more materialistically coloured philosophy emphasizing the importance of relying on Goetheanistic world-conception. You can find books to-day written on a basis for which the spirit is an absolute reality in the highest sense of the word, and in them you can trace the debt to Goethe. Spiritualistic and materialistic students can fight from opposite camps, but both believe they may look up to Goethe in the same way. He thus provides something which bridges the gulf between opponents.

These facts testify to the force of Goethe's world-conception, a force which has such an influence on others that though they do not understand each other, they find something in Goethe which they have themselves. Perhaps some of you know how widely apart Virchow and Haeckel stood from each other. But Virchow also, who saw eye to eye with Haeckel in so few things, has in an important address on Goethe equally found support in him. So in Goethe we see a power, which, in face of all the contradictions and struggles of world-conceptions, is able to show, that things are not what these representatives of science consider, and for which they so stubbornly fight.

It is just when you consider the relation of these important people to Goethe, that you realize that it is the same towards what is called knowledge as it is with different painters, sitting round a mountain, and painting it from different points of view. The resultant pictures must also of course be different, though it is the same mountain they paint. You will get a comprehensive idea of the mountain only by comparing the various representations with each other and compounding them into a whole. If you put yourself in the same position with regard to knowledge, you will see that Goethe does not select a single point of view, but rather scales the mountain and shows that it is possible to take up a position on the summit and there to find a comprehensive panorama, in which all views are revealed in their deeper consistency or interconnection.

It is this which makes Goethe's spirit so eminently modern, and if in plunging deep into Goethe we get the feeling that he appears to us a modern, it will be a sufficient justification if in our frequent studies here of spiritual science and a world-conception based on the spiritual, we consider what he did and wanted to do as a kind of invitation to penetrate deeper into his nature. If he is a stimulating spirit in so many respects, why should he not also be a stimulant for that spiritual tendency (Spiritual Stream) one of whose highest and most beautiful aims is a tolerant investigation into the different standpoints of world-conceptions, and which makes it a principle not to stand still on one fixed point, but, in order to find truth, to climb ever higher and higher by means of methods applied to inner development and growth of inner organs of perception, because thus alone can one see the deeper spiritual foundations? We shall now consider how far Goethe coincides with the deepest feelings of modern mankind on a narrowly limited subject. As an example we shall choose a feeling many of you know, which can be described by saying that there are many people to-day who strive to throw overboard old traditions, and create feelings, thoughts and ideas which lead direct to the present time. You will see at once what I mean when I remind you of a picture which many to-day cherish. You can take what attitude you like to the picture, but it is an expression of the contemporary age. I refer to the picture: ‘Komm, Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast’—‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ The picture lives not only in its creator, but also in those who would enjoy it; they feel the longing to see the figure of Jesus in their immediate presence, as is represented near the table. One might say that the picture has not only value for this age, but for all ages, that it is there eternally and cannot pass away and that every age has the right to put this figure into its own epoch. These few words alone will indicate the feeling which many have towards this picture.

Now one might believe that in these things Goethe belonged still to the ancients—a conclusion one would draw from his preference for the old art, with its old, sound, artistic traditions, and his preference for the Greeks; one might believe Goethe had no understanding of the emotion expressed in this picture—‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ In order to get a glance into Goethe's soul let us refer to a book by Bossi on Leonardo da Vinci's ‘Last Supper.’ Goethe wrote a criticism of this book, and in it there are significant words. Of this picture which is in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie cloister at Milan and in spite of recent restoration looks as if it would soon disappear, Goethe relates how he stood in front of it at a time when it still had a certain freshness. He describes the impression which he once got from this picture in his youth: ‘Opposite the entrance in the narrower wall, in the body of the hall stood the Prior's table, on each side the monks' tables, all raised from the floor on a dais, and now when you had come in and turned round, you saw the fourth table painted on the fourth wall, above the fairly low doors; and at it Christ and His Disciples, just as if they belonged to the company.’—He, summoned by the Dominicans in their sense and in their place, with the emotional thought ‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ The whole, says Goethe, made a unified picture. And not to leave any doubt as to his meaning he adds: ‘It must have been a significant sight at meal-times, when the tables of the Prior and of Christ looked across at each other like two opposite pictures and the monks found themselves in between. And therefore the painter in his wisdom had to take the monks' tables as his model. And it is certain the table-cloth with its creases, its striped pattern and its open corners, was taken from the linen-room of the Cloister, and the dishes, plates, mugs and other utensils were copied from those the monks used. There was thus no question of approximation to an uncertain, old-fashioned costume. It would have been extremely clumsy to have made the Holy Company lie on cushions. No, it had to resemble the present; Christ was to take his Evening Meal with the Dominicans of Milan.’

And now let us ask whether Goethe had this understanding which we must call a modern understanding. He had it in that comprehensive manner which is another proof of how universal his powers are as against the sometimes one-sided powers which mutually exclude and fight each other.

We must put ourselves into Goethe's soul in this way and then we shall understand why Goethe stands so close to us and why we look up to him whenever the current attitude to deeper spiritual questions is under discussion. It was his deep consciousness that it is possible for man to awake in himself spiritual organs in order to ascend to higher conceptions, and thereby to gain something which not merely lives in the human spirit, but at the same time lies deeper.

Were it possible to enter upon Goethe's scientific studies, as you will find them discussed in detail in my book, Goethe's World-Conception, we should be able to show the working of his whole method. But to-day we want to approach him from another side. Goethe has expressed things here and there which indicate the deep foundation of his philosophy. We shall have to speak of this in the last two addresses of this winter's cycle on ‘Faust.’ [See note on publications at end of book. {There is none! - e.Ed}] He once said to Eckermann concerning Faust, that he had drawn him in such a way that the reader who is content only with externals has some satisfaction in the colourful scenes, but that he can also find behind the words the secrets which lie there. Here Goethe is pointing out in Part II that we have to differentiate between the external and the inner essential secret meaning. In accordance with ancient custom we describe the external as the exoteric and the other as the esoteric.

Now we shall approach Goethe by considering to-day in an external, exoteric way a work in which he expressed his whole ‘methodical thinking and willing;’ and the day after tomorrow we shall consider it esoterically.

It is a comparatively unknown little work of Goethe's to which we must go if we want to look into his deepest secrets of knowledge—we merely describe them as such. It is the little piece at the end of the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants,’ under the title, ‘Legends,’ from which the reader, if he strives to get Goethe's world-conception, will get the feeling that Goethe wishes to say more in it than appears from the scenes. For the thoughtful student this ‘Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’ will provide riddle after riddle.

And now allow me to explain the chief features of this story, for I cannot talk about it unless we recall the important points, if we are to look more deeply into Goethe's philosophy. We shall therefore have to give a moment to the content of this little work; and after that we shall understand each other better in what we shall have to say. I have often had it said to me when I have lectured on this story, ‘I never knew there was a “legend” in Goethe's works;’ and so I repeat that it is contained in every edition of Goethe and constitutes the ending of the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants.’

Now to the scenes. A Ferryman lives by a River and to him come remarkable forms—Will-o'-the-Wisps. They want to be put across to the other side by the Ferryman in his boat. The Ferryman agrees to take them across. On the way they behave in a curious manner; they are restless and fidgety, so that he is afraid they will upset the boat. But they arrive safely and then they propose to pay him in an odd way. They shake themselves and golden pieces fall from them, and they are the reward for his trouble in taking them over. The Ferryman is not enthusiastic about the golden pieces and says: ‘It is a good thing that nothing has fallen into the river, for it would have surged up wildly. I cannot take this payment; I can be paid only with the fruits of nature.’ And he demands three Onions, three Artichokes and three Cabbages. They had to pay with fruits of the earth. We shall soon see what deep significance every point and every fact has.

The Ferryman continues: ‘Now you give me the extra trouble of taking down the river the golden pieces you've thrown about and I must bury them.’ Wherefore he takes them actually a short way downstream and buries them in the crevices of the earth. When they have been thus buried, another remarkable being comes along to them—the Green Snake, who crawls in and on and about the earth and through its crevices. Suddenly she sees the pieces of gold falling down through the cracks of the earth and thinks at first they are falling from Heaven. She therefore devours them and becomes, by thus taking the golden pieces into her own body, more and more luminous. As she comes to the surface she notices that she gives off a peculiar light in a marvellous manner and gleams like emerald and precious stones.

Now the Snake and the Will-o'-the-Wisps come together, the latter still shaking themselves and throwing away what they shake out, the Snake, having acquired a taste for gold, taking up and swallowing what the others throw about. The conversation between them is significant. The Snake calls herself a relative of the Will-o'-the-Wisps in a horizontal line, the Will-o'-the-Wisps call themselves relations of the Snake in a vertical line. They ask the Snake moreover if she could not inform them how to come to the Beautiful Lily. ‘Oh,’ says the Snake, ‘the Beautiful Lily is on the other side of the River.’ ‘Well, then we've done a fine thing,’ answer the Will-o'-the-Wisps, ‘we've just had a lift across because we wanted to come to the Beautiful Lily. If we could only find a Ferryman who would ferry us back again!’ And now follow very important words. ‘You will not find the Ferryman again, and if you did, be certain that he may indeed take you across, but not back again. If you want to get to the other side of the River, there are only two ways. Either you try at noon, when the sun is at its highest, to find a bridge over my own body, in order to cross’—The Will-o'-the-Wisps say, ‘We do not like journeying at midday’—‘Or you use the second way; for there is another possibility. At dusk you will find the huge Giant at a certain place. He has no strength in him, but when he stretches out his hand and its shadow falls across the river, you can cross over on the shadow. The shadow gives enough support to walk over on it. So if at midday you will not cross over me, you must find the Giant.’

The Will-o'-the-Wisps let themselves be told this, but the Snake has returned into the crevices, rejoicing in her increasing light-giving power through swallowing the gold.

And now the Snake notices something extremely odd. On descending again into the earth, she notices that where she had formerly found metals and so on, she now sees remarkable forms. Before, she had perceived them only through the sense of touch; now, being luminous, she can also see the things. She was able to feel pillars and also shapes like human beings, but till then she never really knew what there was in the underground caves. Now she enters again and her radiating light serves to illuminate everything.

On entering this large cavern under the earth, the Snake can at once perceive that there are four kingly figures standing in the four corners: a Golden King, a Silver King, a Brazen King, and in the fourth corner a Mixed King, put together in the gayest manner of all kinds of other metals.

The moment the Snake enters the cavern and lights up the figures, the Golden King puts the very significant question: ‘Whence comest thou?’

‘From the crevices, where the gold lives,’ answers the Snake.

‘What is more splendid than gold?’ asks the Golden King.

‘Light,’ is the Snake's reply.

The King asks further: ‘What is more comforting than Light?’

‘Speech.’

No one will doubt that these words are not meant to give just pictures, but that they also have a significant content.

As the Snake enters the cavern a crack opens in the Temple where the four Kings live and there enters the Old Man with the Lamp. He is asked why he comes at that moment, whereupon he says the remarkable words: ‘Do you not know that my lamp may illumine only what is already illumined? that I may not lighten the Darkness?’ After the Snake has lit up the objects in the room he may also come in with his wonderworking Lamp.

Now a conversation takes place between the Kings and the Old Man with the Lamp. He is asked:

‘How many secrets do you know?’

‘Three,’ he answers.

‘Which is the most important?’ asks the Silver King.

‘The open one,’ replies the Old Man.

‘Will you open it also to us?’ asks the Brazen King.

‘As soon as I know the Fourth.’

And now come the most significant words of the whole story:

‘I know the Fourth,’ said the Snake, and whispers something into his ear; whereupon the Old Man with a great voice cries out:

‘The time is at hand!’

There are a great number of attempts to solve the riddles of this story, and many people have tried to explain in one way or another what was felt to be a riddle even in Goethe's and Schiller's time. It is characteristic that Goethe and Schiller agreed about it and pronounced it explicitly in the words: the word that solves the story is in the story itself. So the solution has to be sought in the story itself, and in the course of my address it will be found to be so, though in a remarkable way. The Snake whispers something into the Old Man's ear, and what is whispered, but not spoken, is the solution of the riddle. The Old Man then says: ‘The time is at hand!’ So what we have to find out is what the Snake whispered to the Old Man in the subterranean Temple.

The Old Man now proceeds to the dwelling-place of his Wife. Through the power of the Lamp's light the most diverse materials are metamorphosed: stones into Gold, wood into Silver, dead animals into Precious Stones, but Metals are destroyed. He finds his Wife in an almost unconscious state. When he asks what has happened, she says: ‘There were quite extraordinary people here. One might have taken them for Will-o'-the-Wisps. They behaved pretty badly.’ ‘Well,’ says the Old Man: ‘considering your age, no doubt they were decently polite.’ Then she relates how the Will-o'-the-Wisps went for the Gold and licked it, so that they could shake it out again. ‘If it had been no worse than that—but just look at the Pug-dog. He ate of the golden pieces, was changed into precious stone, and died. Now he's dead,’ the Old Woman continues: ‘Had I known this before, I should not have promised them to pay their debt to the Ferryman, namely, three Cabbages, three Onions and three Artichokes.’

‘Well,’ says the Old Man, ‘take the Pug-dog and carry him to the Beautiful Lily, who has the quality of being able to change precious stone into life by touching it.’ So she takes the three times three fruits, to pay off the debt she has undertaken to the Ferryman, and takes the Pug-dog as well.

Now we come to a very significant point in the story. As she carries the basket, it seems unusually heavy, although anything dead has no weight for her; the basket with the dead dog alone would be no heavier than if it were empty; the living things, the Cabbages, Onions and Artichokes alone weigh down the basket. On the road to the Ferryman, another singular thing happens to her. The Giant holds his arm so that its shadow falls across the River, seizes one Cabbage, one Artichoke and one Onion out of the basket and devours them, so that she has now only two of each kind left. She proposes therefore to pay off only a part of the debt to the Ferryman. But he says that it is absolutely necessary to bring the whole of it at one time.

After considerable argument the Ferryman says there is a possible way out, namely, if she goes bail for the production of the three missing fruits. She must therefore put her hand into the river, as security that she will keep her promise. This she does, but notices that her hand as far as it is immersed in the River has become black and smaller. ‘Now it only looks like it,’ said the Old Ferryman, ‘but if you do not keep your word, it might become a fact. The hand will gradually dwindle and finally disappear, but without your losing the use of it. You will be able to do everything with it, but no one will see it.’ She prefers, however, to have a visible hand, even if it is useless. If she brings the tribute at the agreed time, the Ferryman says everything will be all right.

On the way to the Beautiful Lily, she meets a handsome Youth, who, however, as he says, has lost all his former power and strength, and we learn from their conversation how this has happened. The Youth had conceived the active desire to reach the Beautiful Lily. She had become his Ideal. But her lovely eyes had such a baneful effect that they deprived him of all his strength, and still he was ever attracted to her.

At length the two come to the Beautiful Lily. Everything, indeed, that surrounds her is highly indicative, but we can now select only a few points. The Beautiful Lily is the image of most perfect Beauty, but her touch possesses the power of killing everything that lives, and restoring to life everything that has gone through life and died.

The Old Woman now presents her requests. The Youth has come to satisfy his longing for the Beautiful Lily, but we see that she also feels a longing: she feels herself cut off from all living fruitfulness; in her garden flourish flowers, but only to the point of bloom, not to that of fruit; beautiful she is, but far from all life. The Old Woman then says something significant: she repeats what the Man in the subterranean Temple had said and that gives the Lily new hope. It was indeed the last moment in which she could receive any hope, for she had lost the last living thing, which had been a sort of link between her and the living. She had had a Canary in her neighbourhood, and had taken great care not to disturb it, since that would have killed it. But a Hawk had come near, the Canary fled from it and flew up against the Lily and was killed. And so the Beautiful Lily was reduced to complete spiritual loneliness and isolation from all that human beings have.

The Old Woman now gives the Pug to the Lily. The Lily touches him and thereby restores him to life. The Youth tries to calm his longing by embracing the Lily and thereby he is killed. Life is completely annihilated in him.

The Snake next forms a Magic Circle; and the Youth and the Canary are put inside it. By this means—and the Snake points this out significantly—what is hopeless is to be quickly altered, and in fact it is so. We learn that the Old Man with the Lamp now approaches and that through him a solution of the whole situation can be actually attempted. For there is still just time when he arrives; the bodies of the Canary and the Youth have not yet begun to decay.

The Old Man leads them towards the subterranean Temple, which the Snake had already reconnoitred. He says to the Will-o'-the-Wisps: ‘You are also there to help us. When we come to the Gates of the Temple, you will have to be the ones to unlock them.’ The Snake makes a bridge over the River and the whole company proceeds over it. Then we see, when they have arrived on the other side, that through the contact with the Snake, who now decides to sacrifice herself, the Youth becomes alive again, though not yet in possession of his spirit. And because the Snake is prepared to sacrifice herself, the Youth is translated into a remarkable state. He can see, but cannot understand what he sees. The Snake divides up into numerous wonderful precious stones, which the Old Man sinks in the River and thereby a bridge is formed over it. The procession moves on under the guidance of the Old Man into the subterranean Temple. As they enter we see that questions full of meaning are exchanged between the newcomers and the Kings. For instance: ‘Whence come ye?’ ‘From the World.’ ‘Whither are ye going?’ ‘Into the World.’ ‘What do ye want with us?’ ‘You to accompany!’ (i.e. the Kings.)

Now the group, with the Temple, begins to move. They go under the River and rise again, with the whole Temple, on the other side, and as when they have risen something that looks like woodwork falls into the Temple. It is the Ferryman's Hut. It changes and becomes a small Temple inside the large one. And now takes place a scene which is important for the Youth, who, you remember was until now alive, but not spiritualized.

We have seen that the first, the Golden King, represents Wisdom; the second or Silver one, Illusion, Semblance or Beauty; the third Brazen one, Strength or the Will. We now see a symbolic act taking place. The Youth is presented with three different gifts by the three Kings; the Brazen King with the Sword, accompanied by the significant words: ‘The Sword on the left hand, the right free,’—Will-power. From the Silver King he receives the Sceptre, with the words,—‘Tend the Sheep.’ We shall see that the Youth is filled with the feeling of the soul, which expresses itself in Beauty. The Golden King sets the Crown on his head, saying: ‘Recognize, Realize the Highest.’ And the power of imaginative thought enters the Youth. At this instant he is spiritualized, he gains his spirit and may be united with the Beautiful Lily. We are then also told that everything is made young.

What is still specially significant is the part played by the Giant, who has no strength in himself, but in his shadow. He staggers clumsily over the bridge and the King is indignant about it. But it turns out that the Giant's coming has a good meaning. Like the pointer of a great Sun-dial, he is held fast in the middle of the Temple Court. We see what strength we find in the Sun-dial, in the Giant pointing to and harmonizing Time, and we see how the bridge leading to the Temple across the River is made out of the Snake's body. We see also that not only pedestrians, but carts, horsemen and herds can cross to and fro. We are shown how the Youth, on being united with the Beautiful Lily, regains the strength of which her touch had deprived him, how he may now come near to her and embrace her and how happy and blessed they both are.

Who would not say, when he studies the scenes of the fairy tale: ‘These are riddles!’ For the moment we can get only a slight idea of what there is in this legend. But if we proceed historically, if we consider that it arose in the middle of the year 1800 at the beginning of his friendship with Schiller and what took place between Goethe and Schiller, we shall understand what Goethe set out to do in this story.

To this period belongs the production of a work, the fruit of a study of Goethe's world-conception, which became deeply important for the education and cultivation of German spiritual life; Schiller's letters on ‘The Æsthetic Education of Man.’ We can only outline Schiller's intentions in these letters.

He asks himself the question how man can succeed in developing his powers higher and higher, so that he can, in a free and perfectly human manner, penetrate the secrets of the world. This work is written in letter-form to the Duke of Augustenburg, and Schiller wrote this significant sentence in it: ‘Every individual human being, one may say, carries in him according to inclination and his destiny, a pure, ideal person, to find agreement with whose unchangeable unity in all its variations is the great task of his existence.’ And then Schiller tries to examine the means whereby man has to develop himself upwards to the higher stages of human existence.

There are two things that chain man and prevent a free view of the secrets of existence. One is the control by the senses, and the other is the insufficient development of the Reason. And Schiller explains these things thus: Take a person who is unaware of the compelling, logical part of concepts, or even the concept of duty, and follows only his inclinations and instincts. He cannot freely develop the powers of his nature, he is caught in the slavery of impulses, desires and instincts; he is unfree. But he also is not free who struggles with his desires, impulses and instincts, and follows only a purely conceptual and logical necessity of reason. Such a person becomes the slave either of the necessity of nature or the necessity of reason.

By what means can a man develop his inner powers? Schiller answers that he must develop his inner, divine states, strive to cleanse and purify them and make them correspond with what we call logic. When his impulses and instincts are purified so that he does willingly what he considers his duty, when the necessity of reason is no longer felt as compelling, then a man will act reasonably from force of habit, for then reason has led him down to the senses and the senses led him up again to reason.

Consider a man looking at a work of art. He sees something of the senses: but through every sense organ there is revealed to him something spiritual, for in the physical is expressed the spiritual which the artist has put into his work. Spirit and physical senses in the contemplation of beauty—these become the intermediaries. So art, life in beauty, becomes for Schiller a great means of education, a means of aesthetic education, a freeing of nature, so that it can unfold its own powers.

How, therefore, does a man develop himself in Schiller's sense? He must guide his nature down so that it proves true in physical nature, and train the sense up, so that it prove true in rational nature. Goethe uttered wonderful words concerning these letters: ‘Their effect on me is to show what I always lived or wished to live.’

It can be proved that Goethe was stimulated to write his fairy tale by Schiller's words in his aesthetic letters. Goethe expresses the same thing in it, in his own way. He did not wish to express the riddles of the soul in abstract ideas. For him they were too rich and too important to be grasped by natural necessity and in logic. Hence the need grew up in him to personify the different powers of the soul in the figures of his story. Goethe answers Schiller's question in this story and we shall see how wonderfully his psychology is revealed in it. We see in the presentation of the Will-o'-the-Wisps how the soul is always taking in and giving out, how certain powers are personified in the Snake, which works only on the ground like human research, human reason, and experience, which remain in the horizontal plane, while the idealist climbs to the heights. The power of the religious mood is characterized in the Old Man with the Lamp, and finally we see by means of the narrative events how Goethe shows the way in which each soul-power must work.

We shall see the day after tomorrow that Goethe shows how each soul-power must work together with the others, in order to formulate a complete picture of the soul, so that it can develop itself to human perfection, embracing all things. When man tries to grasp knowledge, but is immature, he is killed, like the Youth. There is such a thing as maturing towards knowledge. In the ‘Fairy Tale’ Goethe presents the evolution of the soul in a correct and pictorial way, by creating a parallel work to Schiller's ‘Æsthetic Letters.’ Goethe was aware that there is a goal for the development of the human soul, which in ancient times was called the ‘initiation into higher secrets.’ He knew such a thing is possible and that there are societies which develop the soul in secret places, in the Temples of Initiation. He shows also that humanity in the newer age must make it more and more possible to attain this Initiation, to develop the soul, and in larger spheres. He shows in the events that take place between the separate people, the progress of initiation up to the highest stages, to the point where the soul is capable of grasping the highest secrets. This is viewed exoterically, and purely historically.

By living with Goethe, Schiller experienced what Goethe had done in one of the most important periods of his life. And if Schiller had some difficulty in understanding Goethe, we must admit that what one said in an abstract answer in the Æsthetic Letters, and what the other had to say in a much more comprehensive way, in a way which is attained only by expressing oneself in scenes and persons, is one and the same thing. The Fairy Tale is Goethe-psychology in the deepest sense. We see that Goethe has become so fruitful through this method of his aspiration, that we still gladly take him as guide to-day. He still seems to us a man of the present. We read him as a writer of our time. He is so fruitful, because he has so much that belongs to all time in his work and his whole method. Thus his influence is consistent with that truth which he himself considered the real one, and he once uttered significant words when he said: ‘That which is fruitful alone is true.’

The meaning is that man must acquire such truths that when he enters upon life, they find confirmation by proving themselves fruitful. That was his criterion of truth: ‘That which is fruitful alone is true.’

These addresses, which are meant to bring Goethe nearer, ought to show us that he tested this saying himself, and those who go deeper into him will feel this. You will feel that there is something of genuine truth in Goethe, for he is fruitful, and what is fruitful is true.