The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To continue last week's study I shall begin with a kind of hypothetical case. Where the deepest riddles of human existence are concerned the best way to avoid abstraction and to get close to reality is to give examples. My example will of course apply to every possible level of life. So let us begin with a hypothetical example.

Let us imagine we are in a school, a school of three classes, with three teachers and a headmaster. These three teachers differ tremendously in character and temperament. It is the beginning of a new school year. The headmaster discusses the coming year with his teachers. First of all it is the turn of the first teacher. The headmaster asks him what preparations he intends to make and what he thinks is the best way to proceed in the coming year. The teacher replies, “Well, during the holidays I noted down carefully all the areas where the pupils did not meet my expectations, areas that I had obviously not prepared well. And I have drawn up a new plan for next year containing all the things which I am sure were successful and got across to the children. All the work I will give them next year consists of the things that came off best last year and have proved successful.” A further question from the headmaster produced a complete schedule the teacher had made of the subject matter. He could also stipulate what work he would give the pupils to do in school and what would be set as homework in the course of the year. All his themes, both for schoolwork and homework, had been chosen from careful scanning of the previous year. The headmaster was very satisfied and said “You are doubtless a conscientious teacher, and I reckon you will achieve excellent results with your class.”

The second teacher also said, “I have gone through the whole curriculum I covered with my pupils last year and noted everything I did wrong. I have arranged the new schedule avoiding all the mistakes I made before.” And he, too, was able to show the headmaster a curriculum containing all the subjects he was going to give the pupils for schoolwork and homework in the course of the year, basing it on the experience of his last year's mistakes. The headmaster said, “The teacher I have just spoken to noted all the instances where he had achieved excellence, and tried to plan his curriculum accordingly, whereas you have endeavored to avoid mistakes. It can be done either way. I am assured that you will achieve excellent results with your class. I see with a certain satisfaction that I have teachers in my school who review their past achievements and let the wisdom of self-knowledge guide their future steps.” You see, a teacher who knows his priorities is bound to make a good impression on a headmaster.

Then it was the third teacher's turn. He said, “During the holidays I, too, have thought a lot about what happened in my class last year. I have tried to study the character of my pupils and have done a kind of review of what has taken place in the various individuals.” “Well,” said the headmaster, “you will also have seen the mistakes you made and the things you did well, and will have been able to draw up a schedule for the coming year.” “No,” replied the teacher. “I have certainly made mistakes; and some things I have done well. But I have only studied the pupils' characters and what has taken place there. I have not thought especially about whether I made any particular mistakes, or whether this or that was particularly good. I did not do that. I accepted that things had to happen the way they did. So I have just observed what I believe had to happen out of a certain necessity. The pupils had their various dispositions, and these I observed carefully. I too have a definite disposition, and the interaction of our different natures produced its own results. I cannot say more than that.”

“Well,” said the headmaster, “you seem to be a very self-satisfied person. Have you at least drawn up a schedule, and worked out the subjects you will give your pupils as schoolwork and homework during the year?” “No,” he answered, “I have not done that.” “Well, what do you intend to do with your class?” To this the teacher replied, “I will see what kinds of pupils I will have this year. And I believe I will be able to size this up better than last year, as each year I have always studied the previous year's characters during the holidays. But I cannot possibly know yet what they will be like next year. Only time will tell.” “Well, are you not intending to plan subjects for schoolwork and homework?” “Yes, but not until I have seen what my pupils' capacities are like. I will try to set the work accordingly.” “Well, really,” said the headmaster, “we would be thoroughly at sea in that case. We can hardly allow such things to happen.”

But there was nothing to be done. The headmaster had to agree to it, and the school year got under way. The headmaster inspected the school frequently. He saw the first two teachers doing exceedingly well, but with the third he always found that things were not on a good footing. There was no certainty, he said, one never really knew what would happen the following month. And it went on like this throughout the year. Then came the time for the report cards. From those of the first two teachers the headmaster was satisfied that they had been very successful. Of course, some of the pupils in their classes failed too, and others passed, but it all happened as expected. According to the report cards, the third teacher's results were no worse. Yet other people had come to the conclusion over the year that he was very lenient. While the other teachers were strict, he was so lenient that he frequently made allowances, and the headmaster was convinced that the third teacher's class had come out the worst.

Then the next year came. The holidays were over, and at the start of the school year the first two teachers spoke as before, and the third, too. Things happened similarly, with the school inspector also coming occasionally, and, of course, he noticed what the headmaster had as it were prepared him to see, namely that the first two teachers were very good, and the third only second-rate. It could not be otherwise. I hardly need mention that after a few years the two good teachers were nominated for decorations, and the headmaster received an even higher one. That is a matter of secondary importance, isn't it?

Some time later the following thing happened. The headmaster left the school and another came at the beginning of the year. He also discussed with his three teachers what their plans were, and so on, and each of the teachers answered in a similar way as before. Then the headmaster said, “There is certainly quite a difference between your methods. And I believe the first two gentlemen ought to take a little guidance from the third teacher.” “What!” said the first two gentlemen. “The previous headmaster always said that he ought to take guidance from us!” “I do not think so,” said the new head. “It seems to me that the first two should adapt to the third.” But they could not very well emulate him, for they could not see how anyone could possibly foresee what would happen in the coming year if he groped about as blindly as that teacher did. They just could not imagine it.

In the meantime the former headmaster, because of his insight into proper school administration, had himself become a school inspector, and was most astonished at the views his successor was expressing about the school he knew so well. How could such a thing happen? And he said, “The third teacher never told me anything except ‘I must first see what the pupils are like, then I can form my schedule from week to week.’ But that way you cannot look ahead at all! It is quite impossible to manage if you cannot anticipate a single thing.” To which the present headmaster replied, “Yes, but look, I have actually asked my teachers about their different ways of looking ahead. The first two gentlemen always say 'I know for certain that on February 25 next year I will present such and such items of school-work. I can say in detail what will be happening, and I know for certain that I will be talking about such and such a subject at Easter.' The third teacher says 'I do not know for certain what I will be doing at Easter, nor do I know what schoolwork I will set in February. I will set the work according to the kind of pupils I have.' And by that he meant that he can in a certain way foresee that all will be well. And,” said the new headmaster, “I actually agree with him entirely. You cannot know until afterwards whether your resolves have been entirely successful. It depends on the attitude you have to the previous year; if you study the character of last year's pupils, you acquire greater capacities to understand the character of the new pupils. I appreciate that more can be achieved this way.”

“Yes, but you still cannot know anything in advance! Everything is in the realm of uncertainty. How can you predetermine anything for the whole school year?” asked the former headmaster. “You cannot anticipate anything. But you must be able to look ahead a little bit, if you want to make proper plans.” “You can foresee that things will go well,” said the new headmaster, “if you join forces as it were with the spirit at work in the pupils, and have a certain faith in it. If you, so to speak, pledge yourself to this and depend upon it, then even if you cannot anticipate the school work you will be presenting in February, you will know that it will be the right work.” “Yes, but you cannot foresee anything with certainty, and everything remains vague,” said the school inspector, to which the new headmaster replied, “You know, I once studied the sort of thing people call spiritual science. And I still remember from this that beings on a much higher level than human beings are actually supposed to have acted in this way in much more important affairs. For at the beginning of the Bible it says 'And God made light.' And only after he made the light does it say 'And he saw that it was good.'“ To this the inspector had nothing suitable to say.

Things continued in the same way for a time. There are few headmasters like the second one I chose as a hypothetical example, aren't there? I could call him hypothetical to the second degree, for even with it being a hypothesis it is hypothetical to assume a headmaster like that. Therefore he was dismissed very soon, and another one more like the inspector was appointed. And things ran their course until one day it went so far that the completely “undecorated” teacher was driven away from the school in disgrace and another of the same style as the first two was appointed in his place. The outcome could not possibly have been any different at the time, for in all the yearbooks and personnel files it was recorded what great progress had been achieved by the first two teachers, while of the third one it was recorded that he sent out only poor students from the school for the simple reason that he made allowances; otherwise all his pupils would have failed. There was absolutely nothing that could be done about a person like this third teacher.

Many years passed. By chance a very unusual event followed. The headmaster who had been dismissed tried to go more deeply into how matters had turned out with the two teachers who had always practiced strict self-observation, for example, with the one who noted the subjects that yielded fewer successes and selected the more successful ones. The former headmaster also wanted to know what the second and the third teachers had achieved. He even followed up what their pupils had achieved under other teachers, and he discovered that with different teachers the third teacher's pupils made much less progress than those of the first two. But the former headmaster did not stop there. He went even further into the matter and traced the subsequent life of the former pupils of these teachers. He then discovered that those taught by the first two teachers, with a few exceptions naturally, had all become respectable citizens, yet they had achieved nothing outstanding. Among the pupils taught by the third teacher, however, were people of considerable importance, who accomplished things of far greater significance than the pupils of the others.

He was able to prove these things in this particular case. But it made no special impression on people, for they said, “We cannot always wait to follow up the pupils' whole subsequent lives! That is impossible, isn't it? And that is not the point, anyway.”

Now why am I telling you all this? There is an important difference between the first two teachers and the third. Throughout the holidays, the first two teachers kept focusing their attention on the way they had done their work the previous year. The third teacher did not do this, for he had the feeling that it had to happen as it did. When the headmaster, the first one, kept telling him again and again, “But you won't have any idea how to avoid mistakes next year, or how to do the right thing, if you don't study what you did well last year,” he did not answer immediately, for he did not feel like explaining this to him. But afterwards he thought to himself, “Well, even if I did know what mistakes happened in the course of the work my pupils and I did together, I will after all have different pupils this year, and our working together is not affected by the mistakes made last year. I have to work with new pupils.”

In short, the first two teachers were wholly entrenched in a dead element, while the third teacher entered into what was alive. You could also say that the first two teachers always dealt with the past, the third teacher with the immediate present. He did not brood over the past, but said, “Of necessity it had to happen as it did according to the conditions that prevailed.”

The point is that if things are judged in a superficial way according to external judgments, one can indeed go astray where actual facts are concerned. Because if you were to do things the way the first teachers did them you would be judging the present according to what is dead and gone and what ought to be allowed to remain so. The third teacher took what was still alive from the past, arriving at it by simply studying character, and made himself more perfect by doing so; in fact, he did it with this in view. For he told himself, “If I can make myself more efficient in this way, the greater capacities I thus acquire will help me achieve what I have to do in the future.”

The first two teachers were somewhat superstitious about the past and told themselves, “Past mistakes must be avoided in the future and evident good qualities must be used.” But they did this in a dead way. They had no intention of enhancing their abilities but only of making their decisions according to outer observation. They did not have the wish to be effective as a result of working in a living way on themselves; they thought the only means to gain anything for the future was observation and its results.

In accordance with spiritual science we have to say that the first teacher, who investigated so carefully the good qualities he had established in the past and wanted to incorporate them in his future work, acted in an ahrimanic way. It was an ahrimanic approach. He clung to the past, and out of personal egotism looked with complacent satisfaction at everything he had done well and prided himself on it.

The second teacher's character was governed more by luciferic forces. He brooded over his mistakes and told himself, “I must avoid these mistakes.” He did not say, “The things that happened were necessary, and had to happen like that,” but said, “I have made mistakes.” There is always something egotistic about it when we would like to have been better than we actually were, and tell ourselves we made mistakes that ought to have been avoided and that we must now avoid. We are clinging to the past, like Lucifer does, who, on a spiritual level, brings past happenings into the present. That is thinking in a luciferic way.

The third teacher was, I would say, filled with the forces of divine beings who are progressing in a normal way, whose correct divine principle is expressed right at the beginning of the Bible, where we are told that the Elohim first of all create and then they see that their creation was good. They do not look upon it egotistically as though they were superior beings for having made a good creation, but they admit that it is good in order to continue creating. They incorporate it into their evolution. They live and work in the element of life.

What is important is that we realize that we ourselves are living beings and a part of a living world. If we realize this, we will not criticize the gods, the Elohim, for instance. For anyone wishing to set his own wisdom above that of the gods might say, “If gods are supposed to be gods, could they not see that the light would be good? Those gods do not even sound like prophets to me. If I were a god, I would of course only create light if I knew beforehand what light was like, and did not have to wait till later to see that it was good.” But that is human wisdom being placed above divine wisdom.

In a certain way the third teacher also saw what would come about, but he saw it in a living way in that he surrendered himself to the spirit of becoming, the spirit of development. When he said, “By incorporating what I have gained through the study of last year's characters and not focusing on the mistakes I made of necessity, simply because I was as I was, nor applying criticism to what I encountered as my own past, I have enhanced my capacities and acquired in addition a better understanding for my new pupils.” And he realized that the first two teachers were considering their pupils merely in the light of what they had done the previous year, which they could not even estimate properly. So he could say, “I am quite certain I will give my pupils the right schoolwork in four weeks time, and I have every confidence in my prediction.”

The others were better prophets. They could actually say “I will present the schoolwork I have written down; I will give them that for sure.” But that was a foreseeing of facts, not a foreseeing of the course of the forces of movement. We must hold very firmly to this distinction. Prediction as such is not impossible. But predicting in detail what will happen when these details are interwoven with a living element that is to work out of itself is possible only when we consider the phenomena that Lucifer and Ahriman carry over from the present into the future.

We are gradually getting closer to the big problem occupying us in these lectures on freedom and necessity. However, as this particular problem affects so profoundly the whole matter of world processes and human action, we must not fail to look at all the difficulties. For instance, we must realize clearly that when we look back at events that have happened and in which we have been involved, we look at them as necessity. The moment we know all the circumstances, we consider the events as necessity. There is no doubt about the fact that we look upon what has happened as a necessity.

But at the same time we have to ask, “Can we really, as so often happens, always find the causes of events in what immediately preceded them?” In a certain way natural science has to look at what has just happened to see what will happen next. If I carry out an experiment, I have to realize that the cause of what takes place later obviously lies in what took place previously. But that does not mean at all that this principle applies to every process in the world. For we might very easily deceive ourselves about the connection between cause and effect if we were to look for it along the lines of what comes first and what comes later. I would like to explain this with a comparison.

When we penetrate external reality with our senses, we can say, “Because this thing is like this, then the other must be like that.” But if we apply this to every process, we very often arrive at the error I want to illustrate. For the sake of simplicity let us take a man driving himself in a cart, an example I have often taken. We see a horse with a cart behind it and a man sitting in it holding the reins. We look at it and quite naturally say that the horse is pulling and the man is being pulled. The man is being taken wherever the horse takes him. That is quite obvious. Therefore the horse is the cause of the man's being pulled along. The pulling being done by the horse is the cause, and the fact of the man being pulled is the effect. Fair enough! But you all know very well that that is not so; that the man sitting up there driving himself is leading the horse where he wants him to go. Although the horse is pulling him, it is taking him where he wants to go.

Such mistakes happen often when we judge purely externally, on the basis of happenings on the physical plane. Let us look once more at the hypothetical examples I gave you a few days ago, in which a party of people set out for a drive, got into the coach, but the driver was delayed, and they were five minutes behind time. Therefore they arrive beneath an overhanging boulder at the moment it falls, and it crushes them all. Now if we trace the cause on the physical plane, we can naturally say, “This happened first and then that and then the other.” And we will arrive at something. But in this case we could easily make the same mistake we make if we say the horse pulls the driver wherever it wants and overlook the fact that the driver is leading the horse. Perhaps we make this mistake because the controlling force in this case is possibly to be found in the spiritual world. If we merely trace events on the physical plane we really judge in the sense of saying the man is going where the horse takes him. However, if we penetrate to the hidden forces at work in the occurrence, we see that events were directed toward that point and that the driver's belated arrival was actually part of the whole complex of circumstances. It was all necessary, but not necessary in the way one might believe if one merely traces events on the physical plane.

Again, if you believe you can find the cause by assuming it to be what has happened immediately beforehand, the following might happen. Seen externally it looks like this. Two people meet. We now proceed in the proper scientific manner. The two have met, so we enquire where they were during the hour before they met, where they were an hour before that, and how they set out to meet one another. We can now trace over a certain length of time how one thing has always led to another, and how the two were brought together. Someone else who does not concern himself with this sort of thing hears by chance that the two people had arranged five days beforehand that they would meet, and he says, “They have met because they planned to do so.”

Here you have an opportunity to see that the cause for something is not necessarily connected with the immediately preceding event. In fact if we break off looking for the chain of causes before we come to the right link in the chain, we shall never find it, for after all we can only follow the chain of causes up to a certain point. In nature, too, we can only follow it up to a certain point, particularly in the case of phenomena involving human beings. And if we do this, and go from one event to the other, tracing what was before that and before that again, and imagine we will find the cause this way, we are obviously laying ourselves open to error, to deception.

You have to grasp this with what you have acquired from spiritual science. Suppose a person carries out some action on the physical plane. We see him doing it. If we want to limit our observations to the physical plane, we will look into his behavior prior to the action. If we go further, we will look into how he was brought up. We might also follow the modern fashion of looking at his heredity, and so on. However, let us assume that into this action on the physical plane something has entered that is only to be found in the life of that person between his previous death and rebirth. This means that we must break off the chain of causes at his birth and pass over to something that resembles the prior arrangement made by the two people in my example. For what I have just described may have been predetermined hundreds of years before in the life between the last death and the birth into the present life. What was experienced then enters into our present actions and resolves.

Thus it is inevitable that unless we include the sphere of the spirit, we cannot find the causes of human actions at all, certainly not here on the physical plane, and that a search for causes similar to the way people look for causes of events in outer nature may go very wrong.

Yet if we look more closely at the way human action is interwoven with world processes, we will arrive at a satisfactory way of looking at things, even of looking at what we call freedom, although we have to admit that necessity exists also. But what we call the search for causes is perhaps for the time being limited most of all by the fact that on the physical plane one cannot penetrate to the place where causes originate.

Now we come to something else that has to be considered. The two concepts freedom and necessity are extremely difficult to grasp and even more difficult to reconcile. It is not for nothing that philosophy for the most part fails when it comes to the problem of freedom and necessity. This is largely due to the fact that human beings have not looked fairly and squarely at the difficulties these problems entail. That is why I am trying so hard to focus in these lectures on all the possible difficulties.

When we look at human activities, the first thing we see everywhere is the thread of necessity. For it would be biased to say that every human action is a product of freedom. Let me give you another hypothetical example. Imagine someone growing up. Through the way he is growing up, it can be shown that all the circumstances have gone in the direction of making him a postman, a country postman, who has to go out into the country every morning with the mail and deliver letters. He does the same round every day. I expect you will all agree that a certain necessity can be found in this whole process. If we look at all that happened to this lad in his childhood and take into account everything that had its effect on his life, we will certainly see that all these things combined to make him a mailman. So that as soon as there was a vacant position he was pushed into it of necessity, at which point freedom certainly ceased to exist, for of course he cannot alter the addresses of the letters he gets. There is now an external necessity that dictates the doors at which he has to call. So we certainly see a great deal of necessity in what he has to do.

But now let us imagine another person, younger perhaps. I will assume him to be younger so that I can describe what I want to describe without your objecting too strongly to the way he behaves. Well then, another, younger person, not out of idleness but just because he is still so young, makes up his mind to go with the mailman every morning and accompany him on his round. He gets up in good time every morning, joins the postman and takes part in all the details of the round for a considerable while.

Now it is obvious that we cannot talk of necessity in the case of the second fellow in the same sense as we can of the first. For everything the first fellow does must happen, whereas nothing the second fellow does has to be done. He could have stayed at home any day, and exactly the same things would have happened from an objective standpoint. This is obvious, isn't it? So we could say that the first man does everything out of necessity and the second everything out of freedom. We can very well say this, and yet in one sense they are both doing the same thing. We might even imagine the following. A morning comes when the second fellow does not want to get up. He could quite well have stayed in bed, but he gets up all the same because he is now used to doing so. He does with a certain necessity what he is doing out of freedom. We see freedom and necessity virtually overlapping.

If we study the way our second self lives in us—the one I told you about in the public lecture,¹ our actual soul nature, which will pass through the gate of death—it could, after all, be compared with someone accompanying the outer human being in the physical world. An ordinary materialistic monist would think this was a dreadful thing to say. But we know that a materialistic monist takes the view that people are terrible dualists if they believe water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. For them everything must be undifferentiated. They think it is nonsense to say that the monon “water” consists of hydrogen and oxygen. But we must not let monism deceive us.

The crux of the matter is that what we are in life really consists of two parts that come together from two different directions, and these two parts can indeed be compared with the oxygen and hydrogen in water. For our external physical nature comes through the line of heredity, bringing not only physical characteristics with it but also social status. It is not just our particular form with its nose, color of hair, and so on that we get from our father and mother, but our social position is also predestined through our ancestors' positions in life. Thus not only the appearance of our physical body, the strength of our muscles and so on, but our position in society and everything pertaining to the physical plane comes through the line of heredity from one generation to the other.

Our individual being originating in the spiritual world comes from a different direction, and at first it has nothing to do with all the forces in the stream of heredity through the generations, but brings with it causes that may have been laid down in us centuries before, and unites them on a spiritual level with the causes residing in the stream of heredity. Two beings come together. And in fact we can only judge the matter rightly if we regard this second being coming from the spiritual world and uniting with the physical being as a kind of companion to the first one. That is why I chose the example of the companion who joins us in everything. Our soul being in a certain sense joins us in the external events in a similar way.

The other person accompanying the postman did it all voluntarily. This cannot be denied. We could certainly look for causes, but compared with the necessity that binds the first postman the causes for the second man's actions lie in the realm of freedom. He did it all voluntarily. But look closely and you will see that one thing follows with necessity from this freedom. You will not deny that if the second person had accompanied the first person long enough, he would doubtlessly have become a good mailman. He would have easily been able to do what the man he accompanied did. He would even have been able to do it better, because he would avoid certain mistakes. But if the first fellow had not made these mistakes, the second man would not have become aware of them. We cannot possibly imagine that it would be of any use if the second fellow were to think about the first one's mistakes. If we think in a living way, we will consider this to be an utterly futile occupation. By specifically not thinking about the mistakes but joining in the work in a living way and just observing the proceedings as a whole, he will acquire them through life and will as a matter of course not make these mistakes.

This is just how it is with the being that accompanies us within. If this being can rise to the perception that what we have done is necessary, that we have accompanied it and will furthermore take our soul nature into the future in so far as it has learnt something, then we are looking at things the right way. But it must have learnt those things in a really living way. Even within this one incarnation, we can really confirm this. We can compare three people. The first person plunges straight into action. At a certain point in his life, he feels the urge to acquire self-knowledge. So he looks at the things he has always done well. He revels in what he has done well, and thus he decides to go on doing what he has always done well. In a certain sense, he is bound to do well, isn't he?

A second person is inclined to be more of a hypochondriac, and he looks more at his failings. If he can get over his hypochondria and his failings at all, he will get to the point of avoiding them. But he will not attain what a third could attain who says to himself, “What has happened was necessary, but at the same time, it is a basis for learning, learning through observation, not useless criticism.” He will set to work in a living way, not perpetuating what has already happened and simply carrying the past into the future, but will strengthen and steel the companion part of himself and carry it livingly into the future. He will not merely repeat what he did well and avoid what he did badly, but by taking both the good and the bad into himself and simply letting it rest there, he will be strengthening and steeling it.

This is the very best way of fortifying the soul: to leave alone what has happened and carry it over livingly into the future. Otherwise we keep going back in a luciferic-ahrimanic way over past happenings. We can progress in our development only if we handle necessity properly. Why? Is there a right way of handling things in this area? In conclusion, I want to give you something like an illustration of this too, about which I want you to think a little between now and next Tuesday. Then, taking this illustration as our starting point, we shall be able to get a little further with our problem.

Suppose you want to see an external object. You can see it, though you cannot possibly do so if you place a mirror between the object and yourself. In that case you see your own eyes. If you want to see the object, you must renounce seeing your own eyes, and if you want to see your own eyes, you must renounce the sight of the object. Now, by a remarkable interworking of beings in the world, it is true with regard to human action and human knowledge that all our knowledge comes to us in a certain sense by way of a mirror. Knowing always means that we actually know in a certain sense by way of reflection.

So if we wish to look at our past actions, we actually always look at them by putting what is in fact a mirror between the actions and ourselves. But when we want to act, if we want to have a direct connection between ourselves and our action, between ourselves and the world, we must not put up the mirror. We must look away from what mirrors ourselves. This is how it is with regard to our past actions. The moment we look at them, we place a mirror in front of them, and then we can certainly have knowledge of them. We can leave the mirror there and know them in every terrible detail. There will certainly be cases where this will be a very good thing. But if we are not capable of taking the mirror away again, then none of our knowledge will be any good to us. The moment we take the mirror away we no longer see ourselves and our past actions, but it is only then that they can enter into us and become one with us.

This is how we should proceed with self-observation. We must realize that as long as we look back, this review can only be the inducement for us to take what we have seen into us livingly. But we must not keep on looking at it, otherwise the mirror will always be there. Self-observation is very similar to looking at ourselves in a mirror. We can make progress in life only if we take what we learn through self-observation into our will as well.

Please take this illustration to heart, the illustration of seeing one's own eyes only if one renounces seeing something else, and of the fact that if one wants to see something else, one must renounce seeing one's own eyes. Take this illustration to heart. Then, taking this illustration as a basis, let us talk next Tuesday about right and wrong self-observation, and get nearer and nearer to the solution of our problems. In this most difficult of human problems, the problem of freedom and necessity and the interrelationship of human action and world events, it is certainly necessary that we face all the difficulties. And those who believe they can solve this problem before they have dealt with all the difficulties in fact are mistaken.

• 1. See lectures of December 3 and December 10, 1915, in Berlin in Aus dem mitteleuropäischen Geistesleben (Of Central European Cultural and Spiritual Life), GA/Bn 65. Not yet translated.

We are far too accustomed to dealing with big problems like necessity and freedom in the simplest possible concepts and trying, as it were, in the twinkling of an eye to cover as many aspects as we can. We usually do not consider that problems of this kind require that we realize how complicated many of the interrelationships are in the world, and that what takes place in one area must be looked at in an entirely different light, if we want to understand it, than something quite similar in another area of the world.

I would like first of all to remind you of something I mentioned here a short time ago in a different connection. When we see such significant world events as those of the present, we are very much inclined to look hastily for the most obvious causes and to expect to find the consequences in what will happen immediately afterward. With this kind of observation we do the facts a thorough injustice. When I mentioned this before, I drew your attention to the fact that at the beginning of the Middle Ages the Roman world and what is now Central Europe were in opposition to one another. From a historical point of view we can say lightly, “Well, we try to discover the particular political motives of ancient Rome that made those Romans feel compelled to carry out their campaigns against the countries to their north, against what is now Central Europe. And we can look for the consequences in subsequent developments.”

Yet if we look at things this way we do not by any means exhaust all the points that should be considered. For just imagine, if something different had happened in the way the tribes moved across Europe from east to west, or something had happened differently in the clash between the might of Rome and the Teutonic tribes, the whole subsequent development of Central Europe right up to modern times would have had a different appearance. All the various events we have seen taking place in the course of the centuries up to our time would have been different if, at that time, the world of the ancient Roman people, who owing to their particular quality and their position in world history could not fully take up Christianity, had not fused with the world of historically young peoples who had taken up Christianity with youthful energy.

Out of the way this encounter came about between a culturally overly mature people, such as the Romans were, and a historically young people, such as the Teutonic people were in those days, all the later events have developed right up to Goethe's Faust and all that nineteenth century culture has produced. Could things have happened the way they did if that encounter had not occurred? Here, we are looking at a stream permeated with a strict inner necessity moving through world events and spreading out over immense regions. How could anyone at that time possibly have even wanted to arrange his actions in keeping with what has happened on the physical plane through the centuries from then until now?

What is taking place today is in turn the starting point of universal configurations that will of course be connected with current happenings; yet, as far as events on the physical plane are concerned, these configurations will on the face of it look very dissimilar to what takes place compressed into a short time span. I only want to mention this so that you become aware that there are deep reasons behind what I already mentioned in connection with these studies, namely, that we do not get far by brooding and speculating about how things are connected in the world. Imagine a Roman or a Teuton of the third or fourth century speculating on the possible consequences of the battles taking place in that time, and how far he would have got. Not very far!

It is essential that we become aware that the deciding factors concerning things that have to happen and our recognition that they really ought to happen are not our speculations about their possible results or immediate consequences but other things. It is essential that we become aware that into the stream of events taking place on the physical plane there actually enter forces we sense as coming from the spiritual world, impulses about the particular effects of which we don't need to speculate in regard to what ought to happen on the physical plane. We must be in no doubt that looking at human action and world history shows clearly how necessary it is that we should extend our view beyond what lies on the physical plane. And after having prepared the way for these essentials, let us return to considering the human being as such.

In the last lecture I showed how impossible it is to acquire a right relationship to our past actions if we merely continue mulling them over. On the contrary, we must realize that what is past, including our own actions, belongs to the realm of necessity, and we must become familiar with the thought that what happened had to happen. That is to say, we acquire a right relationship to our actions if we can look objectively at our past achievements, looking at a successful or unsuccessful deed of ours with equal objectivity.

Now you are bound to have serious objections to what I have just said, for such objections do exist. Consider for a moment what I have just said, that when we have done something, it is over; that we establish a proper attitude to it by facing it objectively and not wishing we had acted differently. The serious objection is this: What about the whole domain that should play a great part in human life, the domain of repentance for a deed we have done? Obviously people are quite right in saying that repentance is necessary and has to take place. If we could manage to remove from the human soul the feeling of regret, we would be removing a moral impulse of the highest order. But are we not actually doing away with it when we simply look at all that has happened completely objectively?

Here indeed is a new difficulty, one that can be the starting point for endless misunderstandings. We will have to go to the heart of the question of freedom if we want to clear away this difficulty. You know, the great Spinoza said that when we look at the world, we can really only speak of necessity.¹ Freedom is fundamentally a kind of illusion. For if a ball is hit by another one, it has to go the way the second one goes. “If it had consciousness it would believe”—Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—“that it was going its way by choice. And it is the same with the human being,” says Spinoza.¹ “Even though he is in the clutches of necessity, just because he is conscious of what he does, he thinks he is free.”

But Spinoza is utterly and totally wrong. The matter is quite different. If we really flew off somewhere like the ball that follows only the necessity of propulsion, we would lose consciousness regarding everything to do with our flying and our acting out of necessity. We would be bound to be unconscious of it. Consciousness would be eliminated. And that is what happens. Just think of the speed with which you are moving through space according to the science of astronomy! You most certainly do not do that consciously. There, consciousness is cut out. You would not be capable of being conscious, for you would not be able to hurtle through space as the science of astronomy shows you do. Consciousness of everything a person does out of necessity has to be eliminated, and in such an obvious case as flying through space we can readily see that processes subject to necessity eliminate our consciousness.

However, we are not always so obviously conscious of things, but more or less unconscious of them. In real life it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other. Where one thing borders on another we cannot understand them as easily as in our case above. On the contrary, we could say, “In all matters where we are absolutely conscious, our actions cannot be other than free. If a ball that I struck really had consciousness, it would only fly in a certain direction if it received into its consciousness the impulse I gave it and directed its own course accordingly. The ball would first of all have to become unconscious in order merely to follow the momentum.”

If you think this over, you will make a distinction that we unfortunately do not make in ordinary life with regard to actions. The fact that we do not make this distinction has not only a theoretical significance but also a very practical one. We do not in fact distinguish between situations where we have been unsuccessful and cases that are immoral and bad. This distinction is an extraordinarily important one. It is absolutely true that we arrive at a correct estimate of an action that has not succeeded and has not turned out as we intended only if we can look at it objectively as though it had been absolutely necessary. For as soon as it is over it is in the realm of absolute necessity. If something does not work out and we feel uncomfortable later on because it has not worked out, it is absolutely true that our uneasiness arises from egotism. One would have liked to have been a better person, a more capable person. That is egotism expressing itself. And unless this egotism is completely rooted out, we cannot see the further development of our soul in as significant a light as we should.

But not every deed we have done is an unsuccessful one; there can also be a bad deed, a morally bad deed. Let us look at morally bad deeds, for instance, the following one, to choose a really striking example. Suppose someone has nothing to eat, or would like something for some other reason than hunger, and he steals. Stealing is a bad deed, isn't it? Does what we have said keep a person who has stolen something from feeling remorse for his deed? No, it does not! And why not? For the very simple reason that he did not seriously want to steal, but only wanted to possess what he stole. He could readily have cut out the stealing if you had given him what he wanted, or if he had been able to acquire it in some other way than by stealing.

This is a striking case, but in a certain way it applies to all forms of bad deeds. The bad deed as such is never really intended, and language has a subtle feeling for this. When an evil deed has been done, we say, “conscience stirs.” Why does conscience stir? Because the bad deed only now becomes a matter of knowledge. It comes up into consciousness. When the deed happened, the awareness was taken up by the motive on account of which the bad deed was done. A bad deed is not willed. And repenting means that the perpetrator becomes aware that he allowed his consciousness to be dulled at the time the bad deed was done. Whenever anyone does a bad deed, it is always a matter of his consciousness of the deed being dulled, and of his having to acquire an awareness of cases like the one in which his consciousness was dimmed. The whole point of punishment is to awaken forces in the soul that will enable consciousness to extend to the kind of situations that previously produced an elimination of consciousness.

Among the dissertations done at universities by philosophers who are also occupied with legal problems there is usually one on “the right to administer punishment.” Now a great many theories have been drawn up concerning reasons for giving punishment. The one and only possible reason can be found only when we realize that punishment is given for the sake of exerting the soul forces so that consciousness will extend into spheres it did not previously reach. This is also the task of repentance. Its purpose is precisely to let us observe the deed in such a way that the force of the repentance raises the action into consciousness. Then the consciousness will see the whole picture and will not be dulled the next time. You see what is involved. We must learn to discriminate properly between a fully conscious deed and one where the consciousness is dimmed.

On the other hand, if you have an action that does not fit the category of good or bad but was only unfortunate, an action in which something we had intended to do was not successful, there the point is that we ourselves can obscure our view of it if we judge it by bringing in the thought, the feeling, that it would perhaps have turned out differently if we had done this or that better, or if we ourselves had been different. Here, it is a matter of bearing in mind that if the eye is to see an object, it cannot see itself. It must hold up a mirror, for the moment the eye holds up a mirror to see itself, it cannot see the object. The moment a person broods about how differently he should have acted, the deed cannot act upon him with the kind of power that will further his soul development. For as soon as you set egotism between yourself and your deed, as implied in the fact that you would really like to have done the deed differently, you are doing exactly the same as when you hold a mirror in front of your eye so that it cannot see the object.

We can also put it another way. You know there are so-called astigmatic eyes, eyes in which the cornea are curved in different degrees in the perpendicular and the horizontal direction. Eyes like that have a peculiar kind of inaccurate vision. Such persons see specters merely because the cornea has an irregular curve. They see specters because they are actually perceiving their own eyes and not what is outside. If one perceives one's own eye because it is incorrectly constructed and has not become an eye that can completely eliminate itself and allow the object to affect it, one cannot perceive the object. If we fill our mind with the thought “You should have been different, and if you had only done this or that differently, it would all have turned out well,” it is just as though we had astigmatism and did not see the actual fact but distorted it. Yet a person must see the real facts allotted him, only then will they really be effective. Their effect on a person who is not filled with feeling about facts but allows the facts themselves to work upon him will be the same as the effect an outside object has on healthy eyes. The facts then continue their work in the soul.

One can say that anyone who has not yet acquired an objective view of past facts in which he was involved cannot see them in their objectivity and therefore cannot obtain from them what he ought to have for his soul. It is exactly as though our eyes were to remain at their stage of development in the sixth or seventh month of embryonic growth, while we ourselves were born at the proper time. We would see the whole world wrongly. If the eyes were not to continue developing during the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth month, but were to stop short, they would not eliminate themselves in the process of seeing. We would see something entirely different from what we actually see when we develop normally.

Thus what we have done acquires its right value only when we have come to the point of being able to let it enter the stream of necessity, and when we can regard it as necessity. But as has been said, we must realize that we then have to make the distinction between what is successful and unsuccessful and what is called “good” or “bad” in a moral sense.

Broadly speaking, you will find all this analyzed, though more philosophically, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for there it is emphasized that human beings become free when they achieve the possibility of drawing impulses from the spiritual world. In one passage it is even expressly stated that impulses of free will come from the spiritual world. However, that does not exclude the utmost freedom in relation to certain events in which we very distinctly follow necessity. For we must distinguish between purely external physical necessity and spiritual necessity, although the two are basically pretty much the same. But they differ in regard to the position they occupy in world existence.

It is like this: Let us look again at a figure such as Goethe, who has appeared in world history and of whom one can say that we can follow up the education of a person such as he, and can see how he became what he was; we can then follow up the impulse that led him to achieve his Faust and his other poetical works. We can, as it were, regard all that Goethe achieved as if it were the result of his education. And then of course we see him as a genius. We certainly can. By doing this we remain focused on Goethe.

But we can do it another way. We can follow the spiritual development in the eighteenth century. We can pick out some details, for instance, that before Goethe had thought of writing a Faust, Lessing had projected one, so there was already one in existence.³ Thus we can say that the conception of Faust arose out of the spiritual problems and impulses of the time. We could say that if we examine Lessing's projected Faust and a number of other similar Faust versions, they all led to the famous Faust. By leaving Goethe out, we still come to Faust as though by necessity. Faust arose out of what preceded it. So we can arrive at Faust by following Goethe's development. One can look at Goethe from a more developmental point of view, or one can entirely leave him out and look in detail at how a type of poetry originated in Europe, such as the Song of the Nibelungs,⁴ and how it became compressed into the poem Parsifal:⁵ Parsifal, the striving human being, belonging to a certain period of evolution. One can look at how another line of development then came about, due to which the Parsifal concept was quite forgotten, and how that remarkable idea took hold of people that found its expression in the popular romance of Faust. This brought the appearance of a Faust about, what one might call a Parsifal of a later age. Goethe can be left out entirely.

Obviously we must not be pedantic; fifty years more or less do not matter. Time is elastic and can be stretched forward or backward, so that that does not interfere. It is only with things that go on in an ahrimanic way that time plays an important part. Things that come from the gods can always be moved forward or backward in time. But speaking generally we can say that even if the Frankfurt councilor Kaspar Goethe and his wife Aja had not had their son Wolfgang, or if he had died immediately after birth, for as you know he was ill at birth and nearly died, someone else would certainly have produced something similar to Faust. Similarly if Goethe had lived in the fourteenth century, he would certainly not have written Faust. These are unreal thoughts of course, but sometimes one has to consider them in order to realize the truth.

Thus we can now ask the question, “Did Goethe produce his Faust or any of his life's work out of freedom, or was it a question of absolute necessity?” The greatest freedom of all is to obey historical necessity! For if anyone imagines that his freedom could ever be endangered by what exists in the world as necessity, he ought also to say, “I want to create a poem, but I am a person who wants to work in total freedom! I want to disregard all the other poets who were unfree; I want to write a free poem. But I could not be free if I were to use the words of our language, for they came about through primeval necessity. That would not do! I will be an absolute champion of freedom. I will make up my own language!” And he sets about doing so. What he would actually achieve, of course, would be that everybody rejects him and his poem written in a nonexistent language, that with his freedom he would be bound to arouse everyone's resistance, which would express itself at first of course merely in incomprehension. From this you will see that there can be no talk of freedom, as it enters into the stream of events, being in any way encroached upon by the necessity present in the ongoing stream of world events.

We might also imagine a painter who wanted to be completely free saying, “I want to paint for sure, but I do not want to paint on a canvas or any other surface; I will paint freely. Do I first of all experiment on a given material? Not me! For then I would perpetually be compelled to comply with its surface.” The material has a very definite conformity to law, yet complying with it does not mean one is not free.

Particularly where major events in world history are concerned, it is obvious that when consciousness plays a part in our actions, what we can call necessity can join directly with freedom. As I have already said, in the fourteenth century Goethe would not have been able to create Faust, for it would have been absolutely impossible for Faust to have come about at that time. He would not have been able to write it. Why not? Because there is something we have to call an empty space in world events with regard to certain evolutionary impulses. Just as we cannot put more water into a cask if it is already full, or we can only put a certain quantity into it if it is already partly full, we cannot put anything we please into an already “full” age.

In the fourteenth century there was no space for anything like the kind of thing that came down from the spiritual world through a human being into the physical world in the form of Faust; no space, only a state of fullness. Events run their course in cycles, and when a cycle has been completed, an empty space appears for new impulses which can then enter the life of the world. A cycle has to be complete in regard to content, and then an empty space must occur again, before new impulses can come in. In the cultural period in which Goethe lived, an empty space had occurred for the impulses that came from the spiritual world to the physical world through him. Evolution really does proceed in waves: emptiness—a state of fullness to the point of completion—an ebbing—emptiness again. Then something new can come.

In the time between death and a new birth a human being plans his next incarnation according to this rhythm. He arranges it so that he encounters the particular level of emptiness or fullness in the physical world that is right for his impulses. Someone bringing with him from earlier incarnations impulses of the highest order that require a space must come at a time when there is an empty space. Whoever has the kind of impulses that need to meet with receptivity must incarnate at a time when there is a space to be filled. In many areas of course one thing will work in opposition to another. That is quite obvious. We see then that in a certain respect we choose—if we may use the word—on the strength of our inner qualities the period in which we come into the world. And on this depends the inner necessity governing our activities.

If you bear this in mind, you will no longer see any contradiction in the consecutive events and realize that Parsifal and so on, and Faust, take their turns, and then comes Goethe who creates a work that can just as well be understood in the succession of periods. You will find no contradiction any longer, because Goethe looked down from above and prepared in his inner being what could become tangible in his work. That is to say, when he was on the physical plane, he brought forth from his inner being what he had absorbed in those particular preceding centuries in which the stream of events had taken place.

Between the two statements “Goethe's work had to be produced at a definite time,” and “Goethe produced it out of freedom” there is just as little contradiction as there would be if I were to have a board and six balls in a row, then produce a small cup and say, “I will put the first ball into the cup, then the second and third and so on, and I pour them out over here.” And if now someone were to say, “But those balls lying over there are the same balls we had to start with,” someone else could reply, “No, they are the balls that came out of the cup.” Both statements can be true.

What took place in the course of time and ultimately led to Faust is what Goethe had absorbed in his inner being and what Goethe then expressed just because it had accumulated within him through looking down from the spiritual world. For we always take part in the whole evolution of the world. If we look at things this way, we can say “The moment we look into the past we have to regard past events themselves as a necessity. And if we look at ourselves and produce the past again as deeds of the present, so long as we do this consciously, we are still free in what we bring into the present of what was prepared in the past out of necessity.” Thus that person is most free of all who knows in full consciousness “what I am doing is nothing but spiritual necessity.” These things cannot be understood by pedantic logic but only by fully grasping reality in a living way.

There is still another approach that can help us understand this completely. We can ask ourselves the following. If we look at animals, we know they have a dimmed consciousness. I have often described that. Human beings have a level of consciousness in which freedom can come to expression. But what kind of consciousness do angels have, the beings immediately above human beings? What is the consciousness of the angels like?

It is actually very difficult to have an immediate perception of the consciousness of angels. When we as human beings want to do something, we consider what form our action is going to take. And if it does not work out on the physical plane as we imagined it should, we have failed. If someone sews two pieces of cloth together, and when he has finished it they come apart, the endeavor has not been a success. This can happen with a sewing machine. If things do not turn out as we had envisioned they would on the physical plane, we say the deed has miscarried. That is to say, people aim their will at something they picture happening on the physical plane. This is how our human willing proceeds.

But not in the case of angels. Their intention is everything. An angel's intention can be carried out in many different ways and the effect can still be exactly the same. This is quite true, though it is of course contrary to ordinary logic. In the artistic sphere only, and then only from the human point of view, can we acquire any feeling for this kind of consciousness. For you will always find that if the artist can take things in a human way—he may not always be in a position to do so, but if he can—he may possibly appreciate what turns out contrary to his expectations, even to the point of failure, and regard it to be of greater value than those things he did exactly as they should have been done. We then come a little closer to what is so extraordinarily difficult to grasp: that with the angels' consciousness, their will, everything depends on the intentions, and that these intentions may be realized in the most varied ways on the physical plane, even in polar opposite ways. That is to say, when an angel decides to do something, he chooses something quite definite, but not in the way that he says, “It has to look like this.” That is not in the least implied. He will not know what it looks like until it has happened.

We have seen, and I have drawn your attention to the fact, that this is even the case with the Elohim. The Elohim created light and saw that it was good. This means that what comes first for human beings, the mental image of what is on the physical plane, does not come first at all in the consciousness of spiritual beings above human beings. With them the intention comes first, and how it is to be carried out is quite another matter. Now in this respect humans are of course midway between animals and angels. Therefore, they tend on the one hand to descend to the unconsciousness of animals. Whenever a criminal deed occurs, it is essentially due to the animality in human beings. On the other hand, however, we also have a tendency to ascend to the consciousness of the Angeloi. We have within us the possibility of developing a higher consciousness, a consciousness beyond the ordinary one, in which intentions take on a different aspect than is normally the case.

Thus we can say, that if as human beings we get involved in some of life's important problems, we cannot then make plans in the ordinary way. Suppose that as a teacher—a proper teacher this time—you have a particular child to educate. Now an average person has his educational principles. He knows when to give punishment and when not to; perhaps that he should never give any punishment at all. He knows how to do that. But if you look at the matter from the point of view of a higher consciousness, you will not always judge in this way, but will leave everything in life's hands. You will wait for the results of observation. Your one intention will be to bring out all the latent talents. But these potential talents can be drawn out in various ways. This is the important thing.

If we take all these things into consideration, we will realize that in order to understand how necessity and freedom affect the human being we must observe both the external physical part and the inner part, first of all the etheric. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that our etheric body takes quite a different course from the physical body. Our physical body, as I once told you, is young to begin with. It then develops and grows older until it becomes senile. The etheric body does the opposite. Whereas we say we grow older when speaking of the physical body, we ought really to say we grow younger as regards the etheric body. If we want to use the words “old” and “young” for the etheric body, it is actually old when we are born, for it is all wrinkled up and small enough to fit us. When we reach a normal old age, and die, our etheric body has become so rejuvenated that we can hand it over to the whole world, where it can work again as a youthful force. While the physical grows older, the etheric body grows younger. It gets younger and younger.

If we die at an unusual time, die young, significant things can happen with the etheric body, such as those I have told you about. But it is not only with regard to aging that we see a difference between the physical and etheric bodies, but also with regard to necessity and freedom. When the human being is most enmeshed in necessity in what he does with the physical body or in general as a being on the physical plane, he is then freest in his etheric body, and the latter is then left entirely to itself. Whenever the etheric body is enmeshed in necessity, everything a person does on the physical plane is left to his own freedom. Thus, where the physical body is subject to necessity, the etheric body has a corresponding degree of freedom, and where the etheric body is subject to necessity, the physical body has a certain amount of freedom.

Let us look at what this means. You cannot say we are completely free to get up and go to bed whenever we want to. People get up in the morning and go to bed in the evening. There is no question of freedom there. This is part of the iron necessities of life. And even if you vary the time of getting up and going to bed, freedom is obviously out of the question. You also eat every day. There is no question of freedom there. You cannot resolve to do away with this necessity and try to be free by not eating, because you feel the taking in of food to be a compulsion. With regard to all these things a human being is tied to necessity. And why is he tied to necessity? Because the companion—as I called him last time—the inner self accompanying us through life on the physical plane and through all the compulsions connected with the physical plane, lives all the while in freedom.

But if we are to involve our inner being, our etheric body, in necessity, how are we to do it? By consciously submitting to what we recognize to be a necessity. For instance, by telling ourselves that the time has come when everyone who realizes he is ready for spiritual science ought to take it up. Nobody is forced to do this by an external necessity, of course. But we can see it as an inner necessity, because it is necessary in the present cycle of humanity. Thus out of our own free will we yield to necessity. There is no external pressure on the physical plane. We must follow compulsion out of inner freedom, as it were. The etheric body itself makes the resolve, which permeates it with necessity; it creates the necessity itself, thus acquiring the possibility of developing in freedom with regard to what happens on the physical plane. That is to say, we become acquainted with spiritual necessity, thereby making ourselves more and more free with regard to life on the physical plane.

You will now say, “Through the very fact that we find our way into a spiritual necessity we ought to become more and more free in life on the physical plane.” That is indeed so. By uniting ourselves with the spirit that streams through the world and letting it pass through us, we really do receive elements that set us free from the fetters of the physical world. We cannot of course free ourselves from what is allotted us by our previous incarnation, by our karma. But if we do not thus free ourselves through our knowledge of spiritual necessity from conditions of necessity on the physical plane, we remain bound to these after death, and have to carry them with us. We have to carry the necessities of the physical plane with us through the life between death and a new birth, and cannot free ourselves from them. But each moment in which we connect ourselves in our etheric body with the necessities of the spiritual plane, we become freer and freer of the necessities of the physical plane.

It is indeed so that if we can follow out of a free resolve a purely spiritual impulse, we become freer and freer from all that would otherwise fetter us to physical life, fetter us far beyond death. On the other hand, with regard to everything we are enmeshed in during physical life, and which is unalterable, the etheric body as such becomes freer and freer.

Thus we see how freedom and necessity interact on the physical plane and also in connection with the etheric body. The etheric body receives its freedom through the necessity of the physical plane, and has to recognize its own necessity. The physical body receives its freedom when the etheric body thus recognizes its necessity, and its necessity arises through its self-chosen karmic involvement in the events on the physical plane.

In this way we see the physical part of human beings, free in bondage, and the spiritual-soul part, bound in freedom, interacting organically. Freedom and necessity always interweave. It is quite impossible for us to be subject to pure necessity when we are fully conscious. Through the fact that we permeate a thing with consciousness, that is to say, accept it in full consciousness, freedom governs our soul. This is how we lift ourselves out of necessity in our soul and make ourselves free concerning matters we are conscious of. However, if we acknowledge with our minds that something is necessary, for instance, that the present time is the time for taking part in spiritual science, if we freely comply with a necessity, so to speak, does this give us a degree of unconsciousness? In a certain sense it does. We do become unconscious to the extent that we undertake to develop our consciousness to the point where we reach the gate through which streams and radiates what is to come from the spiritual world. We then receive this, and bend to the powerful forces coming to meet us from the spirit world. This is why in connection with working our way into spiritual necessity we speak of working our way up to the beings who bend down toward us.

Therefore we shall always stress that with our consciousness we soar toward the beings who permeate and pulse through us from the spiritual world and when we say, “We must of necessity accommodate ourselves to the impulses coming from the spiritual world,” we expect that at the same time the impulses of higher spiritual beings will descend into these our impulses. Thus a relative, deep unconsciousness arises, where we become aware of what is at work in us spiritually in the same way as we would be aware of an unconscious action where we are quite sure that the spirit is in us and the right thing to do is to obey, where we are privileged to obey.

We have now come back to our starting point. If we tried with our ordinary consciousness to mull over the many consequences that can arise from such significant events as those of the present, for instance—and I compared them earlier to the Roman-Teutonic wars—we would get nowhere. However, the moment we can tell ourselves we do not want to find the right solution through mulling them over but through giving way to the spiritual impulse and letting it stream in, we do not need to brood. For then we know that if only we let these spiritual impulses take hold of us, they lead us to the right solution, to spiritual currents that even go beyond the centuries, beyond millennia. This is what is important.

Then we see that we no longer need to think that things must go like this today and like that tomorrow for such and such to happen, for we will realize that we are now living in the particular epoch of humanity in which the further evolution of earthly existence can progress in the right way only if spiritual impulses coming from the spiritual world are directly taken up. That is how it is. And the things that happen externally on the physical plane must of necessity unite with these impulses in the right way. Then the right things will happen. Then we shall know, without mulling over what will happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, that what will really come about will be that the souls now passing through the gate of death will continue to work on, both in their etheric bodies and as souls, to the extent that the thoughts of those human beings who will in the future populate the blood-stained battlefields of the earth join with them, so that something will arise that will live for centuries. But we must have a direct awareness of this in the spirit of these words we have often heard:

Out of the courage of the fighters,
Out of the blood of battles,
Out of the grief of the bereaved,
Out of the peoples' deeds of sacrifice
There shall arise spirit fruit
If only souls, in spirit-mindfulness,
Will reach out to the spirits' realm.

The important thing to realize is that from a certain point in the present our souls must become conscious of the spirit, souls that have the will to direct their consciousness toward the spirit. Then, from what is happening today, the right things will come for the future. To make this thought our own, steadfast confidence is needed, such as those beings have whom we count as members of the hierarchy of the angels. For angels act out of that kind of confidence. They know that if they have the right intentions, the right things will come of them; not because they envision that future events should take a definite form, but because they have the right intentions. These right intentions, however, can only be grasped spiritually. And only through thinking in the way of spiritual science can we find the way to grasp something spiritually, as we have endeavored to do.

• 1. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677, Dutch pantheist philosopher. The example of a stone being pushed into motion can be found in his sixty-second letter of 1674.
• 1. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781, German poet, playwright, and critic.
• 4. Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German epic of about 1200, telling of the life of Siegfried, his marriage to Kriemhild, his wooing of Brunhild on behalf of Gunther, his murder by Hägen, and the revenge of Kriemhild.
• 5. Parsifal, a hero of mythology and various epics and romances, especially the one by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

I have a few things to add to the four lectures on freedom and necessity which more or less form a connected whole. Let us take another look at one of our basic truths of spiritual science, the structure of the human being that we have become so well acquainted with. We consider man as a synthesis of four members: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. If we confine ourselves to what is in the physical world, to the part of the human being that is given, we can state that in our ordinary waking condition we have in the first place the physical body. We know our physical body for the very reason that we can obviously observe it externally with our senses, and everyone else in the physical world can observe it in the same way and has to agree with us that the physical body exists. Therefore, in the physical world this physical body can be perceived from outside.

A simple reflection can convince you that you cannot observe what we usually call the etheric body. It escapes ordinary physical observation. The astral body also escapes ordinary physical observation, and the I even more so, for the essence of the I, as we have often said, can be so little observed externally that human beings cannot even name it from outside. If someone were to call out the word “I” to you, you would never come to the conclusion that he could mean your I. He can only mean his own I. The I as such is never named from outside. Yet it is obvious that we know something about it. We name it from within. Thus we can say after all that while the etheric and the astral body are inaccessible on the physical plane, as things stand now, the I is not inaccessible. We refer to it by saying “I.” Nevertheless, it remains a fact that the I cannot be seen in the same way as the physical body or any other physical object. It cannot be perceived at all by the senses.

What does the fact that we know something about the I and that we come to the point of naming it actually tell us about the I? Philosophers often say, “Human beings have direct certainty of the I. They know firsthand that the I exists.” In fact, there are philosophers who imagine they know merely from philosophy that the I is a primary being, that it cannot be dispersed or die. Yet anyone with sound thinking will immediately respond to this philosophical opinion by saying, “However much you prove to us that the I cannot be dissolved and therefore cannot fade away, it is quite enough that after death, probably for eternity, the I is to be in the same condition it is in between falling asleep and waking up.” Then of course we would no longer be able to speak of an I. Philosophers are mistaken if they imagine there is any reality in the I they speak of. If we speak of something that really exists, we are speaking of something entirely different.

Between falling asleep and awakening the I is not there, and a person cannot say “I” to himself. If he dreams about his I, it sometimes even strikes him as though he is encountering a picture of himself, that is to say, he looks at himself. He does not call himself “I” as he does in ordinary daily life. When we wake up, it is in regard to our true I as though we were to strike against the resistance of our physical body. We know, don't we, that the process of waking up consists of our I coming into our physical body. (Our astral body also does so, but for the moment we are interested in the I.) The experience of coming in feels like hitting our hand against a solid object, and the counterthrust, so to speak, that this experience engenders is what brings about our consciousness of our I. And throughout our waking day we are not really in possession of our I, for what we have is a mental image of our I reflected back from our physical body. Thus what we normally know of the I from philosophy is a reflection, a mirror image of the I. Do we have nothing more than this ego reflection? Well, this reflection obviously ceases when we go to sleep. The I is no longer reflected. Thus on falling asleep our I would really disappear. Yet in the morning when we wake up, it enters our physical body again. So it must have continued to exist.

What can this I be, then? How much of it do we possess so long as we are active solely on the physical plane? If we investigate further, we have, to begin with, nothing of this I within the physical world except will, acts of will. All we can do is will. The fact that we are able to will makes us aware of being an I. Sleep happens to be a dimming of our will; for reasons we have often discussed we cannot exert our will during sleep. The will is then dimmed. We do not will during sleep. Thus what is expressed in the word I is a true act of will, and the mental picture we have of the I is a reflection that arises when our will impinges on our body. This impact is just like looking into the mirror and seeing our physical body. Thus we see our own I as an expression of will through its effect on the body. This gives us our mental image of the I. Therefore, on the physical plane the I lives as an act of will.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

So we already have a duality on the physical plane: our physical body and our I. We know of our physical body because we can picture it with our observation outside in space; and we know of our I through the fact that we can will. Everything else underlying the physical body cannot at first be discovered through physical observation. We can see how the physical body has developed and what it is composed of. Yet the description we have to give of this composition in the course of our passage through the Saturn, sun, moon, and earth evolutions remains a mystery if we consider the physical body only. Everything underlying the physical body is a mystery to physical observation in the physical world.

How the will enters our physical body, or enters into what we are, is a further mystery. For you can become conscious of your will, can't you. Therefore, Schopenhauer¹ regarded the will as the only reality, because he had an inkling that in the will we actually become conscious of ourselves. But of how this will enters into us we know nothing at all on the physical plane. On the basis of the physical world, we know only that in our I we can take hold of our will. I pick up this watch, but how this act of will passes through the etheric body into the physical body and actually turns into a picking up of the watch remains a mystery even for the physical body. The will descends straight from the I into the physical body. Nothing else remains in the I but the inner feeling, the inner experience of the will.

The way I have described this here has actually been applicable to the greater part of humanity only for the past few centuries, and this fact is usually overlooked. As for us, we have studied the matter so much that it ought to have become second nature with us. If we look back to the middle of medieval times, it is pure fancy to imagine that people lived then in exactly the same way as they do today. Humanity evolves, and the way human beings relate to the world changes in the different epochs.

If we go back beyond the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, we find many more people than we do now who not only knew of the physical body but who really knew that something lived in the physical body that we nowadays call the etheric body, people who actually perceived something of the aura of the physical body. By the Middle Ages of course these were only the last remnants of an ancient perception. Even in the tenth century, though, people did not look into a person's eyes like we do today when we simply see the physical eyes. When they looked at other people's eyes, they still saw something of the aura, the etheric. They had a way of seeing uprightness or falsehood in the eyes, not through any kind of external judgment but through direct perception of the aura around the eyes. It was also like this with other things.

In addition to perceiving the aura of human beings, people then saw it to a far greater extent than now in animals and also in plants. You all know the description in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds that if we observe one seed, we see it shining differently from other grains of seed.² Nowadays this perception can only be achieved through training, but in earlier centuries it was still quite an ordinary, everyday phenomenon. People did not first have to investigate, possibly with a microscope, what plant a seed came from—even that can in many cases no longer be done today—for they were able to determine such things from the light aura surrounding the seed. And in the case of minerals too, you will find descriptions in old writings classifying them in a certain way according to their value in the world. When the ancients looked at gold, what they described was not invention, for to them gold really appeared in a different way from silver, for instance. When they connected gold with sunlight and silver with moonlight, this was really founded on observation. When they said, “Gold is pure sunlight that has been condensed, silver is moonlight,” and so on, they expressed what they saw in the same way as they still saw elemental life in the outside world, the elemental aura that modern people have lost sight of because modern mankind has to evolve to freedom, which can only be acquired by a complete restriction of observation to what is physically objective.

Just as human beings have lost the ability to see these auras, they have also lost another ability. Today, we must acquire a feeling for how very different it was when the ancients spoke of the will. They had much more of a feeling of how the will, which nowadays lives only in the I, entered the organic realm, the astral body as we would say today. They still felt the I continuing on into the astral body. This can be explained in a quite specific field.

The fact that painters believe they can no longer manage without a model is due to their having totally lost the faculty of experiencing in any way at all how the I continues on into the organism, into the astral body. Why is it often precisely the old portraits that people admire today? Because they were not painted as they now are, where the artist merely has a sitter to copy, and is duty bound to copy everything that is there. In the past people knew that if a person forms the muscles round his eyes in a particular way, then what lives in his I enters in a very definite way into his astral body and produces this form of the muscles. If we were to go back as far as ancient Greece, we would be quite wrong to imagine that the ancient Greeks used a model for the wonderful forms they created. They had no models. If a particular curve of the arm was required, the sculptor, knowing how the will brought the I into the astral body, created the curve out of this experience. As this feeling for what was going on in the astral body faded away the necessity arose to adhere as strictly to a model as is customary today.

The essential difference is that in fairly recent times human beings have come to the point where they see the outer world devoid of all its aura and see themselves inwardly with no awareness of the fact that the will ripples into the astral body and throughout the whole organism. Things have only been like this for a short while.

After a much longer time has elapsed, a new age will arrive for humanity. Then even more will have been taken away from both the outer aspect of the physical plane and from man's inner awareness. We know that at present we are only a few centuries into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that began in the fourteenth century, for we count the fourth post-Atlantean epoch from approximately the founding of Rome till the fifteenth century, and the fifth post-Atlantean epoch from the fifteenth century till as long again; so we are now only in the first third of it. But mankind is steering toward an entirely different kind of perception. We are moving toward a time when the outer world will be far more bleak and empty. Nowadays when a person looks at nature, he believes it to be green and the vault of heaven to be blue. He sees nature in such a way that he believes the colors to be the outcome of a natural process.

In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch he will no longer be able to believe in the colors of nature. At present the physicists only talk about there being nothing outside us but vibrations, and that it is these that, for example, bring about red in us. What the physicists dream of today will come true. At present they only dream of it, but it will then be true. People will no longer be able to distinguish properly between a red face and a pale one. They will know that all those things are caused by their own organism. They will consider it a superstition that there are colors outside that tint objects. The outer world will be grey in grey and human beings will be conscious of the fact that they themselves put the colors into the world. Just as people today say, “Oh, you crazy anthroposophers, you talk about there being an etheric body, but it is not true, you only dream it into people!” People who then see only the outer reality will say to the others who still see colors in their full freshness, “Oh, you dreamers! Do you really believe there are colors outside in nature? You do not know that you are only dreaming inside yourself that nature has these colors.” Outer nature will become more and more a matter of mathematics and geometry. Just as today we can do no more than speak of the etheric body, and people in the world outside do not believe that it exists, people in the future will not believe that the capacity to see colors in the outer world has any objective significance; they will ascribe it purely to subjectivity.

Humanity will have a similar experience in regard to the relationship of the will in their J to the outer world. They will reach the point where they will have only the very slightest awareness of the impulses that come to expression in their will. They will have scarcely any awareness of the unique personal experience of willing anything out of the I. What is willed out of the I will only have a very faint effect on a person. If all that mankind receives by nature continues along the lines described, then in order to do anything at all people will need either long practice or outer compulsion. People will not get up of their own accord, but will have to learn it until it becomes a habit. The mere resolve to get up will not make the slightest impression. This would be an abnormal condition at present, but natural evolution as such is tending in this direction. People will have less belief in moral ideals. Outer dictates will be necessary to activate the will.

This would be the natural course of events, and those who know that what comes later is prepared beforehand know that the sixth epoch is being prepared in the fifth. After all, you can see with half an eye that a large part of humanity is tending in this direction. People are aiming more and more at having everything drummed into them, at being spoon-fed, and consider it the right procedure to be told what to do. As I said, we are now roughly in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, i.e., in an age in which—although the physicists already have the ideal of the sixth age—there is still the belief that colors really do exist outside, and that it is a human attribute to have a red or a pale face. Nowadays we still believe this. We can of course allow ourselves to be persuaded by the physicists or physiologists that we imagine colors, but we do not really believe it. We believe that the nature we live in on the physical plane has its own colors.

We are in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which will obviously have three thirds. During these three thirds post-Atlantean humanity has to pass through various experiences, the first one being that people have to become fully conscious of what I have just described. People must realize fully that in their considerations of the physical body they have completely lost sight of what is behind the physical, totally lost sight of it in all respects. In the second third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—if spiritual science has been successful—there will be more and more people who will know with certainty that something more, something of an etheric-spiritual nature, is bound up with what we see around us. People will begin to be conscious of the fact that what existed in earlier times for clairvoyance, and is now no longer a part of our relation to the world, must be rediscovered in a different way. We will not be able to rediscover the aura that used to be seen, but if people accept and practice exercises, such as those given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, they will realize that they can rediscover along a different path that an auric element surrounds and interpenetrates the human being and everything else in the world. People will acquire a consciousness of this once again.

People will also become aware that they are able to grasp moral impulses once again. However, they will have to take hold of them with a stronger resolve than they do today, for there is a natural tendency in the will to gradually lose its impelling power. The will must be taken hold of more firmly. This kind of will can be developed if people are determined to exercise the strong thinking necessary for the understanding of the truths of spiritual science. People who do understand these truths will be pouring more strength into their will, and they will therefore acquire, instead of a will that is deteriorating to the point of paralysis, a powerful will, able to act freely out of the I.

As humanity progresses, merely natural development will be counteracted by the efforts people make: on the one hand, efforts to do the exercises of spiritual science in order to become aware once more of the aura, and on the other hand, efforts to strengthen themselves by means of the impulses coming from spiritual science for the invigorating and activating of the will.

It is actually as follows. What has to be developed by spiritual science in the second third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch does not yet exist at all. What is the position of human beings today when they observe the external world? And how do scientists stand in this regard? It is very instructive to look at the position of present-day science, especially present-day scientists—of course only in so far as this science presents the natural relation of human beings to their environment. When they look at outer, physical nature, whether it is the mineral, plant, animal, or human kingdom, neither modern scientists nor ordinary human beings have the power really to enter into what they observe. Physicists carry out experiments and then describe them. But they do not venture to fathom the mysteries of what they are describing. They do not feel able to search more deeply into the processes the experiments reveal. They remain on the surface. In relation to the outer world they are in exactly the same situation as you are when you are on a different plane when dreaming. You dream because your etheric body radiates the experiences of the astral body back to you. Anyone observing nature or making an experiment nowadays also observes what it radiates back to him, what it presents to him. He only dreams of nature. The moment he were to approach nature as spiritual science does, he would wake up. But he does not want to. In this first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch people only dream of nature. Human beings must wake up! Occasionally someone does wake up out of his dream, and says, “What is out there is no mere dream; there is something living within it.”

Schopenhauer's philosophy was an awakening of this kind, but he did not know what to do with it. It gave offense to those who philosophized cleverly in the modern way such as the eminent philosopher Bolzano of Bohemia did in the first half of the nineteenth century.³ If you see his copy of Schopenhauer, you will find that he wrote in the margin, “Sheer madness!” Of course, it struck him as sheer madness, because the following statement was really made out of a kind of delirium, “There is something resembling will in outer nature.”

And when modern science remains true to itself and, as it were, draws its own conclusions, what will it arrive at? Dreaming about the physical body! It has no inkling that there is something besides the physical body, otherwise it would have to speak of an etheric body, an astral body, and an I. It does not want to grasp reality, however, but only what presents itself. The modern physicist or physiologist feels like a somnambulist. He is dreaming and if someone shouts at him, which happens if someone talks to him about spiritual science, he falls down just like a somnambulist who is shouted at. And the impression he has is, “I am now in a void!” He cannot change immediately and has to go on dreaming. Just when he thinks he is most awake in relation to external nature he is dreaming most of all.

What will be the outcome? The modern physicist or physiologist will gradually lose all possibility of finding anything in the outer world except for his mental images of it. He will even gradually lose the capacity to form any idea of anything beyond his own mental images of the outer world. What is left for him if he relinquishes the human body to the scientist? The human body is there in front of him and he observes it in great detail, but he leaves it to the scientist or the medical profession to tell him what changes take place if one or another part does not function normally. He dissects this physical body very carefully. But he stops at that and has no notion that there is anything beyond it. In this physical body there is no trace of an I or of will.

What would this scientist actually have to do? He would have to deny the 1 and the will altogether and say, “There is no will, no trace of it exists in the human being, for we cannot find it.” Down in the organism is where the will is hidden, imperceptibly. As we have said, it is only taken hold of, felt, and experienced in the I. Thus, the will would have to be shown in order to prove the existence of the I. That is to say, if a scientist who is only dreaming now were to be absolutely honest, we would hear him say to his audience, “When we speak of the human being, we ought really to speak of will. To us scientists that is an impossibility. The will is nothing. It is an absolutely unfounded hypothesis. It does not exist.” That is what he ought to say if he were to be quite consistent. He would dream of external processes and deny the will.

I have not merely invented what I have just told you. It is an inevitable conclusion of the modern scientific view. If a scientist were to follow his way of thinking to its logical conclusion, he would arrive at what I have just told you. It is not mere invention on my part. I have brought along as an example the Introduction to Physiological Psychology in Fifteen Lectures written by the celebrated Professor Dr. Ziehen of Jena.⁴ He endeavors here to describe what is manifest in the human being as a creature of body and soul. In the course of these lectures, he speaks about all the aspects of the sensations of smell, taste, hearing, sight, and so on. I will not bother you with all that, but will just discuss a few passages in the fifteenth lecture about the will. There you will find statements such as the following:

From the countless material stimuli of the outer world we isolated stimuli of the cortex which correspond in the psychological realm to sensations. We then followed these sensations to the brain cortex along the associative fibers into the motor zone from where the material stimulus was led once again towards the muscular system at the periphery where it caused muscular contraction. This transcortical process corresponded on a soul level to the association of ideas, and the resultant movement we designate psychologically as action. We were able to derive the latter sufficiently satisfactorily from the sensation and from the memory pictures of previous sensations, mental images functioning according to the laws of the association of ideas, to be able to pursue the psychic process to its final stage. At this point, however, we encounter a hypothesis that used to be almost universally taught by psychology and which the ordinary human understanding has always arrived at apparently unconsciously. I refer to the assumption of a distinct will as the cause of our actions.

Ziehen goes on to show that there is no sense in speaking of such a will, that physiologists do not find anything in any way corresponding to this word “will.” He also shows in the particular way he interprets the effects of forces that one might call depravity of will, that there too, it is not a matter of will but of something quite different, so that we cannot speak of will at all.

You see how consistent this is. If people get no further than dreaming of the external physical world, they cannot arrive at the will. They cannot find it at all. All they can do if they create a world view, is to deny the will as such and say, “So there cannot be a will.” The so-called monists of our time do this often enough. They deny the will. They say the will as such does not exist at all. It is only a mythological creation. Ziehen expresses himself a little more cautiously of course, but he still arrives at some strange results though he will no doubt take care not to take them to the ultimate conclusion. I would like to read you a few more statements from his last lecture, from which you will see that although he drew the conclusions, he nevertheless still plays around with the nonexistence of the will. For he says, “What about the concept of responsibility?”

He cannot find the will, but in answer to the question about the concept of responsibility he says,

This does indeed contradict physiological psychology. For this told us that our actions are based on absolute necessity, (i.e., in the physical sense) and are the necessary product of our sensations and memory pictures. Thus we can blame a person for a bad deed just as little as we can blame a flower for its ugliness. Therefore an action is still bad—also in a psychological sense—but not directly blameworthy. The terms blame and responsibility, to put it briefly, are a religious or social matter. So we can disregard them here. To recapitulate, psychology does not deny absolute laws of aesthetics and ethics, provided they are seen to be in another sphere, but psychology itself is confined to the empirical realm, to empirical laws only.

This is perfectly natural. If external nature is only dreamt about, then we see some people doing one good deed after another and others who keep on attacking people for no reason at all. Just as one flower is beautiful and another ugly according to natural law, one person may be what is called a good person. But on no account should the goodness or hatefulness be explained as meaning more than a flower's beauty or ugliness. So the logical conclusion is,

We can blame a person for a bad deed just as little as we can blame a flower for its ugliness. Therefore an action is still bad—also in a psychological sense—but not directly blameworthy. The terms blame and responsibility, to put it briefly, are a religious or social matter. [Not a matter of understanding but purely a religious or social matter.] So we can disregard them here. To recapitulate, psychology does not deny absolute laws of aesthetics and ethics, provided they are seen to be in another sphere, but psychology is confined to the empirical realm, to empirical laws only.

Ziehen continues to express himself cautiously, and does not yet create a world view. For if one does form a view of life from this, there is no longer any possibility of holding a person responsible for his actions if one takes the stand of the author of this book, this lecture. This is what comes of people dreaming about the outer world. They would wake up the moment they accept what spiritual science says about the outer world. But just think, these people have a science that makes them actually admit that they know nothing at all about what points the way from the external body to the human I. Yet what is bound to be living in the I? First of all the laws of aesthetics, second the laws of logic. All these must live in the I. Everything that leads to the will must live in the I. There is nothing in this science that can in any way live as a real impulse in the will. There is nothing of that sort in this science. Therefore something else is necessary.

If this science were the only one the world had today, you can imagine people saying, “There are ugly flowers and there are beautiful flowers and nature necessarily makes them so. There are people who murder others, and there are people who do good to others, and they also are like that by nature.” Obviously, everything appealing to the will would have to be discarded. So why is it not discarded? You see, if we no longer take the I into account, and if we do not accept it as part of what we can know through observation of our world, we must find it in some other way. If we do not want to continue to uphold “social or religious laws,” as Ziehen does, we must somehow get people to accept them in another way. That is to say, if we dream with regard to the outer world and with regard to what we see, then what we will has to be stimulated in some other way.

And this way can only be the opposite of dreaming, namely, ecstasy. What lives in the will must enter into it in such a way that the person under no circumstances stops to think about it or realize fully that it is an impulse of will. That is to say, what has to be aimed for in an age like this is that a person does not attempt to have a clear view of the will impulses he accepts, but they should work in him—and this is a fitting image—like wine does when a person is drunk. An impulse that is not brought to full consciousness works in the same way as intoxicating drink does when it robs a person of the full possession of his wits. That is to say, we live in an age when one has to renounce a really close examination of will impulses. Religious denominations would like to provide impulses, but these must not be examined at any price. On no account ought the motivating ideas be submitted to objective scrutiny. It should all enter into the human being by means of ecstasy.

We can actually prove this all over again in the present time. Just try with an open mind to really listen to the way religious impulses are spoken of nowadays. People feel most comfortable if they are told nothing about why they should accept one or the other impulse, but are spoken to in such a way that they become enthusiastic, fired up, they are given ideas they cannot fully grasp and that surround them with mystery. And the most highly acclaimed speakers are the ones who fill people's souls with fire, fire, and yet more fire, and who pay least attention to whether everybody has conscious hold of himself. The dreamers come along and say, “We examine the Gospels. Even if we go so far as to admit to the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, we find no evidence at all that there was in fact a supersensible being dwelling in him.” We need only remember how many dreamers there are who simply deny the existence of Christ because it cannot be proved on the external physical plane. On the other hand, there are theologians who cannot prove it either, and who therefore speak about the Christ in as vague a way as possible, appealing as much as possible to the feelings, drives, and instincts.

An example of this kind of thing took place in a strange way in public very recently. On the one hand, there were the dreamers—it began with Eduard von Hartmann in the realm of philosophy, and Drews made a lot of propaganda out of it—and these dreamers went so far as to deny the whole message of the testaments by showing that the Mystery of Golgotha is not a historical occurrence.⁵ Certainly, it cannot be proved on the plane of external history but has to be approached on the spiritual plane. Now these dreamers had opponents. Read all the literature on this issue and you will see no sign of any thought, no sign of anything scientific; the whole thing consisted of words one can only describe as drunken and intoxicating words. No sign of thorough study! The opponents are appealing the whole time to what will excite unmotivated instincts. This is how things stand in our life of soul. On the one hand, there is dreaming, which is supposed to provide a world view grounded in natural science, and on the other hand, there is intoxication, which people are supposed to acquire from the religious confessions.

Dreaming and intoxication are the principal factors controlling mankind today. And just as the only way to stop people from dreaming is to wake them up, the only way to overcome intoxication is to look at our inner impulses in total clarity. This means giving people spiritual science that, far from making the soul drunk, awakens the soul to spiritual impulses. But people are not yet ready to go along with this. I have said before that if we offer the challenge of spiritual science to a hardened monist of the Haeckelian school, one who desires only to prove his monism on the basis of natural science, he falls on his face with a thud, metaphorically speaking, he falls down with a loud thud as a matter of course. That is the obvious thing to happen, for he immediately feels he is in a void and his consciousness is completely bowled over. If you take an ordinary person, someone who wants to base his whole world view on natural science, they mean nothing to him; he cannot understand a thing. If he is honest, he will say, “Here we go again, it makes my head spin.” Which means he plops down with a thud.

Concerning intoxication, if someone allows himself to sober up properly, it is a straightforward matter of embarking on a truly ennobled inner religious life. The fact that he can familiarize himself with the impulses coming from spiritual science will enable his belief to deepen into concrete concepts. But if you approach someone who does not want to awaken his soul to the ideals of spiritual science, yet you bring them to him and want him to accept them, that is to say, if you bring spiritual science to someone who is completely under the sway of modern theology, he will sober up, in a strange way, like people who have been drunk and have not quite recovered from the organic aftereffects. He gets a hangover. You can really notice it.

If you observe theologians nowadays—and we can do this especially well in the Dornach area where the theologians take more notice of it—if you observe them in cases where spiritual science is familiar to them but still undigested, and if you listen to them, you will find that all they say is basically a kind of hangover, caused by the fact that they ought to acquire ideas and knowledge about spiritual matters, yet still prefer to be drunk with ecstasy over them and to introduce them into people's mental organization in an entirely unmotivated way. They shrink from becoming sober because they cannot bear the thought that it will not bring them enlightenment but a throbbing headache.

These things must absolutely be seen in their historical necessity. If it can come about that spiritual science brings people at least the rudiments of an understanding of how to regain in a new way the sight of what has been lost, how to motivate the will once again, then humanity will acquire in freedom what nature can no longer give us. You see then that a certain necessity underlies our program. The kind of lecture I gave last Friday and have often given, drawing your attention to the development of thinking on the one hand and the development of will on the other, showed how thinking proceeds until we discover the will in it and come out of ourselves through thinking. It also showed how we find the other spectator on the other side, and demonstrates that through the very fact that we bring thinking to the point where we can emerge out of ourselves, we will have a chance not to fall flat on our faces when we are shouted at and awakened.

We fall down only because we cannot understand * outer processes and have nothing to hold on to when we are awakened from our dreams. What one has to hold on to, so as not to get into the kind of inwardly inorganic, disordered state we call a hangover, is what one can acquire through developing one's thinking. This comes about when the inner spectator I spoke of can emerge unhindered from our inner being. Thus what should be imparted to humanity above all is intimately connected with the real inner laws of human progress.

Yet if you think about what has been said here today and often before, and bear in mind its implications, you will avoid certain obvious mistakes. Some mistakes, of course, will be extremely difficult to avoid, and I will point out just one of these today. Again and again individuals among us say, “There are, for instance, the followers of this or that confession,” assuming in this case that we live among a more or less Catholic population “who have their Catholic priest.” Our friends very often believe that if they explain to this priest that we do represent Christianity, speak about the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way, and do not deny the existence of Christ, we will be able to gain the priest's friendship.

This way of thinking is completely wrong. You will never win these people over by showing them that we do not deny what they are duty bound to preach. We simply cannot do that. Actually you would get on better with these people if you were in a position to say that you are people who do not believe in Christ. Then they would say, “You see, there are people who do not believe in Christ. They do not belong to us. We shall stick to our community who are content to learn from us about Christ through ecstasy.” They do not say that, but that is how they act. Yet when other people besides them affirm the existence of Christ and even maintain they have positive knowledge of Christ, and we become the sort of people who follow our own way, and who want to present Christ in a different way from them: they then become far worse enemies than they would be if our friends were to deny the existence of Christ. For they consider it their privilege to present Christianity, and our mistake is precisely to present it in another way.

Therefore you only make certain theologians furious with spiritual science if you tell them, “We speak of the Christ.” You would make them far less angry if you were able to say—which of course you are not—“We deny the existence of Christ.” What infuriates them is that we refer to Christ in a different context. Out of the best intentions in the world our friends will very easily say, “What do you want? We are on a completely Christian footing.” That is the worst thing you can possibly say to them, for that is just what goes so much against the grain with them.

This touches again on an area where we encounter freedom and necessity in a very special way. The main thing I keep trying to bring home to people is that we should not take these ideas lightly. Freedom and necessity are among the most important human concepts, and you have to realize time and again that we have to gather a great number of ideas to arrive at a more or less correct understanding of the concepts of freedom and necessity.

Where would it lead if present-day humanity were to follow nothing but natural necessity? People would obviously dream more and more, until they had nothing left but a dreary grey in grey, and they would become less and less able to use their will, until they: reached actual paralysis of the will. That is necessity. Out of the freedom of spiritual science people must obviously work to counteract this; for the time is now dawning when we will have to acquire our essential freedom out of an inner necessity which we ourselves acknowledge. Of course we might all say, “We are not going to concern ourselves with what is supposed to happen.” In that case things would come about as described. Yet that things can be different is a necessity, a necessity, however, that can only be taken hold of through understanding. We might call it a free necessity, a genuine and absolute necessity.

Here again the concepts freedom and necessity come very close together. It might sometimes have seemed as though I was only playing with the words “dreaming and intoxication.” That was most certainly not the case. You can find individual examples, and I could tell you many, many more, of the way people speak, as though in a kind of dream, about outer reality. For instance, a particular objection is often raised against what I say in anthroposophical lectures. A pet remark is, “But how can you prove that?” meaning that people require to have what is presented to them proved by comparing it with outer reality. They assume that an idea is valid only if one can point to its physical counterpart, and that this external counterpart is the proof. This is such an extremely obvious idea, that people think they are great logicians if they say, “You see, it all depends on being able to prove that a concept links up with its counterpart in outer reality.”

You can easily point out that this is no great logic but proper dream logic. When people say things like this, I usually give the answer that even where the external sense world is concerned you cannot prove reality, for if someone had never in his life seen a whale, you could never prove the existence of whales through logic alone, could you? Pointing to the reality is something quite different from proving a thing. So much for dream-logic.

I can put it even more plainly. Suppose I paint a portrait of a living person, and someone gives as his objective opinion “This portrait is very like the person,” and goes on to explain that this is so because when he compares the portrait with the person, they both look the same. The likeness is due to the fact that the portrait agrees with reality. Does the correspondence to external reality cause the likeness? Why does he say the picture is like the model? Because it corresponds to external reality. The external reality is what is true. Now imagine that the model dies, and we look at his portrait thirty years later. Is it no longer like him, thirty years later, because it does not agree with external reality any more? The person is no longer there. We can assume that he was cremated a long time ago. Does the likeness depend on the external reality being there? Clear thinking knows it does not. In the case of dream-thinking one can say that in order to prove anything one has to be able to point to external reality. But this is only true for dream-thinking, dream-logic. For surely, just because a person passes from existence to nonexistence, a portrait of him does not change from being like him to being unlike him!

You see, many things can be made into a necessity if people want to adapt their logic accordingly, especially when we find in every article about logic nowadays “The truth of a concept consists in, or can be proved by, the fact that one can point to the external reality in the physical world.” But this definition of truth is nonsense, and this becomes evident in cases like the comparison with the portrait. If you consult so-called scientific books today—not the kind that deal with pure science—all they do is give descriptions, and if we stick to descriptions, what does it matter if we remain in mere dreams? If some people want to describe nothing more than the dream of outer life and do not pretend to build a world view, let them. However, a world view based on this is a dream view. And we can see that. Wherever this step is taken, you usually find dream-philosophy.

It is quite ridiculous how unable people are to think, that is to say, to think in such a way that their thinking is based on the element on which it ought to be based. I have copied out a statement Professor Ziehen makes on page 208 of these lectures, in which he wants particularly to point out that we cannot find the will that underlies an action. He puts it like this, “Thinking consists of a series of mental images, and the psychic part”—that is, the soul content—“of an action is also a series of mental images with the particular characteristic that the last link in the chain is a mental image of movement.”

There is the clock. The will is eliminated, isn't it? I see the clock. That is now a mental image. The will does not exist and I see the clock. This clock has an effect on me in some way by setting my cerebral cortex into some sort of motion, and then passes from the cerebral cortex into a kind of motor zone, as physiology tells us. One thing passes on to the next. This is the thought image of movement. I have first of all an image of the clock, and the image of the movement succeeds the activity of the imagining the movement, not by way of will but by way of the image of movement. “I have only a series of mental images,” says Ziehen. Thinking consists of a series of mental images, and the psychic part of an action is also a series of mental images. The will is unquestionably eliminated. It is not there. First of all I observe the clock and then the movement of my hand. That is all.

You can track down the logic this contains by translating this statement into another one. You can just as well say, “Thinking consists of a series of mental images. So far so good. And when we look at a machine, the psychic process is just another mental image, with the particular characteristic that the last link in the chain is a mental image of a moving machine.” One is exactly the same as the other. You have merely eliminated the machine's driving power. You have merely added the mental image of the moving machine to what you were thinking before.

This is what this dream-logic consists of. Where the outer world is concerned, a person who applies dream-logic does of course admit the existence of impulses of some sort, but not in the case of the inner world, because he wants to eliminate the will. Ziehen's whole book is full of dream-logic of this kind, eliminating the will. At the same time of course the I is also being eliminated, which is interesting. According to him, the I is also nothing more than a series of mental images. He actually explicitly says so.

The following interesting thing can happen. Forgive me if I let you into some of the intimate secrets involved in the preparation of a lecture like today's. I had to give today's lecture, didn't I? I wanted to bring you not just an overall picture of what I had to say but also some details. So I had to get this book out and look at it again, which I did. I could of course not read you the whole book but had to limit myself to a selection of passages. I certainly wanted to show you that today's world view based on dream-science cannot include the will, the will is really not there. I have shown you what the author has to say about it in this book of his. I wanted to draw your special attention to what the author says about the will, that is to say, what he says against it. So I look up “will” at the back of the book; aha, page 205 and following, and turn there to see what he says about it. I did tell you today too, though, that in the first instance the will is only perceptible in the physical world in the I. So when we speak of the true I, we actually have to speak of the I that wills. Therefore I also had to show you how the person who has nothing but a dream view based on science speaks of the I. To show you that he simply denies the will, I read you the passage from “Mental image of movement” to “the will is eliminated.”

I also wanted to read you something briefly on what he says about the I. So I turned to the index again—but I does not occur at all! That is entirely consistent, of course. So we have as a matter of course a book on physiological psychology or psychiatry that does not mention the I! There is no reference to it in the index and, if you go through it, you will see that only the mental image of the I occurs, just a mental image of course. The author lets mental images pass, for they are only another word for mechanical processes of the brain. But the I as such does not figure at all; it is eliminated.

You see it has already become an ideal, this eliminating of the I. But if humanity follows nature, then by the sixth post-Atlantean epoch the I will be eliminated altogether in earnest, for if the impulses of will proceeding from the center of one's being are lacking, people will hardly speak of an I. During the fifth epoch human beings have had the task to advance to talking up an I. But they could lose this I again if they do not really search for it through inner effort. Those who know anything at all about this aspect of the world could tell you things about the number of people one already meets who say they sense a weakness of their I. How many people are there today who do not know what to do with themselves, because they do not know how to fill their souls with spiritual content? Here we are facing a chapter of unspeakable misery of soul that is more widespread in our time than one usually imagines. For the number of people unable to cope with life because they cannot find impulses within themselves to support their I in the world of appearances is constantly growing.

This in turn is connected with something I have often spoken about here, namely, that up to now it was essential that people should work towards acquiring a conception of their I. And we live in the time when this is finally being properly acquired. You know that in Latin, which was the language of the fourth epoch, the word ego was only used as an exception. People then did not speak of the I, it was still contained in the verb. The more world evolution, and language too, approached the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the more the I became separated. The Christ impulse is to help us find this I in the right way. The fact that in Central Europe in particular this I is uniting itself in its purest form with the Christ impulse is expressed in the language itself, in that through the inner necessity of evolution the word for I (German: Ich) is built up out of the initials of Christ: I-C-H, Jesus Christ.

This may well seem a dream to those who want to stay nowadays in the realm of dream-science. Those who wake themselves from this dream view of life will appreciate the great and significant truth of this fact. The I expresses the connection the human being has to Christ. But people have to cherish it by filling it with the content of spiritual science. However, they will be able to do this only if with the help of science they make freedom a necessity. Really, how could people have said in earlier times that it used to be the normal thing for people to remember previous incarnations? Yet for our coming earth lives it will be normal.

Just as in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch human beings have to take hold of their I and bring it to life, so it will be the normal thing in the future for people to have a stronger and stronger memory of their previous lives. We could just as well say, “Spiritual science is the right preparation for remembering earlier lives in the right way.” But those who run away from spiritual science will not be able to bring this memory of past lives up into consciousness. Their inner being will feel something lacking.

That is to say, people will fall into two categories. One group will know that when they examine their innermost soul, it will lead them back into earlier lives. The others will feel an inner urge that comes to expression as a longing. Something does not want to emerge. Throughout their whole incarnation something will not want to come up, but will remain unknown like a thought one searches and cannot find. This will be due to insufficient preparation for remembering previous earth lives.

When we speak of these things, we are speaking of something real, absolutely real. You have to have properly taken hold of the I through spiritual science if you are to remember it in later earth lives. Is there anything you can remember without making a mental picture of it? Need we wonder that people cannot yet remember the 1 when they did not have a mental picture of it in earlier epochs? Everything is understandable with true logic. But the dream-logic of the so-called monism of our time is obviously always going to oppose what has to come into being through the true logic of spiritual science.

• 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860, German philosopher.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 3. Bernhard Bolzano, 1781–1848, mathematician and logician from Bohemia.
• 4. Theodor Ziehen, 1862–1950. Published Theory of Knowledge on the basis of Psycho-Physiology and Physics in 1913.
• 5. Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906, German philosopher. Arthur Drews, 1865–1935, philosopher. Denied the existence of Jesus.

Today we want to listen to a recitation from the poetry of Friedrich Lienhard and Wilhelm Jordan. Then I will add something of an anthroposophical literary consideration to it about the present time and its tasks. This will conclude our evening, but first I would like to say a few words by way of introduction.

Friedrich Lienhard is one of those poets of the present time of whom we are able to say that as far as his own striving in a certain connection, he comes near to the striving of spiritual science. On October 4, 1915, he celebrated his 50th birthday and we at Dornach joined others from all sides in sending our congraulations to this spirit-filled poet. We can look in a certain way into the actual artistic content of the poetical nature of Friedrich Lienhard who in a certain sense has been very friendly to our movement. He himself, says that he originated from the French Alsace Lorraine region where he had to pass through many difficulties in order to attain what he calls his world conception. He tried to develop out of the European German nature so as to bring to effectiveness the actual beating in of the waves of this Central European German being. We can say how there lives within him above all that which I have just attempted to characterize, an element that can perhaps only be evaluated correctly when we realize its worth as we approach it from the spiritual artistic point of view which is fostered in the science of the spirit. In Lienhard's poetry we have, above all, the wonderful description of nature, lyric nature, but put in a very special way when he attempts to bring human beings into speech with nature. Also there is something of the nature of the human being which actually proceeds directly out of the natural way and shows its spirit in nature existence. Now, what does all this come from?

It comes from something that one can perhaps only correctly notice with Friedrich Lienhard when one attempts to evaluate art today which one should always do—so as to realize that there is something which has been completely extinguished from the consciousness of mankind: people no longer are able to evaluate artistic representations. Today they focus completely upon the content of the art, on its representation characteristics and allow that to work on them, but they fail to realize that the important thing is the formal element, the artistic formal element of what is being attempted, not the content so much but how the ideas and the feeling come together, how they undulate in waves and then dissipate. It is very important to see how the poetic language comes into existence in the actual undulation of the waves. In Lienhard you can see quite readily how in the poetical expression of his experiences there is a swaying of the ruling of elemental spirituality, a sort of participation of the poetic soul with that which we would characterize as something which lives in an elementary way in the ether world behind the pure sense existence when the etheric element is brought to manifestation in a natural way as, for example, in the expression of the soul life of young children. If you follow the words of Friedrich Lienhard in a literal way, it appears as if the elementary spirits want to move on further through these words, they sort of ripple through, warm through, weave through all this natural phenomena and this rippling, this warming, this living, this weaving through of elementary beings in relationship to nature continues itself with such a poet who understands how to really live with the spirit of nature.

A further element of Friedrich Lienhard is that precisely through his ability to grasp the great connections of mankind and of the world, with which, I might say, he with his feelings is inwardly connected without anything of the narrow chauvenistic nationalistic spirit entering into these feelings, you can find in him the driving, working forces and beings of the folk life; and again the folk life not out of the details of the accidental individuals, but from the whole weaving and swaying of the priciple of the Folk Soul itself and being able to grasp all that and to place the single personalities into the great spiritual connections in which they are able to stand within the life of the folk. Through that fact Freiedrich Lienhard is in a position of being able to represent such a figure as that of the priest Oberlin of the Alsace Steinthal who was spiritualized by a kind of atavistic clairvoyance. He was able on the one hand to present Oberlin in a real plastic three dimentional way and on the other hand to grasp him in an extraordinarily intimate soul way. Out of these impulses, Lienhard was able to call forth into the present time the divine figures of antiquity, not in the way of these ancient hero sagas, but he took not only the content of it but also attempted in present day speech to find the possibility of again reawakening that which as a beating in of the waves lived through this ancient time and to be able to realize it can still beat into our present age. Lienhard was able to awaken all this and therefore we can say in a certain sense, as it were, that Friedrich Lienhard is one of the most superior poets of the present age, because other poets of this age have attempted to transpose themselves more into the naturalistic, the realistic aspect also rejecting the real artistic spiritual and in that way wanted to create something new. However, the real poet, when he wants to create something new, does not try to use these naturalistic whimsies of our present age, but creates something new by being able to grasp in a new way the stream of the eternal beauty; he grasps that which is eternal in a new way so that art remains art. And real art can never remain real art without being permeated by the spirit. Through this aspect it was possible for Friedrich Lienhard to approach much nearer to that which he called: The Way Toward Weimer. Acutally in his free time he had produced this periodical for a long time which he called Ways Toward Weimer in which he attempted to turn to the ideas and artistic impulses of that great period which began towards the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, and to recognize that which is in these, precisely much of real worth which existed in that particular period which had been forgotten and had faded away. For that reason, in his later artistic period he attempted again to deepen, to make it more inward, I might say, so that ultimately it was possible for such inward poems to come out as those who relate to personalities such as Odelia and the like. He knew how to unite himself with all that in a true sense with the Christian impulses which weave and undulates through mankind. And it is very noticeable that he, not by the external content of his poetic creation but through the way in which they carry the elementary nature right into the details, that he was able to approach the alliteration aspect of the artistic element which appeared as if it was being lost from the whole of German literature. This allilteration and that which is related to the German nature, has with it the whole central European German Folk substance. Because of Lienhard's ability to do that, that brought him close to Wilhelm Jordan, another peot who partly through his own fault and partly through the fault of our age has been little understood by our present time. We shall attempt to bring Wilhelm Jordan to you later on through recitation.

Precisely through alliteration, Wilhelm Jordan attempted again to renew, as he called it, a way of speaking which belonged to times gone by. He could do nothing else than bring this formal element of the ancient poetry, again into the present time. He attempted to lift it up to great moving impulses out of the smallness of everyday things. One must say that it is literally a calamity, although it is not quite without Jordan's own fault that such a poem as “The Damier” which attempted to bring the world moving spiritual principles into connection with mankind upon the earth, that such a creation as “The Danier” should be passed over without effect in our present time. This is partly his fault, because he allowed himself to be damaged by the natural scientific way of looking at things. Much of this damaged his poem “The Niebelungen”, whereas instead of having the deeper principles which should have been applied in this poem, he allows the naturalistic principle of heredity to dominate it; he allowed the substance transition of the forces of inheritance from one generation to another to dominate instead of the soul aspect dominating. There is too much domination of the blood aspect in a certain sense through that. You can say that Wilhelm Jordan paid his tribute to the natural scientific grasping of the present age. However, on the other hand he has taken away from his poems what perhaps already in an earlier time would have been able to give the great spiritual impulses to the artistic striving of mankind, so that not everything would have had to sink into the inartistic barbarism, which in many cases in the later period appeared in the place of the earlier spiritual principles. We can indeed see how today people want to scoff about that which Wilhelm Jordan wanted to do. But I might say that as far as we are concerned, it is our job to be able, in a certain sense, to allow these great impulses to work upon our soul wherever they might appear, because nevertheless there will come a time when these inpulses will have to fulfill a certain mission in mankind's development.

Certainly the poet, Friedrich Lienhard, will be recognized in wide circles. However, in our circles we should attempt to discover that which perhaps can be found precisely in him, because that will be, above all, what I believe will be able to carry his artistic strivings together upon the waves of the spiritual scientific strivings into the future.

Having said that now we will listen to the poems of Friedrich Lienhard and then to some extracts from the poem “Niebelungen” by Wilhelm Jordan. (The following are the poems recited by Frau Dr. Steiner: “Faith”; “The Morning Wind”; “A Greeting to the Forest”; “TheCreative Light”; “The Lonely Stone”; “Have You Also Experienced?”; “All The Tender FLower Cups”; “Soul Wandering”; “The Dance of the Elves”; “The Summer Night”. “The Songs of Odelian”; “Autumn On the Mount of Odelian”; “St. Odelia” then a recitation from the Niebelungen Song by Wilhelm Jordan.)

It is also good to allow this type of poetic art to work upon us. We have in Friedrich Lienhard a poet who really attempts in the present time to carry in spiritual idealistic soul experiences which are strong enough to unite themselves with nature experiences; and with such things one can detect something which is more appropriate to the ‘how’ in art than to the ‘what’ in art. How wonderful is that which draws itself to the magic in the district around the Mount of Odelian and how beautiful it is, how directly lyrical is the perception which streams out of this protective patroness, Odelia, of the Cloister of Mount Odelian. The fact that Odelia was once persecuted by her horrible father, that she was blinded and precisely through the loss of her eye sight, she achieved the mystical capacity of healing the blind, making them see, this is the saga around which all the rest gathers itself. All that which in truth gathers itself around this saga in deep mysticism is lyrically united with the nature which is around the Alsacian Mount of Odelian and it finds itself precisely within these poems by Friedrich Lienhard which have been recited to you. You can find in these poems that he gives the real opportunity for, I might say, the swinging in of an elemental nature which weaves itself in the form of his poems much of which reminds you of the forgotten Wilhelm Jordan. From this small sample which we have been able to hear today you will be able on the one hand to realize how very much this poet attempted to place these figures from the great spiritual weaving of life before us to create them out of this spiritual weaving of life and to allow us to realize that the weaving of the spiritual world works in the external world. You can experience precisely through Wilhelm Jordan, I believe, how the poetic soul can unite itself with a world historical streaming so that in that which confronts us in a poetic artistic form, there actually lives the striving of a spiritual stream which works through the development of the world.

When we were together last Tuesday, I had to ask the question: What would be the outcome of the development of mankind on earth if it were not possible for a spiritual beating-in to find its way into that which exists in the pure external physical existence. Not only in the external realm of scientific knowledge, of the social life and so on, but also in the realm of art, the fact that confronts us and comes to meet us very strongly is that we live in a very critical age, an age which is filled with crises, because if that which is living in spiritual science is not able to take hold of human soul life, then art itself would gradually disappear from mankind, because it cannot exist without the spirit. This art is trying to disappear from such figures as Wilhelm Jordan. However such figures as Friedrich Lienhard have attempted to hold fast to that which tried to disappear—the spiritual aspect—from Wilhelm Jordan. Today people do not see much of the threatening danger of the artistic decay, because in many connections, intoxication also dominates in this realm of dream life of which I spoke Tuesday, of which one can really only perceive if one has an organ to grasp it. I can only wish that more and more people were actually able to realize from a spiritual scientific perception what it means for the ... is an indication of what is going to come into art if this rejection of all spirtual life, of spiritual perception, still continues. One of the great tragedies of the modern times is that such a large nunber of people are able to consider art as all that which is represented by Rheinhard. When one receives a real artistic perception from Spiritual Science, then one will be able to see clearly the so-called rubbish involved in Rheinhard, because that which in modern life appears in the artistic domain is nothing other than a distorted world. When one really attempts to grasp the life of the present time, one can, I might say, indicate the actual places where a life which has been eaten up by materialism affects the art of our age and causes it to fall into a morass. You can see how everything of what art really is is forgotten. In order for a real artistic sense to continue itself into the development of mankind, it is necessary that that which comes to us from earlier times, which, for example, lives also in Lienhard's poetry and which in a certain way is a kind of nature pantheism and a kind of spirit pantheism can develop from that into something more concrete, so that human beings are able to learn to understand the manifoldness of life so that they can see the etheric, astral and the spiritual by the side of the physical sense aspect. Without seeing these things mankind remains blind, blind precisely in relationship to the artistic. As far as the artistic perceptions is concerned, the world as it is today is predisposed to only take in the quite solid external sense aspect, to look on it exactly as it is and to describe it as it is; and that is not art.

One can also experience this nonsensical unclear staggering and wabbling, this frenzy we find with reference to the phenomena of life as it is regarded by people who are called fine psychologists. It often makes your heart sad to see that so few people are strongly adapted enough to perceive what is happening in this realm, to see it in such a way as to be able to rebel against it. Contemplate human beings as they confront us. The artist must indeed look upon them in so far as he is able to place them into the deeper life of the world. If one looks upon people with that particular soul organ which the evolutionary development of mankind has already brought into existence, then we need the possibility of saying the following. There is a person; he is configured in such and such a way. He has experienced this or that thing. We know that this person is more inserted into his physical life, another is more inserted into his ego, another more into his astral body. We must have a living feeling for the fact that the characteristics of mankind can divide themselves in so far as they are taken hold of more by the physical in one case, another more by the etheric, another more by the astral and another more by the ego aspect; and if one is not able to do this in our present time and still wants to describe people artistically in poetry, etc, then one gets the sort of staggering which today is regarded as art.

You must, I might say, take hold of the significant phenomena of our age in order to obtain a real understanding of what is actually happening. For example, one can meet four people who, shall we say, have been brought together by karma. Then one can understand how they are brought together in certain connections through karma when we see them together, how the stream of karma also flows in the progress of the world and how these human beings precisely in a certain way, through their karma, wanted to insert themselves into the world. One will never be able to understand things from the standpoint which is possible today if one is not able to see such karmic connections. Let us take the four brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, Alyosha and Smerdyakov in Dostoevski's novel The Brothers Karamazov. When you are really able to see them with the eye of the soul, you actually see in these four brothers four types which you can only understand through the way they are carried by karma. Thus one knows the following. The four brothers carry a stream of karma into the world in such a way that they must be the sons of a typical scoundral of the present age who has these four brothers as his sons. They are carried in in so far as they have selected it through this karma. They are placed one by the side of the other so that one sees how they differ from each other, and this can only be understood when one knows the following. In Dimitri Karamazov there is an overpowering by the “I”; in Aloysha Karamazov there is an overpowering by the astral body; in Ivan Karamazov there is an overpowering by the etheric body and in Smerdyakov there is a complete overpowering by the physical body. A light of understanding falls upon these four brothers when one is able to consider them from this standpoint.

Now, just think how a poet with Wilhelm Jordan's gift and with a spiritual grasping of the world as it must be in accordance with our modern age, how such a person would place these four brothers side by side, how he would grasp their spiritual and fundamental conditioning. How would Wilhelm Jordan do it?

Let us consider Dostoevski; how does he grasp the situation? He grasps it in no other way than that he places these four brothers as the sons of a quite typical drunken man in a certain stagnated society of the present age. Let us take the first son, Dimitri, the son of a half adventurous, half hysterical woman who after she first elopes with the drunken sop, Fyador Karamazov, beats him and finally cannot endure him anymore and leaves him with his son, Dimitri, the eldest son. Everything is now placed only an inheritance, it is so placed that one has the impression that here the poet describes something like a modern psychiatrist who only focuses upon the coarsest principle of heredity and has no inkling of the spiritual connections, and wants to bring before us the sin of heredity. Now we have the next two sons, Ivan and Aloysha. They come fron the second wife. Naturally the sin of heredity will work differently with these two sons. They come from the so-called screaming Liza, who, because she is not half hysterical but completely hysterical has spasms of screaming. Whereas the first wife soundly thrashed the old drunkard, now the old drunkard thrashes the screaming Liza. Now we have the fourth son, who, I might say, is overpowered by everything which is in the physical body have Smerdyakov, a kind of mixture of a wise, thoughtful and idiotic man, someone who is quite imbecilic and also a partly clever man. He is also the son of the old drunkard and has been begotten with a deaf person who was regarded as the village idiot, namely, the stinking Lizaveta who is seduced by the old drunkard. She dies in childbirth and it is obvious that he does not know that Smerdyakov is his son. Smerdyakov then remains in the house and now all the scenes which occur between these personalities are played out.

As far as Dimitri is concerned it is understandable that he is influenced by his heredity. He is a man in whom the quite unconscious ego flows and pushes him further in life so that he acts out of the unconscious, but of the thoughtlessness and he is so delineated to us that, in the main, you realize that you are not dealing here with a healthy spiritual person, but with someone of a more hysterical nature. Therefore you will find the effect of all that from the nature evolution of the present, that present which will not permit itself to be influenced by that which comes from the spiritual world conception. All the unclear instincts which can actually just as well develop themselves into the best sort of mysticism as well as the most external criminality, in all that you can find the transition from the unconscious, all that Dostoevski deliniates in Dimitri Karamazov. He wants to depict as Russian, because he always tries to describe the true Russianness.

Ivan, the other son, is a Westerner, they call him the Wesler because he wants to familiarize himself with the culture of the West; whereas Dimitri knows very little of the culture of the West but prefers to function out of the Russian instincts. Ivan was in Paris. He studied all sorts of things. He has taken up the Western world conception; he argues with people; he is completely filled with the materialistic world conception of the West modified however by the brooding of the Russian. He argues with all types of people using all sorts of thoughts about how the modern spiritual culture can enter into the midst of the instincts: Should a person be an athiest? Should a person not be an athiest? Can you assume that there is a God? Can you say that there is no God? Can you arrive at an assumption of God? Yes, I accept God, but I do not accept the world. That is the sort of discussion that goes on and on. This is how it is with Ivan.

Now, the third son, Aloysha, becomes a monk early. He is the one in whom the astral body has the superior powers but it also shows that all sorts of instincts work in him, the same instincts as his older brother had developed in him developed through mysticism. Dimitri, who comes from another mother, actually is predisposed to criminality which manifests itself as with other people, but in the case of Aloysha it manifests itself differently, he becomes a mystic. You can say that criminality is only a special development of the same instinct which on the other hand prays for self-emulation—the belief in divine love which goes through the world. Both of them come out of the lower instinctive nature of men, but they develop themselves in different ways. We are not objecting to having these personalities in art, because anything which is real can be the object of art. The important part is not so much the content but how it is presented—is there a weaving of the spiritual in it?—that is the important point.

In Russian culture you have a certain spirituality which is a further development of natural relationships which I have described in my previous lectures as a contrast of spiritual relationships. From the very beginning Dostoevski was a hater of Germany. He had his task of instinctively letting none of West European culture flow into his soul. Because of his being a true Russian, Dostoevski did not come out of the real soul aspect, but that which comes from his subconscious nature arose, all the brooding in the inner human being, that sort of worked itself out and developed itself in the art with the exclusion of all spirtual aspects.

Now we have in Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov that remarkable episode of the great inquisitor in front of whom the reincarnated Christ appears. And being a true orthodox Christian of his time, this priest knows that he has to put Jesus Christ in prison. That is the first thing that he does. Then he gets the inquisition to give him a hearing. The great inquisitor who develops religion in the sense of the Christianity of our age says to himself: “Ah, yes, Christ has come back. You are indeed the Christ. However, you cannot enter into Christianity as it is now with our priests of the holy order, because you do not understand these things. Take what you yourself have performed. Has it done anything to make people happy? We had to put right what was impractical in your approach. If Christianity as you know it came among people, it would not have the sort of salvation which we have brought to the people, because when you really want to bring salvation to people, you have to bring them a teaching which actually works upon human beings. Now, you believe the teaching also must be the truth. However, you cannot begin to confront human beings with such things. Above all, human beings have to believe the teachings we have given to them; they have to be forced to accept those teachings. We have done better than you. We have established authority. Therefore the only thing that can be done is to take this reincarnated Christ over to the inquisition.” In the case of Dostoevski you see that there is nothing at all spiritual; you see Christ appearing externally in the physical body and then His being broken up by the-great inquisitor.

It is very necessary that we understand the characteristics of our present age where you get books entitled: Jesus, A Psychopathical study; another entitled: Jesus Christ Considered from the Psychiatric Standpoint. Here you have the standpoint of modern evolution which is the pathological situation of Jesus Christ. A well known psychiatrist—people run after this—writes epoch making works about psychiatry; he gives talks to students and colleagues not only about Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, all sorts of people, then he also talks about Jesus Christ.

Now if we just sit down and listen to Anthroposophy with a sort of lust for sensation or some mystical sensation, we cannot move forward; that is not good enough. This Spiritual Science must become living, it must become living impulses within us. We are not anthroposophists because every week we learn about the elementary spirits, about the hierarchies, and so on. No, we really become spiritual scientists if we are able to carry our ideas into all the single details of life and Anthroposophy gives us the sort of mood which will enable us to actually feel a disgust for many things that are going on at the present time. But let us not be fooled by the sort of standpoint which the Theosophists think they are duty bound to follow, the idea of universal human love. Because we believe in universal human love, we avoid all the disgusting things that are happening all around us, we avoid giving them the right names because we are filled with universal love. People today are not inclined to keep their eyes open. Now this is not the guilt of a single people; it is the guilt of the whole spiritual life of the present. Before we come to any judgements about anything, it is necessary that we make sure that we know all that we need to know so that a judgement can be formed. Let us consider Tolstoy, for example. Now everyone who has listened to me for any length of time knows how I see the greatness which is in Tolstoy; nevertheless we must not forget the other aspects of his personality. Here we have a great spirit of the East filled with bitter hatred for what comes fron Germanism. People did not know about that, because the translators of Tolstoy into German left out these very reprehensible passages. Therefore they presented literature with a false Tolstoy. The so-called critics of our age consider Goethe and Schiller and then they put Dostoevski side by side with them without realizing the vast difference. Whereas Goethe and Schiller had some spiritual motivation in them, Dostoevski was thoroughly absorbed by our modern culture; he reflected it. Now, these things must be brought out in order that one can get a perception of the significance of our anthroposophical striving.

I wanted to add this sort of anthroposophical literary consideration to the recitation which you heard today.

Today I would like to return to much of that which I said in previous lectures and I would like to amplify, in the first place, certain ideas about the inner being of man, about the soul spiritual nature of man. You know that we speak in the first place of that particular member of the inner human being which we designate with an abstract expression as the ether body. Whereas the physical body of man is perceptible for the external senses to external science which is bound to the intellect and its observation, we know that the ether body is something of a super-sensible nature. Furthermore, we speak of the next member of human nature as the so-called astral body. We remember how often we have emphasized the fact that one cannot say that the inner being of man is completely unknown to us. Indeed, man perceives within his bodily existence in the physical world, he perceives his thinking, his feeling and his willing. He experiences it inwardly and he experiences this thinking, feeling and willing as being radiated through by his “I”. One can say that man inwardly perceives this thinking, feeling and willing. However one cannot say that you can actually perceive your astral body. Also one cannot say that you really perceive your “I”, because this “I”—and we have brought this to your attention in the course of these lectures—this “I” of which man speaks falls back into unconsciousness with every sleep and is actually only a reflection of the real “I”. Therefore, in a certain sense, it can he concluded also that this “I” with this thinking, feeling and willing, is in a similar way only an expression, a manifestation of the actual inner being of man, just as with the physical body what you have is a manifestation, an expression of the spiritual nature of that which we designate as the etheric body.

Now, man is obviously happy when, in reference to any given domain of knowledge, he has such a very tightly fit division which he can neatly preserve. Therefore people are so happy when they know that man consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and ego. However, in the man—and I want to emphasize this—all you have with these four expressions are just four words, nothing more than four expressions. And when you advance to real contemplation, then you must, in a certain sense, always pass beyond the borders which are so easily established by these expressions. you speak in a general way, to be sure you may say: Thinking, feeling and willing proceed in the astral body. However that is really only a one-sided abstract way in which the fact of thinking exhausts itself. Just as we as human beings stand in the first place within the physical world, so, to be sure, the impulse to the thinking which exist in the astral body is that impulse which proceeds from the “I”. However, the thinking develops itself as a thought only through the fact that we have the mobile ether body. Our whole thinking would remain unconscious to us as physical human beings if the astral body did not send its impulses into the ether body and the ether body in its mobility would be unable to take up the thought impulses of the astral body. And every thought again would simply just pass over in a transitory way without having the possibility of a memory if we did not have a physical body. You cannot say the physical body is the carrier of the memory. No. The carrier of the memory is the ether body. However, for us human beings, if our thinking were to merely flow along just as dreams flow along and if it were not possible to have it engraved in the physical materiality of the physical body, then our thoughts here in the physical body can assert themselves through the fact that we have this physical body. Thus you see how this thinking is actually a very complicated process. It has its impulses in the astral body, actually already in the “I”. These impulses continue themselves as forces in the ether body, call forth the thoughts, and the thoughts in their turn engrave their tracks into the physical body. And through the fact that they are imprinted, you can always fetch them out of the memory again during the physical life.

Now, just consider—and we have often spoken about this situation—what the memory actually represents for man here in the physical body. As you know, man has experiences. He works these experiences over; then he goes away from these experiences. There comes a time when such experiences relate themselves to the human being as if we knew nothing about them, as if we no longer stood in relationship to them. However, there again comes the time when we are able to fetch the thought experiences out of our inner being. That which we have already experienced is present for us again in in the form of memory. Now, in the first place, man must believe the following. This process of memory belongs to him; it belongs to his soul. When we as human beings walk through the streets and associate in society, someone outside of us with external physical sense organs cannot really know what is hidden within us as our memories, that is, he cannot know what sort of experiences we have had. We carry these in our soul. I might say the sheaths of the physical body are so arranged that they cover over our soul for us. It is as if true physical body is a mantle which hides our soul and in which we can preserve these memories. They belong to us and they work in us through our whole life. We make the outside world into our own inner world. Then we carry this external world in the form of memories with us through existence. We carry these memories as our own possession.

Now, it would be a great mistake if one were to believe that this carrying of the memories through life really comprises the whole process. This is not the case. Darwin, for example, had the correct idea when he investigated to see if rain worms had a special task, and he discovered that rain worms are not there just to merely enjoy their existence but have the very important task of making the soil fruitful as they crawl through it. These are things which natural science certainly admits and this is a ground upon which natural science believes itself secure. Now, natural science, in so far as it does that, should not be criticized because it is really good when they enter into certain single details. However, the problem is that one builds world views upon such details. Obviously you must consider the saying about a man who digs for treasure and is happy when he finds rain worms. However, from the spiritual point of view one can ask the following: Was this activity through which man forms thoughts during his whole life and preserves them in his memory, has that any significance for the whole cosmos? Is this process of memorization only a process which occurs in ourselves? Now, the materialist says that obviously that is a process which only occurs in us. With death we put our physical body in the grave and then that which we have preserved in us as memory is obviously something which is rarely an extinguished thing. We are not going to enter into such a materialistic reply. We want to ask the question: Is our thinking process and memory process something quite different from that which occurs in our memory?

So it is. While we think, while we form thoughts and out of our experiences preserve these memories, during this time we occupy ourselves not only with our thoughts, but the whole world of the Third Hierarchy occupies themselves with our thoughts, the Hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. When we think, we think not only for ourselves, we think and we preserve our thoughts in our inner being in order that a field of activity should be created for Angels, Archangels and Archai. Whereas we believe that our thoughts live only in us, actually the three spiritual Hierarchies occupy themselves with our thoughts. The very smallest of that which we propose with our thoughts is something which concerns us. Even when we have forgotten the thoughts, they are in us and we again call these thoughts out of our memory. Just as we as human beings occupy ourselves on earth with our machines or with eating and drinking, so do the Angels, Archangels and Archai occupy themselves with a web which is formed from our thoughts; they work continuously on our thoughts. It is thus only the side of the activity of the thoughts which is turned toward us that we know about. There is in addition another side and this other side of our thoughts so appears for spiritual perception that we can say the following. While our thoughts which we have in our inner being occupy themselves from outside, the above mentioned spiritual beings weave these thoughts so that we, when we achieve this knowledge, can say the following of ourselves. Our thought process is acutely not something unnecessary for the world. Our thought process is something not only for ourselves, but it stands within the whole world development and contributes to it so that something new can continuously be woven into the world development. If we were not born as single individuals, if we had no thoughts, if we had not preserved memories in us, then at our death, that portion which would have been able to be woven out of our thoughts, that which we ourselves do not weave, that would be lost for world development. And when we pass through the portal of death—the elementary process I have often described—we put aside our physical body and this is given over to the elements of the earth in various ways. Our ether body remains with for a short time. It represents itself to our inner being as a great life tableau which is in front of us. Everything of that which we otherwise remember, that which has gone on in a time continuum becomes as a mighty panorama all at once, a mighty life tableau placed around us. Then, however, our etheric being is separated from us. It is, as it were, drawn out of us.

Now, who does that? Indeed, that is done by the beings of the three Hierarchies we mentioned and they weave it gradually into the cosmic ether so that after our death this web of the cosmic ether consists of that which we during our life between birth and death have added to it, also that which was worked over by the beings of these next three Hierarchies. The new webbing is taken away from us and is interwoven with the whole cosmic all. Every human being has a knowledge of this when he passes through the portal of death, since, for the human being after he has passed the portal of death, something enters which can be described in no other way than as follows. Now, you must see that the ether body is separated from him; his etheric web has been interwoven into the universal cosmic ether. That which he has carried in himself all through his life is now outside, it is external. And that is important. That person who knows these things indicates it with a short phrase which one should call forth before the soul in a meditative way. It can be described through a very essential process by saying the following. The inner being becomes the external, which means that which we always have felt as our thought life becomes external world. Just as here we are surrounded by rivers, mountains, trees, clouds, stones and stars, so after our death something occurs which one can characterize in following way. That which during our physical life has lived in in us now has become a portion of the external world so that it can now be perceived by us.

In addition to this ether body, we have the world of our astral body. This world of our astral body comes to our consciousness, in the first place, so that we feel it as thinking; we feel the world of the astral body as thinking. However, the thinking I have precisely characterized, indeed, sends its impulses down into the ether body so that the thinking itself cannot be conscious in the astral body. You can only become aware of feeling and willing in your astral body. You cannot be conscious of your thinking there, but you become aware of your thoughts in the ether body. It is very important that feeling and willing can become conscious for us, it has to go down into the ether body. Throughout our whole life we feel and we will, we foster feelings about certain experiences. These are processes in our astral body. That again is a very characteristic weaving, but now not just a web in thoughts as I have formerly described it but a web of perception, feeling and impulses toward willing. Higher beings also work in that which we have throughout our whole life as feeling and will impulses. Just as in our thinking beings of the Third Hierarchy work, so there work in our feeling and our will impulses the beings of the Second Hierarchy including the Thrones.

Just imagine how we stand in the world when we know these things how we feel ourselves inserted into the spiritual world. On the one side we say to ourselves: Man, you go through the world thinking, but your thinking in so far as it is turned to its inner side is only the one side of thinking. That which you think is substance for the work of the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai. In so far as we feel and will, we create substance for the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Thrones, or the Spirits of Will. Just as the human being cultivates the earth and works it over, he does not know that while he is working over the earth that it is only one side which is worked over, but on the other side actual processes are occurring which he does not know of with his normal consciousness. In a similar way, man believes that his feelings and his will impulses merely belong to him, but they are a field for the work of the indicated beings of the hierarchies.We are truly not merely physical body that only stands in connection with our environment, but we are also there as soul spiritual beings so this soul spiritual man can stand in connection with the environment. Normally one does not think about how our physical body belongs to our whole environment. But this is easy to work out.

In any given moment when you visualize yourself in a bodily way, you possess not only bones, blood, muscles and so on, but you also have a certain stream of air in yourself which you have breathed in and which you will soon breathe out. This belongs to you while you have breathed in; that was out of you in the previous moment, in the next moment it is again outside you. Just think of yourself without this stream of air. It is impossible to think in this way without realizing that you have this stream of air within you. It belongs to us, it is nonsense to think of the physical body as if it were only enclosed within the skin; whereas you are pointed to the fact that you live with the whole atmosphere environment. However, just as we through our physical body live with the atmosphere environment, with the warmth environment, so do we live with the environment of the Hierarchy of the Third Order through our thoughts and we live through our feelings and will impulses with the Beings of the Hierarchies of the Second Order and with the Spirits of Will. This is how we stand within the cosmic all.

Let us now turn our attention to passing through of the portal of death. We can then say the following. When man passes through the portal of death, we know that when his ether body is taken away from him, when the interweaving into the universal cosmic ether begins, then he has to live backwards three times as fast as he experienced during physical life between birth and death, in so far as during that period he perceives the effects of his experiences between birth and death. Thus, that which we have experienced in us during our physical life we do not perceive them just because we have perceived it here in physical life. We will perceive the feeling out of which we have executed an injury to someone else, not our feeling but that of the other person, that which we have lived through here in the physical life stands as a causative factor there and carries in itself the karma. We have not experienced the impression that our injury has made upon the other person's soul. We experience here, in the main, not that which our deeds, our actions, our thoughts have resulted in effects in the external world, we do not experience that here in the physical life, but we do experience that when we go through our backward vision in the time between death and a new birth. There we live through everything that is outside, not in the way it was experienced by us but in the way in which it was experienced by the external world with which we were in contact. Really everything which other human beings have perceived, have felt through our thoughts, through our words, we live through and because of this the external must become the inner in our new state of post mortem. Through this experience the effects of our thoughts, the effects of our deeds in life, the external effects now become inner which means something which we inwardly experience, something which is experienced by the spirit human being after death, because now he must live himself into that world in which he lived unconsciously during the time of his life.

In so far as he has an astral body, and the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy have worked upon his astral body, he must now live into that world in which his astral body gradually dissolves itself into the external, but now he experiences the external in an inward way, he really lives through it inwardly. He must learn between death and a new birth to work in that sphere in which the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy work, in which they prepare that which again can lead into a new incarnation. And, indeed, then we know that after the astral body has dissolved into the external world and man lives on further with his actual inner being in the time between death and a new birth.

When we want to understand something of this life between death and a new birth, we must make many points of view valid for ourselves. Our goal is not to be one-sided but to make various viewpoints valid so that gradually a comprehensive understanding of these processes can open themselves to us. Thus you must keep the following in view. Just as man through birth enters natural processes which around him in the mineral world, in the plant world, in the animal world, so he enters into a world where things are happening around him with the beings of the Hierarchies which we have mentioned. He is, as it were, enfolded into their activities and that which he has brought with him for them, they weave together so that it can become the foundation for his next incarnation.

You must realize that in this it is, I might say, very difficult to give our present age the correct concepts and ideas for reasons which I have often presented. The present age works precisely with the most reversed concepts in this realm. When a human being enters through birth into physical existence, he enters with certain characteristics. The present time speaks purely of heredity, and means physical heredity, and one speaks of this physical heredity in the following way. A man shows this or that characteristic. Therefore to find out where those characteristics come from, you must look for its ancestors. For example, there is a very industriously worked over book about Goethe, in which Goethe's characteristics are so presented that it has looked for one thing in this ancestor, another in that, one characteristic from a great-great grandmother, another from a great-great grandfather, and so on, as if everything that Goethe had had came to him through heredity. I have often said the following: When you say that the child has the qualities of his parents, it is just as wise a saying as a human being is wet when he falls into water and is then drawn out of it. Naturally he is wet from the water when he is taken out. In the same way he has the properties of his ancestors in him, because they have been led through his soul. There is no greater wisdom there either. Therefore to go back to causes is, for the logical aspect ultimately the most logical, because one can say the following: One wants to prove that the soul-spiritual properties come through heredity in so far as one shows that a genius like Goethe has the same characteristics which his ancestors had, but as we have said, it is no cleverer than the assertion that the man is wet after he has fallen into water.

Now, if you really want to prove that the properties of genius are concerned with heredity, then you would have to show how the descendents of a genius show the properties of the genius. In other words, if you have to prove that genius can be transmitted by heredity, that would be a proof. Look at Goethe's son. See if he has Goethe's genius. Now, behind all this there is a much deeper process. Just imagine this hypothesis, for example, just imagine that there are beings who are not able to see human beings and just imagine that one of these beings who cannot see the activity of man goes to Berlin and sees how watches are being produced everywhere. This being obviously has to say to himself: These watches produce themselves. And that is no wiser than people who say that you do not need any additional explanations about how human beings come into the world; that that occurs quite of itself in the course of propagation in the generations. These ideas can only be held by people who cannot see human beings, who cannot see that that which occurs here in the physical world is only the external expression of an activity which continuously flows down out of the spiritual world just as the activity of the watchmakers flow into the watches. Therefore that which precisely occurs here upon the earth, of which human beings in their foolishness believe that they occur completely for themselves, that is only an external physical process which is directed just as the activity of making watches is a directing activity, so the moment which I have called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my mystery dramas, from that moment on which lies within the middle between death and a new birth, there already begins that activity of the spiritual world, as it were, of inclining itself into the physical in order after centuries to lead the human being into physical existence. When man goes through the portal of death, there is the activity of a working over of that which the human being experienced in his last life which is exercised in the spiritual world. All this occurs in the first half of the life between death and a new birth. However, in the second half of the life between death and a new birth,
the preparation for the next incarnation begins. And now the following can be said about the situation.

That person who is born has ancestors; ancestors again have ancestors; these ancestors have ancestors. Just see how far this goes when you go through 30 generations. However, if you go through 30 generations, you will find that in many people, as it were, there already is the tendency which ultimately leads to the fact that man A is brought together with woman B and then they bring another human being into existence. And if the whole thing did not so occur through 30 generations, if the people had not married, A not coming together with B, therefore that human being who descends into a physical incarnation would not have ultimately been produced. From the whole working together of many people which finally peaks into two, the single individuality of the human being has been a participation in the spiritual world. Thus when we see that the son has the characteristic of his father, of his mother and then again the father's and mother's characteristics are led back to grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and so on, that is because there has previously been an influence exerted on these great-great-grandparents through 30 generations by that individuality who then later on after many centuries wants to be born and this has all been determined according to the plan to find himself as a human being through the generations. All that is a participating activity and the fact that you have similar inherited characteristics emanates from the fact that through the generations that power works down through the spiritual world which finally comes to appearance in a certain human being. This individuality already works in a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, a great-grandfather, a great-grandmother, and ultimately one gets the qualities which come to expression. It is not the physical stream which makes the inheritance, but the physical stream is inserted in this way through inheritance. Therefore, precisely the reverse of that which the so-called natural scientific view maintains, is true. In order that Goethe ultimately comes to appearance through Johann Casper Goethe and his Frau Eiya, Beings of the Second Hierarchy have worked through 30 generations in such a way that Goethe could ultimately be produced. Naturally this applies not only for genius but for eveiy single human being.

Now, you can say that this is difficult to imagine, and you could also ask yourself how is this compatable with human freedom when we have already been determined 30 generations before we descend. I know it is very complicated, but you must remember that this is complicated for the normal consciousness which has been apportioned to you during your earth existence. You will remember that what we are dealing with is not only the individual himself, but the individual in community with the Spirits of Form, with the Spirits of Motion, and so on, and so it is worked out in such a way that freedom is not influenced. Naturally this works in such a way that it corresponds to the working of these Higher Hierarchies. The situation is just like that.

There is worked together that which we are able to give over as thoughts to the cosmic ether with that which we express during our earth existence in our feeling life and in our will life. Therefore Spiritual Science is not supposed to be a totality of knowledge, but above all it should be capable of bringing forth a certain soul mood. I have attempted to indicate this soul mood in the first part of my second mystery play, in the meeting between Capaius and Benedictus, when the goal is that man as a complete human being lives here upon the earth. In order that that can happen, Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits work together so that the human being is a goal for Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits. This feeling, I might say, the thankfulness, the gratitude to the spiritual universe, this feeling to know ourselves in the spiritual universe must flow into our souls through spiritual science. This must become as natural for us as it is natural for us to know about the connections with the physical world.

Science today has advanced so far that everyone is aware of the fact that man cannot just live on his own resources but needs the atmosphere, that he is a menber of the whole environment. When he is hungry or thirsty, then he notices that the external world is necessary in a physical way for his existence, that he stands within the external world, within a universal process. However, man also stands in a universal process in the spiritual world. When he thinks he stands within Angels, Archangels, Archai, and in so far as he feels and he wills, he then stands in a spiritual connection with the next higher Hierarchy. Just as the air stretches itself into man's physical body in so far as his physical nature is concerned, so the spiritual aspect of the activity of the so-called Hierarchies works in his soul.

Quite often you get a materialist raising the objection: Indeed, it may be true that a spiritual world does exist, but it does not help us to know anything about this spiritual world even when you tell us that thinking, feeling and willing stand in connection with the Higher Hierarchies. It does not matter, because in order to think we do not need to know about these Higher Hierarchies. We already think in the world without knowing anything about them. Man believes, thank God. If he had to wait until he knew about the breathing process in a theoretical way before breathing, then he also would not be able to think unless he knew about the breathing process. You think without knowing anything about these Higher Hierarchies. However, let us present a counter question. Can you really think without one having that? At the present time you see that people work with the inheritance of the ancient times; they work with that which they have inherited and they are still inventing machines from that. All this is an inheritance of an earlier age. Much of what we accomplish today is a result of what we have inherited in the past.

Recently we were in Hamburg and saw a picture done in the 13th, 14th century by Master Bertram and I want to tell you something about this picture. Let us go back to the biblical story of the fall into sin which we in spiritual science call Luciferic temptation. When a painter in our modern age paints the fall into sin, so he would paint Adam and Eve on either side of the tree and then, naturally, a serpent on the tree. According to whether he is an Impressionist, Cubist, Expressionist or any other ‘ist’, he would more or less paint this; he would paint it beautifully. But he will paint a serpent looking like any serpent which crawls in the grass; that is realism. But is it realism? Is it actually not realism? I cannot imagine any simple woman being deceived by such a serpent. We know from spiritual science that Lucifer is a being who had remained behind at the Moon development. Lucifer, during the Moon evolution, could not be seen with physical eyes such as we have upon earth, so the serpent could not be something which could be seen with the physical eye, not the serpent referred to in the Garden of Eden. Lucifer had to be seen inwardly. When you study the human being more accurately, you can see in every skeleton that it consists of two portions. You have the skull and the spinal column attached to it with the brain inside the skull and the spinal fluid in the spinal column, and the rest of the human being is attached to it. You can consider the human being only as being attached to it. You have the head like a small cosmic sphere attached to the whole thing. You can also say: Thank God that man through his own wisdom cannot contribute to this head coming into existence through his birth. It would look very strange if the anatomists and physiologists could contribute anything to produce this wonderful structure of the human head. This human head comes into existence between death and a new birth as in a large sphere which we could compare with our blue heavenly sphere, that in which our karma is woven and is an organization which as it goes towards incarnation, becomes smaller and smaller and then unites itself with the mother. That which then becomes our head is woven through by countless beings of the Hierarchies out of the whole cosmic all. It is a wisdom of the most immense magnitude, a wisdom which has embodied in it all the experiences. Our head is an inheritance of the Saturn, Sun and Moon incarnations. The earth with all its forces could not have been able to produce this head. It is only possible to bring into existence that which is added to the head, not the head with all its forces. The other part of the human being, not the head with the spinal column, but that which is attached to it actually is earth man. Now, how would a person with inner vision try to represent Lucifer actually as a Moon being? One would represent a human head and would attach something like a boned up spinal column to it, something like a serpent; and that is how Master Bertram in the 13th, 14th century presents Lucifer there on the tree between Adam and Even. In the Hamburg Museum you can see the picture represented just like that. So you see that the painter who painted this picture has the living knowledge
of the configuration of Lucifer within him. You can also see that it was not so very long ago that we still had the ancient atavistic clairvoyance which has now been lost.

I would like to present the situation from another side in order that you will see the assertion of the materialist who says that you do not need to know anything that comes out of the spiritual world, that all you need to do is use your thinking and feeling just as we breathe in the atmosphere and take in food for our hunger and thirst. I have often talked about the very significant criminal anthropologist, Benedict. He was the first to investigate the brains of criminals, naturally, after their death. He analyzed these brains in order to see if he could find some connections between the structure of the brain and criminal qualities. Benedict found that they all have a common characteristic, namely, their rear head lobes were too short and did not completely cover up the small brain. Just imagine this: the common qulaities of the criminal brain is to have a too short rear head lobe just as the apes also have it, something which does not cover the small brain. Obviously this actually is a property of the physical body and so from that you can conclude that there are two types of people being born, those having a correct rear head lobe and those with too short lobes. Those who have a correct rear head lobe do not become criminals and those with too short rear head lobes must become criminals. From the standpoint of the materialistic world conception you cannot raise any objection against this knowledge, but then all talk about morality is nonsense. Can we really punish people when we have to say that they have to be criminals because they have too short rear head lobes. You can see how materialism and all that can come about from it can gradually degenerate. You must extinguish all sorts of spiritual aspects from the social, ethical and juristic life, otherwise we are living in a complete lie, because there can be no objection against the facts which have just been presented.

Now, let us see how we approach the situation. To be sure, there are those who have correct rear head lobes and those with too short rear head lobes. However, there is an ether body there which can be developed in a quite different way and is much more mobile than the physical body. Behind the rear head lobes of the physical body there are the rear head lobes of the ether body and the human beings of the future will have to learn to distinguish between children who have too short rear head lobes and those who have longer rear head lobes. The educators will have to know in what characteristics a short hind head lobe manifests itself in the earliest years of childhood. These children will have to be educated in such a way that the ether lobes can be correspondingly developed and so form a counter weight. Then through the fact that you have developed the ether lobes strongly, they will prevent the damage which the physical lobes can produce when they are too short. So we can see that if spiritual science does not enter into our civilization, then as a result of materialism, all morality, all ethics, all justice would be meaningless. The spiritual would be extinguished from mankind's experience.

Recently in my public lectues I spoke about a forgotten thinker, Karl Christian Plunk. I do not intend to defend everything which Karl Christian Plunk has written in a dogmatic way. However, I have showed you how he worked out of a very deep spiritual consciousness and that he had a certain spiritual world conception. He died in 1880. Very few people bothered about his books. In 1912 the book entitled A TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN by Karl Christian Plunk appeared,a wonderful book. Since he died in 1880, this book had to be written before that. In the first edition of my RIDDLES OF PHILOSOPHY which was entitled WORLD AND LIFE VIEW OF THE 19TH CENTURY, I had already pointed in the year 1900 to Karl Christian Plunk. Plunk actually was an Idealist; he really was a man who lived in the spiritual world and wanted to bring into existence that which inserts itself in the world from the spiritual. I could mention many other examples, however, I am just pointing to Karl Christian Plunk. (An extract from Plunk's book TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN written in 1880 is given in which he spoke of the present war ‘1914–1918’) In this book he refers to the fact that in the future war, Germany will have to defend herself in the West and the South; how on all sides the enemy has national jealousy against the Center. The people will be jealous of the success and growth of the culture of Germany. How many people who had a materialistic concept could have thought like that? Very few of them. Yet, these are the very people who call the people who have a spiritual feeling, idealists.

When a spiritual researcher says: Today people are alright, they can still continue to think, because they have an inheritance of the ancient type of thinking and are able to invent machines. However, human beings will come to a standstill before 50 years is over. They will not be able to discover anything more unless they decide to take spiritual influences up into their thinking. They will reach a dead end. They will have to go to the next stage which will be a development of a spiritual scientific point of view, then they will be able to have new discoveries. Today we have machines only because we have inherited the ancient thinking in our consciousness. We see that the time demands that we allow ourselves to become fructified from the spiritual world. And only this fructification will make it possible to be able to understand the spiritual facts as anthroposophical spiritual science gives us. And unless this happens, the great world tasks will not be solved. I have often mentioned the fact that we are living in a time when the second appearance of Christ will occur shortly, the Etheric Christ Being, that second appearance of Christ upon earth. However, it is necessary to have a preparation in order that this event does not go by unnoticed.

Just recently when I gave a lecture, two people came to me after the lecture and said that they are very surprised about what I was saying and they thought that they would not expect a Theosophist to speak the same way that I spoke. They thought Theosophists would speak differently, because they were pacifists. They forgot the fact that ever since pacifism arose, we have had the bloodiest wars. We talked about illnesses and I tried to explain that illness is the reaction of nature in order to make man healthy, that before the appearance of illness there are unnatural relationships and illness is an attempt to compensate for these unnatural relationships. The illness is necessary, because the unnatural relationships were there. You must see that in all circles of materialism, it leads to the unfruitfulness of thinking.

Spiritual scientific truths must work in our feeling, in our soul mood in a fructifying way and there must be a number of people in our age who can hold them true out of an inner conviction to that which is a necessity for world evolution, that which comes out of spiritual science. Then there will be what should be, then the Christ when He appears in His new form will find those people whom He needs; and that must be. When he appears in His etheric figure, and when someone says that he has experienced the Etheric Christ, then he must not be grasped as being an idiot. It is very necessary today to give mankind a strong push forward, a push which is able to overcome the materialism and its consequences, and this century needs it, needs it in order to take up a new form. And we have as the signs of fire for this goal of mankind today the significant bloody events all around us. We take up spiritual science so that the sacrifice of all those people who have died as a result of this will not have died in vain. If we take up spiritual science, then all that which has gone an around us as a sacrifice of these souls in this war, will be some sort of compensation for it and that will contribute towards the elevation of mankind. that must be, that is why we have to express this invocation again and again.

From the Courage of the fighters,
From the blood on fields of battle,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the people's sacrifice:
There will ripen fruit of Spirit,
If souls will turn in consciousness
Towards the realm of Spirit.

Today it is my task to speak of a very deep historical impulse. As far as anthroposophical spiritual science is concerned, we are already familiar with the fact that spiritual forces, spiritual intentions, spiritual goals stand behind everything which occurs in the world. The anthroposophical spiritual scientifically schooled view is able to see more directly the spiritual processes which stand behind historical occurrences. In order to understand what is going on we must know not only the material historical facts, but we must be able to complete then by knowledge the sort of facts which we are going to present to you today.

We will start by indicating a personality whom you all know, namely, H. P. Blavatsky. You all know that H. P. Blavatsky was a particularly psychic person in a time when materialism was at the high point in external life and she stood in a very special way in the spiritual movement of the second half of the 19th century. H. P. Blavatsky was not a personality whom one can designate in the ordinary sense as a medium, but she had, in the deepest sense, very striking psychical properties, she was a psychic personality. If you want to understand this you must realize the milieu out of which she proceeded. She came out of the Russian milieu, out of how the spiritual and physical can work together in a life in such a way that it is not normal, but abnormal. And to understand that, we must cast our attention on the special folk characteristics of the Russians, how that is different from the Central and Western Europeans.

The Middle and Western Europeans are indeed, in a certain sense, the continuous and also the newly creative configuration of that culture which proceeded out of the 4th post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin cultural period. What lived in this Greco-Latin cultural period is continued in Central and Western Europe, through the fact that in this West and Middle Europe the physical bodies specially develop themselves, also become special instruments for spiritual working, for thinking, feeling and willing. That which thinking, feeling and willing can bring together through the Instrument of the physical body, that should come out in a very primary way in West and Middle Europe. However, the situation is different with the Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe and in particular with the Russians. One can say that the way in which the physical body is mechanized through as is the case in West and Central Europe cannot occur with the Russians in so far as this people remains in its national quality. You cannot understand the Russians with West European science. You can only understand them when you know that an ether body exists. The precise characteristic of the Russian people consists in the fact that the most important activity of life does not enter into the physical body as it occurs in West and Middle Europe, but more into the ether body and therefore does not permeate the physical body so much. In the Russian people the ether body has a much greater significance than it now has for the Western and Central Europeans and especially for the American people. Hence, within the Russian people, within the folk people, not the ruling classes, a direct strong ego as is the case in West and Central Europe can never be developed in the same way. However, the “I” is always veiled over by a certain dreaminess, it almost has something of a dreamy nature in it, because just as the “I” now lives in the 5th post-Atlantean period, so it is conditioned by a special development of the physical body. During this 5th post-Atlantean period, the Russian people are not advanced far enough for the building of the “I” directly as such. That which lives and weaves in the ether body should not imprint itself into the physical body. Hence, one can say that that which is predisposed in the Russian folk, in the main, cannot at the present come to external manifestation.

Now, H. P. Blavatsky grew in part out of the Russian people, to the greatest part she has grown out of the Russian Folk Soul. It will be understandable from that that with her, the ether body in a high degree in its activity is able to be much more powerful than all physical activity in so far as we are dealing with a cognitive activity. Hence, we have in H. P. Blavatsky, in the main, a personality who can experience a large amount of her ether body, but naturally that is quite different from what one can experience through thinking and cognition with the help of the brain. Because Blavatsky has grown out of the Russian folk, she can experience an immense amount in her ether body. However, connected with that is the fact that she lacks certain qualities which West Europeans cannot be without if they want to have revelations from the spiritual worlds. H. P. Blavatsky lacked the possibility of thinking logically. This is the faculty which the Western European must have to obtain proper revelations from the spiritual world, but H.P. Blavatsky lacked this possibility of grouping together her knowledge. Nevertheless, that which permeated her ether body, which was contained in her etheric cognitive ability, did not prevent her from receiving significant revelations. Therefore precisely at the time when mankind was at the height of materialism, such a personality coming out of the East European people is present who in her stream of heredity, in her blood, still had, I might say, a dose of the Central European aspect. So there was present in her, but it was overpowered by the East European element, that which in Middle Europe leads to a logical nature and which in particular leads to will initiative which the Russian as a belonger of his folk does not have. Now what actually happened?

When we put together these two extreme poles, then we can say—of course you know that we have English books written by Blavatsky—that which occurred came as a result of her roots in the Russian nature which came out of her ether body, that was taken hold of by the English being, and it appears that her books are worked out in English. However, the most important thing is what lies between; and to understand what does lie between one must become clear that in Western Europe, particularly from the British beingness, an extensive working in of occult science proceeds which always was present as far as one can speak of the English history. Through its whole evolution of its spiritual culture, Middle Europe actually did not have the slightest idea of how incisive occult working has always come out of the British land and spread itself over Western Europe, also over Southern Europe, and so on.

When one wants to know how things stand, one must at least understand this British colored occultism. This British colored occultism is absolutely present. That which people know of as all sorts of high grades of Scottish Freemasonry and so on is actually only the external side which is shown to the world. However, comprehensive working occult schools actually stand behind this external side and they have taken up the ancient occult traditions and the ancient occult stream into themselves in a much higher degree than is the case in Middle Europe. In Central Europe, however, one must strive more and more to permit a knowledge of the spiritual world to rise up out of one's own spirituality. In the British aspect, they have preferred to lean on that which has been traditionally handed down from the more ancient occult schools. Actually we are able to go back to the beginning of the 17th century and find particularly in England, Scotland and Ireland (less in Ireland but over Scotland) such occult societies spread out in which they have continued to propagate that which was occult knowledge in the ancient times, which however they transformed in a certain way.

If one wants to find the reason for this transformation, then one must know that the 4th post-Atlantean cultural epoch which was comprised of Greekdom and Romandom lasted until the beginning of the 15th century and the task of this 4th period was to work over in itself in a purely human way that which in earlier epochs was there as spiritual revelations. What man received in revelations, that was supposed to be spiritually worked over in this Greco-Latin period. Then came the 5th period which begins with the beginning of the 15th. century. Man was supposed to focus more upon the external, more upon the physical world and not to work out new concepts. All the concepts which you have in the world today have come over from the Greco-Latin period. There have not been any real new concepts developed since the 15th century; the ancient concepts were only applied in a new way upon the processes. Darwinism never brought in one single new concept of evolution; it only applied it to certain processes. Thus, not one single new concept has arisen since the beginning of the 15th century. All of these arose previously in the Greco-Latin period. The 5th post-Atlantean period was supposed to direct its glance at the external physical plane and the British people were especially prepared for this task. They were especially adapted for this task, because the British characteristics were developed later in the British Isles.

Now, at the beginning of the 15h century something was threatening. What threatened to arise was a kind of confusion; the purely physical striving of the Britishdom threatened to be confused with a much more spiritual life, with a spiritual life which was fructified from ancient times. This took place when English dominion crossed over the channel into France. The fact that a real separation occurred was effected from the spiritual world through the appearance of Joan of Arc who precisely from the spiritual world itself had to create order in the beginning of the 15th century. The whole of external Western Europe depends, as we have said before, on this appearance of Joan of Arc. At that time there was a complete separation between the French nature and the British nature. This British being originally arose from the Angles and Saxons who had the occult sagas of Hengis and Horsa when they migrated over towards the British Isles. Now, at the time of Joan of Arc, this Anglo-Saxon layer was ruled by the Norman-Roman element and formed a lower caste. That particular British beingness which today is the superior, only happened since the 17th century, at the time when the French element was still working, and the Anglo-Saxons were the lower layer and the French spirit was the aristocratic spirit. They despised everything coming from the Angles and Saxons. For example, there was a very common expression in the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries used as a curse by the aristocracy still living in France in whom there still lived French Normanhood which went as follows: “God damn me to become an Englander”. This curse was often heard. You were not supposed to be an Englander if you wanted to be well regarded. However, this thing changed fundamentally after the separation occurred through Joan of Arc and then the Englander aspect began to develop.

There are many different processes playing about here and it would take too much time if I were to describe them completely, but deep spiritual forces held sway behind the civil war of the Red and the White Roses. But the important thing is that in the beginning of the 17th century, a certain soul incarnated in the British kingdom who did not work in a very significant way externally, but worked further and in a very stimulating way. This person incarnated in a British body in whom there was more French and Scottish blood working together and very little British blood. There actually proceeded from this soul that which gave the impulse not only for the external British spiritual life but also to the occult British life. Naturally there were certain intermediate processes which if described would cause us to go far off our theme which also formed this occult British spiritual life .

I have told you that this spiritual life was a continuation of the occult streams of the 4th post-Atlantean period. One knew an immense amount precisely because physical bodies had the most significance. There in the British occult life they knew the significance of the physical body, that the ether body was made least active, and that the physical body was regarded as an instrument of all spiritual life; and precisely because of that there was no possibility in these occult schools themselves to experience very much from the spiritual world. However, one preserved the ancient traditions in the occult schools; one preserved that which was handed down through what the ancient clairvoyant observed and they sought to permeate that with concepts. Therefore an occult science arose which worked only with the experiences of what had been handed down from what had been seen by clairvoyance in the 4th and even in the 3rd post-Atlantean period. However, that which came into existence through clairvoyance was worked through with purely physical concepts, with that conceptual material which you have when you think through the physical body. Therefore, an actual occult science arose which, however, stretched itself out over all domains of life.

Above all it is interesting to realize that in this chapter of occult science there are facts which actually were taught in these British occult schools about the destiny of the European people. That formed a very important chapter in these occult schools. I will attempt to characterize what was taught there about the destiny of the European peoples. They said the following. There was a 4th post-Atlantean period. This is what they had out of tradition. This 4th post-Atlantean period abounded with spiritual life. This 4th post-Atlantean period has brought forth the conceptual world for man, the perception about social organization. This 4th post-Atlantean period brought forward all possible things; it abounded with spiritual life. It had developed itself in Southern Europe on the Greek and Italian Peninsulas and it radiated out from there. Now, the people of Central and Western Europe were in their infancy in reference to spiritual connections at the time of the flowering of the 4th period. I am now telling you just what was taught there. Thus, the Central and Western Europeans were infants in reference to the spiritual life, infants in relation to that which could radiate out from the cultural results of the 4th post-Atlantean period. These Central AND Western Europeans very gradually worked themselves up out of their infancy until the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and they became maturer and maturer. When we say the Reformation, we do not mean the German Reformation but the English Reformation under James I, and so on. The central and Western Europeans were able to separate themselves in a sense and now a quite definite dogma arose within these occult schools, a dogma which was very strongly held, the dogma that just as the Greco-Latin peoples were the leading peoples of the 4th, now in the 5th post-Atlantean period the Anglo-Saxon culture has to take the lead. This was impressed again and again. The Anglo-Saxondom has to reign spiritually through the 5th postAtlantean period, and everything that was thought in reference to mankind's development had to be so arranged that this dogma of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon as the leaders of the 5th had to be effected.

They taught the following in these schools. There lives in East Europe today the people who are in the same condition in which the Central and Western Europeans were at the time of the Greco-Latin period; the Slavic people who are now in their infancy are in the East of Europe. They realize that these Slavic peoples must develop out of their infancy in a similar way as did the Central and Western Europeans. And just as the Romans were the wet nurse in spiritual connection in the West and Middle Europe, so must the Anglo-Saxon be the wet nurse for the East European peoples and lead them over to their later spiritual life period. It was also taught that just as the Germanic peoples differentiated themselves into Gothic and other tribes in the course of European history, so to speak, so do the Slavic peoples also differentiate themselves. Therefore they depicted how the present forces point to certain future configurations.

For example, in Russia itself, there were a number of different communities which were gathered together spatial aspect just as once numbers of people were gathered in Central and West Europe, and these people who are gathered together in Russia, so to speak, are artificially held together by a state bond. On the other hand, a folk like the Poles were held together by their religion and in spite of their attempts to become independent, these Poles had to be inserted into the Russian beingness. One had confidence in these schools that the whole of Polishdom has to be shoved in turn into the Russian being and they said that they are of the Dornau there are single Slavic peoples who exist in isolated kingdoms. And the following was repeated again and again in these schools: Such independent Slavic folk states are forming. However, these will only last until the next great European war which was going to bring everything into disorder. And they said: The independence of the Slavic States would only last a while and in the future a quite different way of being held together in reference to these East European peoples who are at present in their infancy state, must take place. This was the teaching that was given; it was not just theory but was repeated again and again in these occult schools. Therefore numerous people attempted to configure the external life to influence it in different ways so that the actual facts could form themselves in the sense of what their dogma said. People do not realize what enormous attempts were made by their occult brothers in the British Isles who had other groups in Western Europe and Italy. They knew what one person must do, what another must do and how to work in life in order to achieve their aims. For example, there was one English statesman who became friendly with a certain statesman from a small state in the Dornau which was part of Austria. A friendly arrangement was set up between them. It was so artfully arranged that, for example, on the one side they made friends, but on the other side they tried to put forth all sorts of criticism about this same state. The situation is of great significance when you methodically follow a path in which you develop friendship on the one side in order to win a certain people over and on the other side begin to show the shadow side of these people and attack them.

This is a very devilish thing, but it is an Ahrimanic trick which you can use. One member of such a brotherhood would write a book which would cause a rightful movement to be called forth, for example, and another person would write a book in order to develop friendship. That is how they work between the lines of life; all this so that the British aspect could become the ruling aspect: let us look at how the personality of H.P. Blavatsky works in this occult brotherhood situation. These occult brothers have become aware of her. These ahrimanic occultists knew very well when there was such a person who is configurated as is H. P. Blavatsky, there are all sorts of developmental forces occurring. And here we have H. P. Blavatsky in whom the ether body is active in a special way and they wanted to utilize her so that certain spiritual truths could come forward which could be favorable to their dogmas of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon people. Therefore the tendency arose in the 60's and the beginning of the 70's with these occult brothers of the West to utilize Blavatsky so as to place spiritual truths before the world of which one can say the following. Here is a person whose ideas do not come out of an ordinary human brain, but come out of an ether body and in addition to that one who can predict future elements from such an ether body, a future that holds a foundation for the 6th post-Atlantean period. And, since the 6th post-Atlantean period has not yet arrived, they can then make certain preparations in the 5th. In the case of Blavatsky who was not an ordinary medium, they could so influence her mediumistic forces that she would say what the British brotherhoods wanted. They themselves could not come before the world and say Britain shall be the rulers, but they could say: Look here, here is a person who we are not influencing in any way; she brings a quite new knowledge out of her own ether body. Their goal was that this new knowledge should be placed in the service of the Anglo-Saxon brotherhoods. These brotherhoods related themselves to her so that they were a sort of wet nurse and she was the infant. The intention of these brothers was to put a certain new occult science into the world which would be very suitable for the special aims of these Western brothers.

They would have succeeded in their intentions if Blavatsky had been a pure Russian. However, as I mentioned earlier, she had a certain dose of Central European nature in her. She had an independent nature and very soon became aware of what lived in her ether body and then she did not want to go along with what these occult brotherhoods, who wanted to develop Earth as a higher medium, wanted. After a certain time, H. P. Blavatsky developed many things on very good paths, then she entered into a high order in Paris. However, this Parisian order was dependent on the British occult streams and they tried to prepare her so that what they wanted could come out of her soul. but, as I said, she had much of this Germanic element in her and insisted on certain conditions in this order which were impossible to fulfill and the consequence was that she was excluded from this order. In the meantime she was able to take up into herself many significant secrets which were present in these orders and she began to acquire a very special taste for the whole role; she wanted to play the foremost occult role. She did not want to be just a higher medium; she wanted to direct the thing herself. She entered an American order where they told her many secrets which were only given to those in high grades. Nevertheless, this American order had a very definite intention and in time she received into her consciousness a great deal of knowledge. A whole new situation was now created. Here was a personality who knew much of the occult knowledge which the secret orders had preserved and protected. Here was a situation which had never occurred before. In America she again tried to set up certain conditions to which the American order could not agree, because if they had done so terrible confusion would have come about.

Therefore, through very dubious means, they put her in what is called occult imprisonment which one achieves through certain ceremonial magic in which the soul which you are imprisoning can have ideas which go to a certain sphere and then are reflected back. Everything that develops in the person can be seen by themselves but it is not possible to share it with the external world. It only works within itself; it is an occult imprisonment. This particular ceremonial magic leading to occult imprisonment was done in order to try to make H. P. Blavatsky harmless. In the year 1879 there was an association of occultists of various lands and it was decided that an occult imprisonment was to be placed over Madam Blavatsky and she then lived for a number of years in real occult imprisonment. It then came about that certain Indian occultists freed her from this occult imprisonment and now begins the time when Blavatsky enters into the Indian influence. Everything which I told you up to now is a kind of pre-history of Blavatsky.

We now have the development which everyone knows about. All the difficulties and problems which Blavatsky had are connected with all this pre-history. Certain Indian occultists who strove to save themselves from the British now applied certain means to release her from her occult imprisonment, and this actually was done with the consent of those who had put her in this imprisonment. The consequence was that there streamed into her soul that which was connected only with the Indian occultism. All these goings on are effected by the British brotherhoods completely rejecting that which applies to Central Europe. These brotherhoods tried to utilize Blavatsky for their political objects, but in Paris and America she objected; the inner opposition of her Russianness objected and there was opposition against making the Russians dependent upon West Europe and America. When she was in Paris, she set forth a special stipulation which could not be fulfilled because it would have necessitated a political transformation in France. In America she herself did not put forth the stipulation, but she allied herself with a man named Olcott who was interested in producing all sorts of political machinations. These people originally wanted to guide her into a certain channel failed because she was released from this and went into a different channel in which the mahatma was not what Blavatsky thought he was.

You can see in the well known novel of George Sand how occult societies and particular movements occur in Western Europe, people have a sub-role and are not externally visible. I mentioned all these things in the public lecture on Friday, all the occult streams which produce conspirators resulting in the assasination of Jure (sic), also the murder of Franz Ferdinand. Here you have the whole source of the conspiracy of which the outside world knows very little. It begins in London, it spins over into Western Europe, goes into Southern Europe, goes into the Balkans and finally goes over to St. Petersburg and plays into the whole circle in St. Petersburg. I tell you all these things because you must know that so much of what is happening is produced by causes that you know nothing about.

Our Society has a special task of freeing itself from the influence of these Western European brotherhoods. For example, remember how I was attacked in 1909, how I was accused of wanting to become president of the whole Theosophical Society, of wanting to go to India in order to influence certain political activities. On the one side you have the Berlin-Bagdad Railway and an the other side Anthroposophy. I was trying to work for the Pan-Germanic tendency, to separate India from England. In 1909 in Budapest, Mrs. Besant's intentions was to make Krishna Murti the carrier of the Christ and I would be the reincarnated St. John, the Evangelist in order to get my recognition. Actually I would not go along with that sort of thing. There were many other Theosophists against all this, in fact the International Society of Honest People was formed, really noble people and among them was Keightley who was used earlier by Mrs. Besant to correct the mistakes in her books. This International Society asked me to become its president. And in 1909 I told Mrs Besant that I did not want to connect myself with any other occult movements, only that which works with German culture within Europe. At that time I asked her what she thought about the mighty German occultism which appeared at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century in connection with German culture. And this is what she said: “Ah, that which appeared in Germany was an unsuccessful attempt in occultism that took other forms, and because that failed England must now take the situation in hand and occultism must be brought to Europe from England.” Now you can see how the situation stands. I tell you all these things as students of esoteric wisdom, you have to know these things.

Today I would like to pass over to the occult side of the lecture which I gave eight days ago. In the first place, we have seen that certain occult streams are significant for human life, these occult streams which bring themselves to expression in certain occult brotherhoods. You will have seen from the more externally presented ideas of the last lectures that in a quite special coloring in West Europe, particularly in the British lands, such occult brotherhoods are used in order to achieve certain external goals.

That which is designated by the name occult brotherhoods is a very complicated situation. However, this complicated situation builds itself on a foundation which educates human beings in a certain direction through the fact that it unites them in a kind of cult and certain symbols are given over to them and in this way they are united, as it were, in a service which comes to expression in certain symbols. Many people today think in a very light-hearted manner about the significance of the ceremonies and symbolic matters which are connected with certain occult brotherhoods, and they tend to dismiss them as a laughing matter. However, some people, for example Goethe, attached a great deal of importance to the fact that something of a definite nature exists in such ceremonial situations. Goethe knew this very well and he brought it to expression in one way or another. He was grateful that in the course of his life he did not go through a normal school system, but achieved a later education through being connected with certain orders.

We know that since the beginning of the 15th century we lived in the 5th-post-Alantean period and this was preceded by the 4th which started in 747 B.C. and ended in 1413 A.D. In this period people were so configured that their ether body was much more receptive than it is in the time since the 15th-century. This ether body could perceive much more of that which was around it. When the ether body perceives, then it sees the elementary world, that which is of an elemental nature, elemental beings in plants, animals and minerals. When people in those centuries were still able to speak of cobbies and gnomes which they could perceive in certain mountains and which approached them from certain mines, today's people, when they hear about it call this situation just poetical. However, to the people in these centuries, this is not poetical; they still knew something about the presence of an elementary world behind the physical world. You can see from external documents that people in past ages did possess a different sort of perception. In the Hamburg Museum, for example, you can find a certain picture which presents the original first chapter of Genesis in which you have the Fall into Sin, the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

We know from our studies that the tempter was Lucifer and Lucifer is not a being who can be seen with present day physical eyes, but must be seen with the awakened etheric body, with the awakened clairvoyance, and then he manifests himself as that particular being who was left behind during the Moon Evolution. We already had our physical body during the Moon evolution, but it was not physically visible but etherically visible. In reference to this, present day man is a reflection of that which was already present as head upon the moon, but the rest of the human body was not attached to the head as it is today but was attached in the form of a spinal column coming from the head and presented as serpent-like form. If one wants to represent Lucifer as he is left behind from the Moon development, one has to represent him with a human head and with a spinal column attached to it, namely, in the serpent form. This is exactly how the painter, Master Bertram, represented Lucifer in his Hamburg picture in the 13th, 14th century. We can see that at that time human beings still had a perception of the elementary world.

Those symbols which form the foundation for certain occult brotherhoods also arose in the 4th post-Atlantean period. At that time these symbols were perceived in a living way. Goethe realized that this type of symbolism could be made fruitful for external life. In his book Wilhelm Meister you can read how the education was so led that the human being grew up in a certain type of symbolism. Goethe wanted people to learn about the four reverences which human beings should experience through symbols: the reverence for the spiritual world, the reverence for the physical world, the reverence for other people and the reverence which can then be built up out of these three reverences, namely the reverence for oneself.

Now, the question is: How does Goethe want to develop people for the reverence of the spiritual? He wants to teach them certain gestures: crossed arms over the breast with the gaze turned upwards. In this position they should acquire a reverence for that which can have an influence upon human beings from the spiritual. He intended to combine this gesture with the acquisition of the feeling for reverence for that which is above. Now the question arises: why does this have a certain significance? That has a certain significance because when the human being really experiences the reverence of the spirit, which he receives; and when he, himself, puts his physical hands together behind his back, then the ether hands cross themselves in the front. And when he directs his physical glance downwards, then his ether eyes turned upwards. The natural gesture for the ether eyes is turned upwards and for the ether hands, crossed in front. And this is something which the ether body actually carries out when this reverence for the spiritual is present.

In the 4th post-Atlantean period, people knew about this because they were themselves able to perceive the movements of the ether body; and as far as Goethe was concerned, this was the way of growing into the spiritual life. In a similar way, when he wanted to have reverence for the bodily aspect, the earthly aspect, there was another position; and again for the third aspect if he wanted to have reverence for other people, then the gesture was: outstretched hands and the gaze directed left and right and this would bring to expression reverence for every similar configurated soul; after that he could acquire for himself reverence for his own soul. Now, this direct knowledge of these gestures is correct. It is not just something arbitrary, but is something connected with the spiritual organization of man. This has, in the main, been lost since the 14th century.

What follows from that? Previously, before the 14th century, one could lead these people to gestures of that nature and also more complicated gestures. They would only need to accompany that with something which they could easily awaken to an inner life. After that, in our 5th post-Atlantean period, the situation is such that gestures as Goethe wanted to present can be brought to young people if you give them the corresponding instructions and Goethe also wanted this. However, the complicated gesture language which is involved in sign, grip and word is spread out within the secret brotherhoods, and the realities in them could not be brought to people since the 14th and 15th century; that could no longer happen. However, this process which belonged to the 4th period continued into the 5th post-Atlantean period through the brotherhoods. In the three subsequent grades, they have come among other symbolical things, the grip and word however this continued among souls who were differently invigorated from those souls in the earlier periods. These people could no longer combine anything real with the sign, grip and word, because they could not bring to themselves that which was corresponding in the ether body. It was merely an external aspect as far as the soul was concerned. Previously in the age of the Intellectual Soul, there was a possibility of it having a real substantial content, but when man began to develop the Consciousness Soul, he began to focus upon the physical brain intellect and the sensitivity of the ether body receded.

Now, the question is: What occurred? I ask you to pay attention to what results from this You find that the occult brotherhoods continue these practices into the 5th post-Atlantean period. They take in people and familiarize them with certain corresponding symbols. These people learn certain signs through the fact that they bring their body into a certain position; they learn certain grips by taking hold of someone else's hand in a way that is not the usual way; they learn to express certain words which signify a certain activity of the ether body, etc. I only want to mention the elementary aspects. Thus people have learned sign, grip and word since the 15th, 16th century, but they are so configurated now that their Consciousness Soul is the active aspect and the sign, grip and word do not work into this Consciousness Soul; it remains as an entirely external sign. However, you must not believe that when sign, grip and word are transmitted to people, that they do not have an action upon the ether body. They do have an action. With sign, grip and word, a man does take up that which was once united with sign, grip and word. You instruct a number of people in sign, grip and word and through that you bring something into their unconscious which they cannot have in their consciousness, but this is not appropriate for our present stage of evolution which requires that one imparts that which can be understood by the intellect through the intellect to human beings. First you must bring it to the intellect and this actually is the content of spiritual science. In the 1st place you must stand within the spiritual scientific movement some way and then after certain time has elapsed after being in the spiritual scientific movement, then you can be led to receive sign, grip and word. Then one is prepared to see something which one knows about, something which one can at least understand. However, as a general rule, this is not done in these occult brotherhoods. People are taken up in the first grade or any other occultism and sign, grip and word and many other things are transmitted to them. In that way one is able to work upon their unconsciousness. Now what is the consequence of that?

The consequences that you can adapt these people to become tools for all sorts of plans, because when you are able to work over the ether body in such a way that be does not understand what is going on, you eliminate those forces which would otherwise be present his understanding. In the case of these brotherhoods can become a tool for those who want to execute their own plans. Those brotherhoods continue to further certain political goals or to set up a dogma such as Krishna Murti Alcione being the physical carrier of Christ Jesus. And those who are prepared in this way become instruments to carry this out into the world. However, those who have been able to study my book Theosophy or Occult Science and are able to grasp it, can never be damaged through any transmission of symbols. We see that in a very extensive way in the British lands there is no sort of explanation given or instruction which proceeds the symbolic aspect. When I say explanation it does not mean saying: ‘this symbol indicates this and that symbol indicates that’, because you can give all sorts of nonsense in that way. But this instruction must be so arranged that the mysteries can be revealed from the study of the whole process of earth and human development, and then one can permit the symbolism to arise out of that.

A great deal of damage has occurred in France through the occult literature of Eliphas Levi, whose books Dogma and Ritual of the Higher Magic and Key to the Higher Magic surely contained great truths beside terrible errors. However, these books are so arranged as can be done with our spiritual science, but they have to be taken up in a symbolic way. Just read Eliphas Levi. Now you can read them without danger because you have been specially prepared. You can read his book Dogma and Ritual of the Higher Magic and then you will be able to see how the whole methodology of symbolism is entirely different. Indeed, my dear friends, when one is instructed in symbols in a way that is found in this book, then you have prepared people so that you can use them in any way you see fit. Actually after Eliphas Levi, the situation became much worse through Dr. Onkaus, through Papus, who had such a terrible influence on the Court of St. Petersburg where he played a very fateful political role. Now, the situation is not to refute Papus—this may seem paradoxical because there are terrible things there—because you have a great deal that is also correct. However, the terrible danger lies in the way in which this is given to people. That which you find in Papus' books penetrate into the soul of weak people and that means preparing them to become complete sleepers in their intellect and then you can use them in whatever way you wish. At the present time, such people have a certain influence.

The teaching of Jacob Boehme, of which we have often spoken, was implanted in France in the 18th century by St. Martin, who is called the Unknown Philosopher. St. Martin translated Jacob Boehme's works into French and this was then translated back into German in a way which made his works much easier to understand than they were in the original German. St. Martin's book Errors and Truth was very beautifully translated by a very worthy German poet, Matthias Claudius. So you see that one can experience much of a curious nature in this field. Actually I have to mention the frivolous grasping of Christ in connection with the book entitled The Feet of the Master which Krishna Murti was supposed to have written, and how they thought that that was one of the greatest things that was ever presented. So you see that all sorts of things happen, this hypocritical deceit, the spreading of that spiritual stream which goes out from Papus and those people who call themselves Martinists. Actually one would like to protect the Unknown Philosopher who really strove very honestly after truth all that he tried to do which was necessary the service of the 18th century. All that is entirely different from the terrible nonsense and deceit which the followers of Papus are using when they take his name in vain just to further their ends. He was alright, but these people are terrible people, full of deceit, doing all sorts of things in the service of that which they themselves did not even know.

There are many things we have to know. We have to know that every occult brotherhood builds itself up on the basis of three grades. In the first grade when symbolism is used in the correct way, the souls advance so far that they acquire an inner experience of the fact that there is a knowledge which can be acquired independently of ordinary physical knowledge. Now, in the 1st place, when I say: correctly presented, I obviously mean that which is appropriate for our fifth post-Atlantean period. And in the first grade you must be able to acquire a certain totality of such knowledge independent of the physical. In our fifth period, everyone in the first grade ought to know something of that which exists my book Occult Science, and in the second grade everyone must know, that means, they must have an inner living knowledge of that which stands in my book How Does One Acquire Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Then the person in the third grade who receives the significant symbols of sign, grip and word really knows what it means to live outside his body. This is the whole procedure which should be carried out. This actually was achieved right into the 8th and 9th centuries in certain areas in Europe. For example, this was completely reached by a large number of individuals in Ireland. This is also true in other areas of Europe, but not to the extent that it happened in Ireland. However, the preparation was different at that time because it was impossible to acquire what people today can acquire as a real science of the spirit. The science of the spirit can only appear to us now for many reasons, however, there always has been occult brotherhoods, and they work particularly out of pure symbolism.

Now, I would like to point out that it is especially significant when pure symbolism is worked in a community which in fact has not arrived at its complete maturity; and that is how these terrible evil conditions occur. Under the Empress Catherine of Russia something was received from Voltairism by the followers of Paul and others in Russia who attempted to implant certain secret brotherhoods into Russia from the West. That has had a great influence upon the whole spiritual development of Russia since that time; a much greater influence than you would believe. Naturally such influences group themselves in various directions. For example, these influences work in literature through novels and politics through political writings. However, those influences become very significant for the subsequent development through certain channels which are always present. And everything which is significant in the spiritual life of Russia right up to Tolstoy leads, in the main, back to that which occurred in the time of which I just spoke, to the implanting of certain occult brotherhoods towards Russia from Western Europe.

Now, I have told you that a certain foundation is present, the foundation is that which the occult brotherhoods accomplished through these three grades. However, there are people who advanced to the so-called higher grades. Here we have a domain which is subject to a great deal of vanity, because there are brotherhoods in which people can be brought to the 90th degree or higher. Just imagine what it means to carry such a high order in yourself. The idea of the 33rd degree, however, results from a mistake springing from complete ignorance in a so-called Scottish high grades which are based upon three grades which follow in the way in which I just described. Thus you have the three grades which have their deep significance. However 30 others follow after these three grades. If you are already in the third grade and you are able to achieve the experience of living outside your body, then just imagine where you would have advanced when you are able to go through 30 more grades. This rests, however, upon a grotesque ignorance, because they do not know that in occult science things are not read in the decimal system, but in the following way. When you write the 33rd degree, in reality that signifies, according to the system of memory which is applicable there, that 33 really means 3x3=9. This played a great role with Blavatsky. In her Secret Doctrine you will find a long debate about the number 777. There are people who have fantasized all sorts of things about what this number 777 means. However, it actually is 7x7=49, 49x7=343, 7x7x7=343. That is what it really means. Because the people could not read 33 correctly, they read it as 33 instead of reading it as 9.

Now, let us forget all these vanities and continue. First you have the three grades as a foundation. Then there are six more degrees which follow after the first three degrees. And, when you pass through these six additional degrees, then you have experienced something of great significance. However, in our present age, these additional six degrees cannot be completely fulfilled; it is a pure impossibility. They cannot be completely fulfilled because human beings in our 5th post-Atlantean period are not advanced enough to experience all that can actually be experienced; that will come later, that will come gradually. You must know that since the year 1413 we stand in the 5th post-Atlantean period. This will last 2160 years and will be ended in the year 3573. Hence we really stand in the beginning of our period and in the course of this 5th period a great deal will happen. This must occur through the development of spiritual science. This, however, can only reveal itself gradually step by step. Today we can impart only the great lines of it and we can also learn many details about it, but a great deal will only come when it has strengthened itself on the resistances; and these resistances will become greater and greater.

Today we live in a relatively idealistic spiritual age compared with that which will come in the future. We are living at the end of the 2nd post-Christian Millennium and it will not be long until we reach the year 2,000 and then mankind will have to experience something of a special nature. Things which are preparing themselves very gradually right now are so prepared that there are two polarities which we are going to meet as time goes on. Two polarities are being prepared, one pole from the East and another from the West. In the East things will gradually develop in such a way that another kind of thinking will dominate. Whenever a child is born, one will attempt to say: “What comes of this child? We have to deal with a hidden spiritual being who wants gradually to develop this child.” You will want to solve the riddle of this child, and in the first place you will unite a kind of cult dealing with the growing up of this child. This sort of thing prepares itself in the East. Naturally it will pass over towards Europe and the consequence will be that an immense reverence will develop for that which one calls genius, a seeking for genius. This is what will come from the East. However this will affect only the smaller portion of mankind. The larger part of mankind will be influenced from America, from the West, and this proceeds along an entirely different line of development.

We might say that the present time is doing very well compared with that which will come in the future when the Western development blossoms more and more. Very shortly, when one will have written the year 2000, there will come from America not a direct prohibition, but a kind of prohibition against all thinking, a sort of law which will have the aim of suppressing all individual thinking. On the other hand there is the beginning achieved in this direction of suppressing all individual thinking into pure materialistic thinking where one does not need to work upon the soul on the basis of external experiments, in which the human being is handled as if he were a machine. Now, I hope you will not misunderstand me, my dear friends, because in this domain a great deal is precisely sinned against on the so-called spiritual side. For example, you can experience the following: People will come and say: “Yes, I have been exposed to all sorts of things in medicine and I was not healed; so I went to a healer who treated me quite spiritually.” Then I asked him what the healer did with him and he answered: “There are evil spirits in my body and I must pray them out of myself.” I asked if this helped. “No, I became worse and worse.” I ask you to just imagine how the situation stands. Do not just imagine that this person has said something incorrect. It is quite correct that there were spiritual beings in him that were the cause of what happened to him. But precisely because that healer told him something correct, this damaged the human being.

Now, just think of it in this way. A scamp destroys a machine. He is the cause of the machine no longer running. How can I bring this machine back into proper working order? According to the method of your spiritual healer, I must get hold of this scamp and give him a thorough thrashing so that he will run away and then everything should be in order. Obviously the spiritual healer told you that as soon as the evil spirits have gone away your machine is in order. However, just as little as the machine is now in order because the scamp was thrashed and has run away, so now I must work putting machine back order. And so it is with the person who was sick. Of course, this spiritual healer was able to drive the evil spirits out, but the damage had been done and now you must heal the body. You can see that so much has been sinned against from this other side, because today people have lost the ability to think. For example we have machines today which add and subtract; everything is convenient. Now, in the Future you will not get a law passed which says you must not think. No. What will happen is that things will be done the effect of which will be to exclude all individual thinking. This is the other pole to which we are proceeding. This is connected with the development of the West.

You have to develop a certain counter weight against this tendency in the world development; and Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this counter-weight. What do we have instead? We have these brotherhoods in which these people take up in the first grade and were given symbols. Then they were promoted to the second grade, then into the third where they actually learn the symbolic without any spiritual science being taken up by them. And if you were to ask these people if they are satisfied that they have learned certain ceremonies, hand grips, certain signs and that certain symbolic activities occur in the temple room; they will say: “Ah, we are very happy with that. We do not need to do any more thinking; each person can interpret it for himself in the way he wants.” However, the situation is that we ask by real knowledge into the ether body and people are produced in such a way that in their ether body they have a comprehensive knowledge, not in their physical body, not in their conscious knowledge but in their ether body. They have an immense knowledge particularly when I have been brought to the third degree; they have an immense unconscious knowledge, a knowledge which has been transmitted to them through symbols can be applied honestly or dishonestly in a significant way.

You really have two occult directions, one pole carries the cosmic Christian character, the other carries the Church Christian character. Just as with the Freemasons you have to reckon with the cosmic Christian character of the symbolic brotherhoods, so with the Jesuits you have to reckon with the Church symbolic branch, because the Jesuits are led through three grades with a certain symbolism and learn to acquire precisely through this symbolism a great effect in their speech. Hence the Jesuit speakers are so very effective because they know how to build a speech up in such a way that one can work upon the uneducated masses. They gradually learn to insert certain intensities one after another into their presentation. These people go through their three grades in their own way.

Now, all occult brotherhoods are not Freemasons. There are all sorts of varieties such as the Illuminatum in Germany, and in addition to the three lower grades, you have the three upper grades. In certain brotherhoods you have members who are in the upper grades forming a sort of communion with members in the upper grades of other brotherhoods. You know that the Jesuits battle against the Freemasons and vise versa. However, the upper orders of the Freemasons and the upper orders of the Jesuits build a special brotherhood; they build a state within a state. Just imagine what you can work in the world where on the one side you have the upper grades of a Freemason community which serves as an Instrument in order to produce certain work, setting up an understanding with the upper grades of a certain Jesuit community and and then working together in order to produce certain objectives. Such an apparatus was set up in the land which exists Northwest of Europe between Holland and France. This did not happen recently but some time ago special effects went out which used the one stream as well as the other, and was able to produce a great deal of effectiveness.

Now it is getting late so I will end this lecture by saying that in eight days I will give you still more concrete ideas about this field. Today I had to keep the abstract sides of the situation mind. We had to know all about this in order to perceive what is really working in this realm of the external world.

The occult brotherhoods do possess the ancient tradition, but they are not aware of what the spiritual world is trying to reveal to us in our age. There is a universal formula which rules a large number of these brotherhoods. They speak of the creative power which pulses and permeates the cosmos. When they want, in their sense, to direct themselves to these creative powers, namely, to the divine spiritual which pulsates and permeates the cosmos, then they speak about the Grand Architect of the World. This is a very often used formulation: The Elevated Grand Architect of the world.

For those who can understand the development of mankind from spiritual science, it proves the fact that in truth such brotherhoods go far, far back. These brotherhoods, to be sure, had other forms in more ancient times, but, nevertheless, they go far back in an unbroken sequence to the ancient communities which existed with the Greeks and Romans in the 4th post-Atlantean cultural epoch and we can also go back still farther to the ancient Egyptian times, and our present brotherhoods come from these ancient communities. But as we mentioned earlier, they do not stand in a direct connection with the spiritual world as did the earlier communities, but they preserved that which they had as knowledge more as traditional knowledge.

Now, you already find the concept of the primal revelation in the writings of individually illuminated, theological researchers or researchers of ancient times. What do these people mean by primal revelation? This concept of the primal revelation can become clear when you attempt to become familiar with the ancient religious writings. All you need to do is go back to the writings of Gautama Buddha you will see that what is said there is said upon the basis of the great knowledge; however, as far as he was concerned, it was transmitted by tradition which goes back into distant ancient times built up on a primal knowledge. Thus we are led back to a primal knowledge going back through the earliest centuries to that which was known by people, but which for our particular time is considered to be distorted nonsense by those modern intellectuals when they try to read Jacob Boehme, or Paracelsus. Then you come to the time when people did all sorts of alchemistic experiment and then you go farther and farther back and when an unprejudiced person goes back through the Romans, the Greeks and the Egyptians, he comes to a humanity which once had a knowledge which was spread out over the world in a way in which present day man, however, cannot acquire. Now, it is very difficult for present day man to obtain an idea of this particular situation, because when he tries to transplant himself into these ancient times, all he can think of is that man is a type of ape man. However, in spite of all these theories about the ape man, the unprejudiced person must admit that there must have originally been a knowledge which mankind with his present cleverness cannot reach, a knowledge which is infinitely deep and which stretched itself out over the spiritual worlds in such a superior way that in it is contained not only a consciousness of the fact that man can rise up into the spiritual worlds, but that man can find other beings in these spiritual worlds who are not incarnated in fleshy bodies, beings which we call Angels, Archangels and so on. So, we can find in these ancient religious writings that the people knew of these higher beings and they speak of them as beings with whom they were able to interact. As I said, the writings themselves prove this.

What actually is at the basis of this fact? From a certain stage of initiation, one can come directly behind this mystery. We know that the world around us is not only spread out in the way today's sense knowledge speaks of it, but there is a so-called elementary world at the basis of this nature, world which, if we go back into ancient mythologies we find descriptions of these elemental beings. These elemental beings that lie at the base of the mineral kingdom are called gnomes, those at the base of the water plant kingdom are known as undines, those aeroform elementals as sylphs and the warmth elementals as salamanders. These beings which we just described have their special task in the world; they have a great deal to do. External materialistic science says that everything makes itself of itself, but this is not true. Things do not make themselves of themselves. The person whose eyes are open to the elementary world sees how these elementals actually go through a kind of cycle of the year, how there are beings working down from the spiritual world upon these elementals, they work differently in spring, differently in summer, differently in autumn and differently in winter. This means that we have an elementary kingdom spread out around us which lies at the basis of the nature kingdom and there streams down, one cannot say an instruction, but one can say that forces pour down in order that these elementary beings can receive the power in the spring in order to form the plant covering for the earth. The forces of certain spiritual beings are carried down which impart themselves to these elementary beings so that a new world of form can sprout forth in the spring. And as summer approaches, they receive, as it were, a later course of instruction, forces are poured down upon them so that they can effect that which has to come about in summer. An interworking between the spirits of the higher hierarchies and the elementary beings who weave and live in the nature which surrounds us performs itself in the cycle of the year. This means we are continuously concerned with an up and down pouring, with an up and down streaming of spiritual beings of the hierarchies whose students are the elementary beings who provide the enlivening forces for all that which has to sprout and germinate in the course of the year. All that which arises and fades away in the course of the year, that does not simply grow out of the earth, but stands in a direct interworking with the divine spiritual. And it was said that that which germinates and sprouts in the course of the year stands in direct interworking with the beings who permit their forces to stream up and down and they pour these forces into the elementary world. But, my dear friends just as today sylphs, gnomes, undines and salamanders receive their influence from the beings of the hierarchies who stream up and down according to the course of the year, so when man did not have such a solid physical body in those ancient times, he received instructions from the higher hierarchies who streamed up and down. All the sagas and myths that remain tell us that in ancient times man received such instruction from beings who themselves had descended out of the spiritual worlds. These myths absolutely rest upon a truth. Man found himself with those spirits among whom the gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders exist today, and whereas these elementary beings receive those forces through which they are able to effect the forms which sprout out of the Earth during the course of the year, so man in ancient times received his instructions from hierarchies who streamed up and down. And that which he received in ancient time remains as a residue in writings which have still been preserved and from which an unprejudiced person can prove—as we said—that once upon a time such a primal revelation did exist. Thus we see that such a primal revelation really did exist and in those periods which preceded the eighth century B.C. you have the last residue flowing down to mankind from this primal revelation. Actually we can put the year 747 B.C. as the year which mankind, a result of the further development of his physical nature, was excluded from a direct participation in such instruction. Naturally such an exclusion occurs very gradually, step by step. All that which was contained in ancient science flowed down in this way as a direct knowledge from the spiritual worlds into mankind and has been transmitted by tradition, but is no longer understood today.

Let us focus our attention upon the last science which came to the human being in this way. The question is: What did man experience from such a primal revelation that had flowed down in the course of the time from the earliest periods an into ancient Atlantis? He experienced the connection in which he himself as a human being stood within the spiritual worlds since he is a microcosm and all the processes and forces in the microcosm which otherwise occur in the great macrocosmic world play in him. And the last thing which man learned in this way, the last thing which flowed to him from the external is geometry and mathematics. That person who today allows geometry and mathematics to work upon him in a true sense, will still be able to perceive the fact that a different kind of knowledge comes to him in geometry and mathematics, a different kind of knowledge from the other knowledge which he gathers from experience. There is something within geometry and mathematics which one can perceive apart from external experience. No man can prove that the three angles of the triangle are 180° by merely drawing a triangle in a sense sort of way. He can arrive at the fact, but proving it can only be done as a result of an inner experience of thinking. Man does not need to use his fingers to prove to himself that 3x3=9; all he need do is ideate it to himself and in an inward way he will come to the truth that 3x3=9.

But what comes to expression in the forms of architecture is obtained from a much wider basis. That which is at the basis of geometry and mathematics goes back to a much more ancient knowledge than that which is at the basis of architecture art. In the Graeco-Latin times, that which was ancient knowledge in the mysteries was mediated to the human being by one saying the following to him: ‘When you really deepen yourself, then you bring out of yourself that which was revealed to you by the spirits of the higher hierarchies earlier lives on Earth.’ In the Egyptian Mysteries you did not have to do that. The higher beings themselves still came down. Now in the Greco-Latin period the master assembled his students and said the following: “You were there in earlier incarnations and you went through human development in which the spirits of the higher hierarchies took part. This has established itself in your souls. Bring it up.” Thus Masters of the Greco-Latin mysteries were still able in this way to fetch up that which was established in the human soul. Everything is to be found in the human soul, because everything streamed down through spiritual beings into the human beings from the primal revelation. What we once upon a time experienced in instructions from the hierarchies we really bring out of ourselves.

Now came the year 1413 and man can no longer become conscious of what the earlier spiritual instruction was because it has been covered over in his soul by the materialistic age. Since 1413 the soul unites itself thickly with the body and that is able to act as a covering for that which exists within our souls. However, in the whole period from 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D. it was possible to bring up out of the soul that which in earlier times streamed in in the way I indicated. Just imagine how a person, particularly in the ancient Greek Age, actually had to perceive. Precisely in the ancient Greek Age he perceived as I have indicated. he said to himself: “Geometry as it is brought to expression in the form of architecture, flowed down earlier through divine spiritual instruction from the external would.” Man was hemmed in by forms. Now when man wants to draw a triangle, he takes a piece of chalk and draws it, but the ancient Greek did not have to do that. All he needed to do was to meditate upon himself and at the same time he could, as it were, clairvoyantly see the triangle for himself. Thus he was still able to diagram geometry for himself in a clairvoyant way. It was also so with writing in primal ages, but this applies to a still earlier period. There one did not need to write upon papyrus, but one was able to write clairvoyantly for oneself; you wrote for yourself clairvoyantly. At a certain time in the Greek Mysteries, man was told the following: you are able to have thoughts about yourself and meditate clearly upon yourself, you can then recall what lives in you. You can recall the divine being which lives in you when you do not just focus on the transient earth human being but recall the divine being in you, then you would be able to build up an architectural structure around you which is put together from the forms of geometry. You are within all of that. Just as the spider who spins her web is within it, thus such a student of the Greek Mysteries etherically spun geometry around himself, whole geometry and the other human knowledge is presented in itself in this geometrical structure which he spun out of himself. All he needed to do was establish it outside of himself and then he had the Greek Temple. The Greek Temple is nothing other than the filling in with physical material that which presented itself in this way clairvoyantly in geometrical forms around the human being. The Greek Temple only put the stones into that which appeared before the Greek. Hence the Greek always had the tendency to present a figure of the god in the Temple which he actually had to think of to himself as his own divine hunan being. He did not simply build a temple, but he also put in a divine god such as Pallas Athene.

Thus from all this you can see the connection of architecture, the building of the temple with the original clairvoyance. That person felt something in architecture of a divine nature in these times, something which is connected in the highest degree with all the inner revelations of the human being. They felt that one did not build in the way people build today where you learn all sorts of things at the university, but at that time man could perceive the architectural structure as the revelation of the Spirits of Form. For this reason, we can see the rather special way in which Vitruvius, the great architect of the time of Augustus, speaks of the architect, of the moral qualities which the architect must have, of recollecting the divine spiritual of the universe. And why was it necessary that according to Vetruvius' perception, the architect had to know all this? They saw the manifestations of the beings of the higher hierarchies in the forms of the buildings and this is of great significance. It is true that today's architect would make a face if you demanded that he also learn medicine, philosophy, astronomy, etc., besides his studies at the technical university; in other words, he would be a spiritual scientist of sorts.

Now, why was this so? It was so because Vetruvius, himself, was still able to perceive the following: “When I build” he said to himself “this finite human being is not allowed to build, but this finite human being must be a channel so that a being, of the higher hierarchies can work through him.” However, this possibility of coming into connection with the higher hierarchies so that when one puts stone upon stone in the building, not what finite man creates but what the spirits of the hierarchies create, this possibility was received only in the secret places of the mysteries. One had to be initiated into the connection of the divine spiritual with the human. One had to know medicine, because one had to so adapt the forms so that they could actually be an imprint of the human being himself. Note how in a similar way the shell of the snail is an imprint of the snail himself, how the macrocosm injects the forces into the snail enabling the snail to build the shell out of its own beingness. In a similar way man felt the working of the divine spiritual beings in him; a divine spiritual being led his hand, his own spirit and worked into the forms of architecture.

Now, because the forms of the architecture were the last which were revealed, all those spiritual brotherhoods of which I spoke last time, speak of the real architecture and of the soul mood which real architecture must have. Above all, there live in these occult brotherhoods, even if it is in caricature, that which entered from the spiritual world in the way just described. The person who enters the first grade enters into the spiritual world upon this path. He is presented in these occult communities in the second grade and is made familiar not with those external social relationships but with those relationships which pass from one human soul to another. He becomes a brother member in the second grade and finally he learns to feel in himself what it means to say: ‘Here I stand as a human being and I, as a man, feel that I am a sheath of that which lives in me as spirit man to whom beings of the higher hierarchies can speak, down to whom they can descend; that I can speak no word that is not inspired by these spirits of the higher hierarchies.’ Even if only a small consciousness of this is present in those who are in the third grade of such occult brotherhoods, nevertheless they still call themselves masters of the third grade. But because revelations do not occur any longer, because today things do not work so intensively, because today there is no longer a direct connection with the spiritual world, one has to take hold of the traditions of that which was handed down, then one spreads a mystery over it and does not allow it to be imparted to any one else. However, this primal knowledge was continued in such communities from generation to generation, from century to century and sometimes it was utilized in a very bad way as I indicated last time.

I have already indicated that during the whole time from the year 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D. there was a certain connection with the spiritual world. One could at least enliven it out of one's inner being in these years, one could at least enliven it out of memory. That ended in the 14th century. However, beyond the 14th century certain sensitive people did feel that the spirit still plays in, that if, for example, you want to understand the 15th, 16th, 17th century, you must get an idea that those were still times in which the breath of spiritual life still streamed over the earth. However, this gradually disappeared. In the time from the 14th, 15th, 16th, even from the 17th century, there were sensitive natures who knew: The spirit weaves and lives around us.

Now, I want to bring a fact to your attention. The present historian speaks about the time of Savonarola in the 15th century, for example, in such a way that he speaks of Florence as he does of a city today, because he cannot transplant himself into the soul mood of that time, into that mood where one could still experience something of the spiritual. Why was it that at that time in a certain week in Florence every person who you met on the street looked so very sad and walked with his head bent down and his eyes dimmed? This was because Savanarola had given a sermon on the previous Sunday and he had said: “If the moral aspect continues as it is, then the flood will break in.” And he ended it with the words: “I tell you, waters will flow over the earth.” When he spoke these words, they were enlivened with spirit. The spirit streamed out, and for a whole week the people of Florence dwelled under this spiritual influence. It was very sad.

One of the contemporaries of Savanarola was Pico della Mirandola, Count Mirandola, who lived at the end of the 15th century and also experienced the soul mood which lived in Florence. Pico della Mirandola was one of those spirits who belonged to the sensitive spirits and in that year which passes over from the 4th to the 5th period he felt how the spirit was disappearing from the environment and at the same time he received an inner yearning to feel the spirit. There were a number of people in Florence at that time who experienced this in the same way. They felt that the spirit disappears for the normal person, but they must try to receive it into themselves and these Renaissance men called themselves the Neo-Platonists. In the Academy of Florence, there was a reliving of Plato. I wanted to characterize this for you so that you can understand that there was a sudden transition from the 14th to the 15th century in the soul mood in reference to how these men connected themselves with the spiritual world. When you go back into those times, you can see that people yearned to receive impressions of the spiritual world, but these people were single people all over the world and they had to do special ascetic exercises so that they could receive something of the spiritual in a sort of caricature way. You know that modern science says that nature makes no jumps, but that is not true, it does jump everywhere. When the leaf transforms itself into the blossom, that is a jump. So we see that there was a sudden spring from the 14th to the 15th century and this feeling died away.

Our task is to appeal to those forces which we have as a replacement for the ancient way of grasping the spiritual. There are two ways of doing this. One way is to continue to propagate tradition and many secret societies arose from being satisfied with the propagation of what the ancient said through tradition. However, there were people who attempted to reckon with the new soul forces which came in as replacements for it. They attempted to translate that which came in from the ancient way in the form of pictures, of direct perception into the form of intellectual power, this intellect which is bound to the physical body of our 5th post-Atlantean period. One of the people who tried to do this was Amos Comenius.

Very few people today know that Amos Comenius was the actual founder of the modern pedagogy and that he founded the primer in the 16th, 17th century. A book by Friedrich Eckstein entitled Comenius and the Bohemian Brothers was recently published. Friedrich Eckstein is one of those people who was united with me in a small theosophical group in Vienna at the end of the 1880's. Then he went his own way and I had not heard of him until this book about Amos Comenius appeared. These 150 wood cuts from the original edition are given with German and Latin texts. Here you have wood cuts beginning with God, the world, heaven, the elementals, the elements, plants, fruits, animals, the human body and its members, etc., all of which was put in such a way as to appeal to the heart. This sort of presentation still appeals very much to people. Herder and Goethe loved all this in their childhood. The whole way of writing children's books rests upon Amos Comenius. He was connected with many secret brotherhoods all over Europe and he wanted to establish what he called his “Pan Sophia”. In the beginning of our period, in the 16th, 17th century, we have in Amos Comenius a human being who knew that now is the time for a sudden change, that one must transmute all the knowledge from earlier times into the form of external intellect. You do not simply continue it in the form of the ancient tradition. This tradition rests upon that which was the Temple architecture. Amos Comenius had as his task translating in his “Pan Sophia” everything which worked in the 5th post-Atlantean period and he says the following: “Why should the Temple of Pan Sophia be erected according to the ideas, directions and laws of the higher architect Himself? Because we have to follow the primal picture of the totality; measure, number, position and the goal of the paths according to the wisdom of God, Himself, when, indeed, He instructed Moses to erect the Tabernacle, then Solomon to erect the Temple and finally Ezekial to reestablish the Temple. The structure materials of Solomon's Temple were very precious stones, metals, marble and sappy, good smelling trees like spruce and cedar.” And so we want to establish a school of wisdom, a universal wisdom, a “Pan Sophia” wisdom so that one can say that that which is in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, which was represented in the Wander Years, is a continuation of what Amos Comenius wanted.

In conclusion I want to add some more things. A book has recently been written by Karl Ludwig Sleiss entirely out of natural science. I just want to read something of it to you. (Summary of what was read) He talks about a hysterical young woman sitting on a sofa in a room where an electrical ventilator was running. She became hysterical and said: “Oh, there is a bee that wants to sting me.” She had heard the buzzing of the ventilator. Low and behold, she did produce an inflammation of the eyelid which was quite large. Here is another case where Sleiss talks about a well-known business man who approached him and asked him to cut off his arm because he felt that it was poisoned. Sleiss said that the arm was not poisoned. The man went away and the next day he died. Sleiss said that there was no inflection at all and his diagnosis was death by hysteria. What he wanted to say is that you cannot only cause an inflammation of the eyelid through thought, but you can also kill yourself through thought. What this modern scientist is saying is that thought can incarnate itself, that thought can make itself flesh. However, in the second case of the businessman who wanted his arm cut off because it was poisoned, this was a case of mediumistic clairvoyance where he knew he was going to die. Now, what happened in the case of the hysterical woman who had a swollen eyelid was that the thought that she imagined there was a bee from the sound of the ventilator became imagination and then descended into the astral body, it then came through the ether body and incarnated in the physical body.

In this same book in a chapter entitled “The Myth of Metabolism in the Brain”, Sleiss says that Goethe must have been some sort of clairvoyant, because Goethe had come to the idea that not only are the bones transformed out of the spinal column but also the whole brain has been transformed from it. Now, Sleiss said this in 1916 and he wondered if he could find some indication that Goethe had this idea. However he does not know that in 1892, I, myself, found this indication in the Goethe Archives.

Therefore we can see how certain truths of the spiritual world are penetrating into mankind's consciousness through certain channels. For example, they are talking about Strindberg's play of dream, “Tramspiel” which he produced and they can see the spiritual world breaking in everywhere. Strindberg worked in an extraordinary way and people are saying that there must be some spiritual communication there. Much streamed into Strindberg; however, everything is caricatured. Even that is very interesting for people today. For example, you can read the book Golom by Gustav Merig and you can find something there of which you can say that a stream of spiritual life breaks into mankind in a powerful way; however it is caricatured in forms where it can be more damaging than useful for those people who are not solidly established. Again you get a stream of the spiritual world breaking into the short story entitled “Cardinal Napaloos” (sic). In this story you find certain knowledge about the playing in of the Akashic Chronicle and so forth in a quite wonderful way. You can find indications of how the spiritual world wants to pour into mankind. It is very important to open our eyes to the fact that the spiritual world wants to pour into mankind today. We do not have to warm up ancient traditions, although they are interesting to study. We ought to meet the demands of the present. The spiritual worlds want to pour in. It comes unconsciously and is caricatured. However, when we develop ourselves according to spiritual science, it will not be caricatured; we can actually experience the spiritual world properly. through anthroposophical spiritual science, one can get an understanding for the opening up of our soul, our heart, our head, to the streams of the spiritual world.

We have already spoken of how the cultural development of mankind, in so far as it is spiritual, is permeated by all kinds of brotherhoods which bring to expression in their total content the symbolic actions which have been taken from certain imaginative ideas. The most significant symbol of such brotherhoods is that which is connected with the thought of death and resurrection. Again and again the thought of death and the thought of resurrection is brought together before such brotherhoods. Thus, one can say that as a middle point symbol man is shown how the thought of immortality proceeds out of both of these thoughts. First a man dies and is buried.

Now, in most of these brotherhoods, the personality to which this symbol is attached is called Hiram; this symbol is connected with what is called the legend of Hiram. Thus the name of Hiram, the architect of King Solomon who according to the legend built the Solomon Temple with King Solomon and then as a result of certain of his servants becoming his enemies, Hiram was killed and his death is shown in a symbolic way. It is shown how he is buried and the presentation is brought to a certain resurrection out of the grave, a proceeding of Hiram out of the grave. Through this symbol, they want to carry the thought of immortality to the soul in a much more penetrating way than is possible through mere theories. Through this symbol which takes hold of the unconscious forces of man, through this imagination one wants to show what the situation really is when one passes through death and then is resurrected.

Now, when you consider that the death of Hiram, the resurrection of Hiram is led before the brothers of the lodges, so indeed, we have the connection with the Easter thought. Now you know that in the Catholic cult there is also a symbolic presentation occurring; that the festivities of Maundy Thursday pass over to the Good Friday, and then the Festival is concluded in the symbolic placing of Christ Jesus in the grave. Then you have Christ Jesus lying in the grave from Good Friday through Saturday evening; and as is the modern custom the Resurrection is celebrated, which means that Christ is again taken out of the grave and you have celebration with the Resurrected Christ. When one considers the action which occurs there in the cult, particularly in the Catholic cult, it is just the same as that which occurs in occult brotherhoods as the putting in the grave and the resurrection of Hiram. So you see, the Easter thought stands as the center point in a certain connection in these occult brotherhoods. The meaning which is connected with this ceremony is that the human being, by gazing on this symbolic activity, goes deeper into his soul than he would with the normal forces which are present in his consciousness; it goes much deeper than that. Such a symbolic action would actually have no significance if you could not presuppose that deep down in the human soul you have an activity where the consciousness does not reach. The human soul contains activity below his conscious awareness.

We speak in art of the fact that that which gives the artist power enabling him to produce works of art or to reproduce them cannot originate from the ordinary conscious forces of the soul, but come up out of the unconscious and then enter into the consciousness. Hence, in connection with the artist, it is so that for him any sort of rules to which he might direct himself to, will become a disturbing factor; he cannot regulate himself according to rules; he must direct himself to that which as an elementary consciousness in his soul gives wings to those forces which he needs. He can, if he wants, subsequently to look back and give a certain explanation of that which comes to the surface from the subconscious aspect of his being. Therefore we must assume that many other hidden qualities hold sway in the soul, forces which do not play up into consciousness.

We speak of the fact as we have often spoken about it, that the astral life of man is much broader, much more extensive than the conscious ego life of this human being and these forces play out of the astral life of man into the conscious ego experience. Hence,these forces are present underneath. There is already a large number of people in our time who have so adapted themselves to the external, purely materialistic life and look for their salvation in this external materialistic life so that, in the main, in their soul life they only possess that which is connected with the external material life. You can really notice the difference when you lead a symbol such as the death and resurrection of Hiram in front of human beings who have only been educated for the external material life. They find it very comical, very superfluous. However, those people who have the unconscious soul forces, who are able to perceive the unconscious forces which hold sway in the astral, are taken hold of in the deepest sense by the symbol and call up those faculties out of their soul which are able to understand what is meant by immortality; whereas the ordinary forces which are bound to the physical life cannot understand this immortality.

Something has remained in the Easter Festival of what in the primal consciousness of mankind was connected, in the main, with the thought of this festival. We have often spoken about the question—When do we celebrate this Easter Festival? Well, we celebrate it on the Sunday following the first full moon after the beginning of Spring which falls on the 21st of March. Thus the establishment of the point of time of the Easter Festival is dependent upon the relationship between the sun and moon positions, which means that we upon the earth celebrate the festival which is dependent upon the cosmic connections. What does the human soul say in so far as it has undertaken such an establishment of the Easter Festival. It says the following: Here upon this earth everything shall not be regulated according to purely earthly relationships. However, at least that which touches the soul most deeply ought to be directed according to extra earthly relationships. Man should gaze upon the symbol of immortality; the placing in the grave and the Resurrection; the thought of immortality of the living; the soul going through the Portal of death. That should be carried in front of the human being either in the occult picture as in the Catholic cult or more in thoughts as happens in other confessions—that is not so important at the present time. However, in so far as the human being allows the picture of the placing in the grave and the Resurrection to sway in his soul, this should happen when the sun and the moon come into a corresponding constellation. This is a protest of the human soul, that the gazing upon such an important symbol should not be carried out purely under earthly conditions; it is a recognition that the gazing upon this symbol should be bound up with the cosmic relationships external to the earth.

Here, as I am giving a lecture, certain things are happening to your human soul. Just imagine that so-called Monists were sitting here instead of you. Naturally, there would be an entirely different effect upon their soul than is upon your soul, because you have taken up into your soul certain preliminary ideas from spiritual science. Man is continuously changed by that which he has experienced. You have been exposed to anthroposophical spiritual science; your soul is different from those people who have not been exposed to it. It is not realistic to speak in general terms abut the human being as is done by the academic would. As soon as one goes into the realities, one sees how unrealistic the way the human being is considered by anthropologists.

Now, you see, it is very easy for you not to assess correctly or even to overlook what has happened to your soul in so far as the work of spiritual science has impinged upon it. Much, much more is imprinted upon this soul. Much is imprinted in the human soul, because there is the unconscious, the astral united with the human soul and you will be able to say: That which plays into the human being from the external world and which remains unconscious is nevertheless far more powerful, far more significant, than that which enters consciously. You all know the beautiful love poems which unite themselves with the light of the moon. Here we see that the unconscious soul itself stands in a connection with the non-earthly, that which comes into the earth with the light of the moon. Here you have the moon with its light streaming in and it is something that you have coming from the cosmos, from the extra earthly and has to do with the unconscious weaving and swaying of the human soul. And, if you remember what I said to you on Thursday and again that which I said on Saturday evening at the public lectures about the swaying, the dominating, the ruling and weaving of the Folk Soul element in the human soul life, then, indeed, you must say to yourself that this Folk Soul element comes up out of the unconscious much more than from the conscious. It is really true that that which rules in the depths of our soul and can only echo faintly up into the consciousness, is precisely what rules and weaves in the astral body; that is very important and is of a non-earthly nature. And that person whose soul is open for the impressions of the spiritual world knows that our earth is not only different in spring and in Autumn, that in spring the vegetation shoots up and in autumn there is harvesting, but the portion of the earth which is illuminated by the light of the moon is something different than the earth when it is not illuminated by the light of the moon. After the 21st of March the sun stands in a different relationship to the earth than it had before the 21st of March and that which is reflected back to us as sunlight from the moon upon the earth is therefore something quite different from that which radiated down before the 21st of March. The first full moon after the beginning of Spring gives back to us the first strength of the resurrected sun and this is quite different from any other full moon. Thus our astral nature would not be the same if, shall we say, we would gaze upon the symbol of laying in the grave and Resurrection in December; it is not the same as when we do it in the week after the streaming down of the spring full moon. Our soul is in another condition at this particular time. Now, if our soul is something quite different through the fact that we have taken up spiritual science into it and are not just Monists, so our soul is also something different in the moonlight after the Spring Equinox than, shall we say, after the Winter Solstice. Hence our soul can experience something different at this time as compared with any other time.

Now, when spiritual science appears today, it does so in order that the circle of vision of human beings which has been shrunken by the materialistic development can again be expanded. If you take the thoughts of spiritual science into yourself in a thoroughly correct sense, then you actually are expanding the thinking, the perception, the willing, the feeling of your soul. Today people are not sufficiently clear about the fact that materialistic development has brought not only that which one calls materialism, but this materialistic development has brought something else; it has brought, I might say, short-sightedness of the thought life into all things. The thoughts have become small and now they must be made much larger. The possibility of seeing things in their larger perspective must again arise among human beings.

Just think if the human being were again to become clear about the fact that man actually consists of two parts, out of the head which stands at a much later stage of development and which, one might say, is much more hardened than the rest of the organism and the rest of the organism which stands at a much older stage of evolution. Just think what proceeds from the working together, of this head organism with the rest of the human organism. When we move a hand, the body is at the basis of this movement which participates in this movement. What occurs when I move a hand? I have previously told you about this. The physical hands and the ether hands both move, they move together. When I think, the left and the right lobes of the brain also execute ether movements, that is to say, the ether portion of the left and right brain lobes also execute movements which are quite similar to the hand movements. The ether movements are there, but the physical movements are imprisoned, they are enclosed in the solid skull. It is a bound Promethius and because of this, it is possible to have thinking. If it were not through this external imprisonment, but through the organic fettering of the human being man's arms would now be imprisoned as they will be in the future when the earth will have disappeared and developed into the Jupiter existence just as the brain lobes are imprisoned now. Man's arms will be imprisoned in the future as now the lobes of his brain are imprisoned. Then that which we call thinking will also be left over from the movement of the hands. I will show you what can be made clear with a much more concrete example presicely from the history of our time. It can be clearly shown how the thoughts of the best man of our age are very short.

Now, let us consider Eduard von Hartmann who was the philosopher of the unconscious. As far as his own estimation of himself was concerned, he would never consider hinself to be a materialistic thinker. However, how we think of ourselves does not depend on what we think, but the point is, are our thought habits of a materialistic nature? A person can establish a quite idealistic philosophy and nevertheless can still possess quite materialistic habits of thought; and these habits of thought determine whether he has short carrying thoughts or wide carrying thoughts. Now, as far as Eduard von Hartmann is concerned, among many of his contributions he has also written a great deal about politics, and I want to present Hartmann, the political author, to you, because in his age he was held in the highest esteem as one of the best German, nay, one of the best Prussian patriots as well as being a good political writer. Obviously Eduard von Hartmann's thoughts were so wide carrying that he was able to represent the constellation of the different great powers of Europe to himself: Germany, Austria, Italy, France, England, Russia and in between them the different small neutral states. He continually studied and wrote papers about the different political interest of these single states. Now, he wrote a very significant thesis which came out in 1888 and appeared in book form in 1889, and in it he set forth his ideas as to what represents the best political constellation for Europe.

Now, I have to make the preliminary comment that he was not only a German, but also a Prussian patriot, he spoke so obviously from the standpoint of Prussian patriotism. He attempted to represent what the best thing for Germany and Europe would be as far as alliances which must be developed were concerned, and he saw the salvation of Germany and of Europe in an alliance of common neutrality in the arising of an alliance between Switzerland, Belgium and Holland under English leadership. Just think, Eduard von Hartmann wanted Belgium, Switzerland and Holland under English leadership. You can see exactly what I am driving at from such a concrete example, and the same thing can be seen in other domains of life; When you look back 30 years you can see how ridiculous these thoughts were; how the whole development which one can describe as the age of materialism brings with it short thoughts, thoughts when they relate themselves to time relationships are perhaps valid for 2 or 3 centuries.

Now I will give you an example from the realm of medicine, but things do not go as easily here as in the realm of politics. Nevertheless here is an example from the philosopher Lotse, who had a well developed medical background. He said: “The enthusiasm for any given remedy, as a general rule, is only valid for five years. The enthusiasm for a remedy discovery today disappears and soon as another remedy comes into fashion.” this is noticed far more easily in the medical field than with politics. Gustav Theodore Fechner who really was a very intelligent person wrote a very interesting thesis in the 1820's. At that time iodine, a new medicament, appeared on the scene. Everyone began to claim that it could cure numerous types of illnesses. Then Gustav Theodore Fechner wrote a very neat thesis in which, according to the rules of science, and all you need to do is develop a method of receiving the light of the moon and then this universal medicament could be used in a wonderful way everywhere. Can you see from this that a shortness of judgment, a certain living concepts which cannot be carried very far.

Now, when you entered the domain of folk psychology or race psychology and read what the foremost writers had to say and then placed these side by side, you would be surprised at what you had before you. For example, you could find that men, in so far as they claim to be objective scientists with present ways of thinking, depict the population of Middle Europe as being descended from the Germans. Now, they depict these Germans as having all sorts of qualities. Then the Frenchman, shall we say tries to describe the French and says that they became wise through the fact that France descends partly from the ancient Celts and then he describes the Celts. When you compare and find that person who describes the Germans in Central Europe attributes the same qualities to the Germans which the Frenchman ascribes to the ancient Celts. However, there is much more of a Celtic element living within central Europe than within France. But this the people.

I can repeat numerous examples which will show you how the concepts are so very small that they do not carry very far. You can see what happens today when these so-called secure natural scientific methods attempt to go on into the spiritual life. When you realize all these things, then you will see how necessary it is that the spirit should beat into this realm. How long will it take however until one has such a psychology, a science of the soul of the type which I attempted to give in the lecture last Thursday? Only such a science of the soul can make that which actually rules in Europe understandable, and can also bring that understanding which is necessary if a culture your is to proceed further. One can think of all sorts of domains which are so advanced in materialistic directions, directions which are without any spiritual value. Then we see that this material element—it can be a state or any other structure—can never succeed, can never get better, because the way things are is that everyone needs a soul.

Now, that which we foster, that which we have as our science of the spirit within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be just one society among others. Why not? The answer lies in the following question: what do other societies do when they establish themselves? They set up programs and one unites round a certain program. You print the agreement of this program and when you leave this society, that means you no longer agree with the program. When the whole society dissolves, no one is hurt about these programs. One can get together and then one can also depart. That is the case which happens with every mechanism in the world.

Now, Weissman once attempted to characterize an organism from the natural scientific standpoint. Naturally he could only bring a negative quality, but this negative quality really is correct. He asks the question: how can you tell if something is living? His answer is: that which, when it does, leaves behind a corpse. Now, naturally in this way he is not characterizing that which is living. However, one has to concur that he is quite correct when he says: “The living is negatively characterized by the fact that this living being leaves behind a corpse.” Now, our Anthroposophical Society is a living being through the fact that there are a large number of cycles in the hands of our members of which, in the first place we know as a general rule non-members should not receive these cycles. However, one can now go into second hand stores everywhere and buy these cycles. You see from that that the Anthroposophical Society must be an organism, because just imagine, if the Anthroposophical Society dissolved itself away, then it would leave a corpse behind, and the corpse would be the cycles.

Now, one must be able to think about all these things. Other societies, when they dissolve away, can actually do so without leaving behind a corpse, because they are more mechanistically built. These people depart, the point of the program cannot be called a corpse because nothing is left behind. We are trying to deal in realities. This is something that must enter into our souls. When spiritual science becomes a real perception in us, every thought is felt in such a way that this thought stands in reality; whereas the abstract thinking which corresponds to the materialistic thinking does not bother itself with whether thoughts stand in reality or not. All this, my dear friends, show how limited the thinking is when it only restricts itself to the consciousness; when it is only bound up to the material aspect. Hence we should not wonder when those particular cultural streams in the development progress of mankind they want to take hold of everyday life, must also reckon with other than that which works only upon the ordinary consciousness. And so it has always been with the deep religious cultural impulses.

Why, for example, did something like the cult of Easter enter into the evolutionary history of mankind? Why was this Easter Cult brought into connection with cosmology, with that which occurs in a wide spaces of heaven between the Sun and moon? Because if man were only restricted to the experiences of the Earth, he would fall into the most extreme shortsightedness thinking, feeling and willing. Only through the fact that man is able to receive a greater perspective for his life can his thoughts be made much wider so that not only his physical ego consciousness is inserted in the right way into the earthly experiences but also his astral subconsciousness is membered into the great cosmic events. When the most important thought, the thought of immortality, is attached to the cosmos, it finds its fundamental basis in the religious connection. If man were only to originate out of that which is earthly, he would never be able to grasp the thought of immortality. If man was actually that which the materialistic natural science tries to say he is, if he was merely a highly developed ape, there would be nothing inside of him which would arrive at this thought of immortality.

I can give you a beautiful example from the philosophical aspect about how short the thoughts of natural researchers are in this domain. A few days ago I opened a book in which a person spoke about the connection of man with the apes in the sense that the monists do, in the material sense, not in the sense in which it is justified, but in the sense in which it is quite often expressed. At the beginning of his thesis, he says that he could prove that people who travel in certain districts where the cultural situation of the human being have so deteriorated could see that these people have the same instincts and drives as the apes. Now he says: “If it can be experienced that man can sink down to an ape condition, then it is logical that man can develop out of the apes.” Obviously, that is logical and quite clear. If a person becomes older, then you can get an old man out of the child; you can realize that without having to travel. In the same sense when you say that through cultural decadence man sinks down to ape condition, that is just as logical the same day man can become ape, why shouldn't the eighth also become a man! Therefore with the same logic you can say that if the child can become an old man, why shouldn't a child develop out of an old man; the logic is exactly the same. Material aspect is not that these people develop such logic, but that everyone reads this and no one notices what utter nonsense is being expressed.

If the present type of science, the present type of culture continues as it has, it can give people thoughts and feelings and perceptions only about what is earthly. Nevertheless there lives in man's depths that which is present as super sensible forces. They live there, but they must be repressed. And gradually as a result of this repressed spirituality in human soul, you would get the illness of culture. We cannot sufficiently emphasized the earnestness of our times. If from the heavy trials and tribulations which mankind is going through now, a small number of people can be permeated by the consciousness that what mankind needs is a spirituality, then out of this difficult time of trial something would happen which would be in the sense of the world spirit. But unless we get this spiritualization, nothing will go well for mankind.

We understand spiritual science only when we see in it not just a Christmas Festival but also an Easter Festival; that we understand what actually is meant when we have the thought of immortality for the whole being of man. When we grasp that which is immortal in the human being, only then are we able to understand immortality. Fichte, Hegel, many others knew that the human soul does not only become immortal when it passes through death, it is immortal now; that mortal element can now be found in us. Hence a science must be sought for, which besides taking into view the mortal body, takes into view the immortal soul of man.

It was natural that under the great advances and brilliance of natural scientific development in the last four centuries, that the consideration of spiritual life had to recede and the tendency towards the spiritual was also being eliminated from the external world. However, a time must come again when that Hiram, or shall we say that portion of Christ which always is there and which speaks of the super sensible, when that again resurrects itself after it has been buried in the Good Friday period of cultural development. We grasp the thoughts which at the time when the great Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo are all those who in the first place in a true way and can call that time cosmic Maunday Thursday. This has to be followed by a Good Friday. This view of the immortal element had to be buried. However, now the time has arrived when the cosmic Easter Sunday has to come and when we must celebrate the Holy Resurrection of the human soul and of the spirit knowledge.

Now, it is quite all right if, for example, we celebrate the Good Friday mood of soul in our present age. However, only when we have the power to gird ourselves for the Cosmic Easter Sunday, shall we also be able to perform the cult activity within our soul life which is there externally as the Easter Cult. Black mood of soul—that belongs to the days of Good Friday. The priests wear black clothes, because the corpse of the dead Christ rests in the grave. Then follows the Resurrection in the place of the thought of the grave. Today it is appropriate for us to carry in our soul the sorrow and the tragic. However, we ought to be able to know ourselves that we will be able to carry the spiritual Easter clothes when the times will again be different.

I have spoken in the past lectures of the customs in certain brotherhoods and what happens there. And I indicated that you can find the deeper impulses still present in the dried up structure of modern Freemasonry. And last time I especially spoke about that particular custom which represented itself in the laying in the grave and in the resurrection which, in the main, is that which can be called the Easter Cult. Today I will begin with something else which is connected with these things.

What is actually striven for in these circles can be presented in the following way. One says that you are looking for the lost Word. Now, I cannot permit myself to go into details, because that would lead me too far afield but I will, to be sure, in a certain way, tell you about what is meant by the “Lost Word” and to do this I will remind you of the beginning of the Gospel of John in which it says: “In the primal beginning was the Word. (In Greek, Logos always means Word) And the Word was with God and the God was the Word.” Now, it is obvious that that which we indicate today with the word ‘Word’ is not what is meant there; it is something quite different. You must remember the things which I told you in the last lecture in order to approach what is involved here, that mankind had a primal revelation, a primal wisdom in ancient times.

You must think of this primal wisdom which had to be given in a certain way to mankind, which was in its infancy, and if you think of this wisdom as spread out, you call that the Logos, the Primal Word, then you have an approximate idea of what is meant by the word ‘Word’, the Logos. One is able to say the following: That which was once given as wisdom to mankind which still stood at its infancy, through the mediation of higher spirits and is something which is far more extensive than that which today we are able to know in our spiritual science, you can say that has been lost. It is a beautiful custom when a feeling, a perception is at least stimulated in such brotherhoods that such a thing has actually been lost and must be looked for again.

Now, obviously this will not be found in such brotherhoods, because if that were so, when these people reached a certain degree there they would be just as wise as those people who once upon time were instructed by the Gods. However, in the cult, something is shown which is a picture of this losing of the primal wisdom and the refinding of it. Something should be sunk into the souls of mankind in such a way that they would come into the situation that when they pass through the portal of death, when they then pass the spiritual world and then return to earth, that then they can at least have an understanding of that which was necessary as a wisdom of the earth. Thus we can say: The Lost Word is again searched for, and all our spiritual science is, in the main, a searching for this Lost Word.

Now, to be sure, one cannot say that that which is given by spiritual science today was always absolutely unknown. No. I myself have often openly spoken in public lectures about a lost tone in modern spiritual life, a forgotten stream in which so much has already lived of that which is like a seed, a germinal aspect to spiritual science. When we consider the human being today, we know the following. That which the physical eyes see in the human being, is, as it were, only the external side of this hunan being; it is the physical body. The ether body is working and exists in him in a beingness way within this physical body. However, one does not come very far at all when one knows nothing other than that the man has an ether body. Many people are satisfied when they just know this word and have a vague idea of it, they are satisfied and can say: Well, the ether body is something a little thinner than the physical body, it is mistier and more radiating. But when you know that, you do not have very much. This ether body is actually a very complicated structure.

When you consider the human being as he is today, you know that each one is very different from the other. The European man is different from the African, who is again very different from the Asiatic. You must recognize such differences. However, when we look at the whole of mankind, in spite of all the differences between then, we must admit that the human beings taken together, are much more similar than the animals, because even though we know that the European is entirely different from the African, nevertheless you cannot say that this is as strong a difference as, for example, between the stork and the mouse. Therefore you see that animals are differentiated to a much higher degree than are human beings. The animals are separated from each other by species, and as far as the human race is concerned, you can say that it is one single species. Thus when we sweep our glance over the animal kingdom on the Earth, we find the most manifold differentiations between them.

Let us focus upon the consideration of our ether body. Our ether body is, as it were, held together by the elasticity of the physical body. The ether body is held together through the elastic force of the physical body as long as we are here between birth and death. Now, just represent in an imaginative way, if you can, an experiment which naturally cannot be done, but just imagine that it could be done, that you could remove the physical body on the one hand from the ether body and on the other hand remove the astral body and the ego from the ether body. Then, because the elasticity of the physical body is no longer there, you would discover that this ether body would spring out, separate out into many different divisions showing that the ether body is a manifoldness constituted out of many single factors and is only held together through the elasticity of the physical body.

Now we ask the question: How would these portions which spring out of us appear when we are able to separate the physical body away from the ether body? Indeed, even though it may appear strange to the clever people of our present age, nevertheless the following fact is true. These parts of the ether body would assume forms which would approximately resemble the outspread animal kingdom; that means that all the possible forms of the animal kingdom would appear. It would really be true that a certain part of your ether body, the head, for example, would take on a form similar to a bird, a certain part of the ether body which is in the vicinity of the larynx would take on a very beautiful angelic animal form; and so on. Thus we carry the whole animal kingdom inside us in our ether body. This is absolutely true. Our ether body is the outspread animal kingdom which is held together through the elasticity of our physical body.

Now, in primeval times when evolution was at another stage, the whole human form was distributed among many animals. When you contemplate that, you can understand that which is, in a very coarse way, looked upon as Darwinism. Mankind had, as it were, prepared itself in so far as that which later on it should develop as an ether body through what was separately formed as in the divisions of today's animal kingdom and at that time appeared entirely different from today's animal kingdom. Today's animal kingdom is no longer that which mankind was able to descend from. It was a quite other animal kingdom from the parts that were spread out in space and which were in the future intended to constitute man's ether body. However, the forces which were spread out in this ancient animal kingdom are in a certain sense extracted, as it were, and today these forces are present in our ether body.

Now, just imagine what we have there, in the main, as a totality in us. We have all the instincts, all the different drives of the animals already in us. However, they are only placed into a total relationship through the fact that all of that has been united through the elasticity of our physical body. As physical man, we are human beings and we have received our physical configuration during our earth existence from the Spirits of Form. As physical man we hold all of that which is within us in check. Now, at times one drive comes to manifestation or if one particular part of the ether body achieves the upper hand another drive comes to manifestation. You see what a complicated manifoldness we human beings actually are, and how it is impossible, in the main to approach the human being and understand him with these things which one first sees in the external world. If you focus your attention on the physical body, you first see that the Spirits of Form work there. These Spirits of Form give man his form only during the earth period. The animals have received their inherited form from the ancient Moon Evolution. This animal form is therefore a Luciferically configurated form; it is a form which has remained behind from the ancient Moon Evolution. What was only of an etheric nature at that time today has hardened itself. However, man has received his external physical configuration from the Spirits of Form, but they work in a lesser way in his inner being. Thus these Spirits of Form work less upon the ether body than do the Archai, Archangels and Angels. These Beings work upon the ether body and have something to do with the directing of this manifoldness in the ether body of which I just spoke. When we enter more exactly into the spiritual scientific facts, then we must be clear, for example, that in this our ether body all those forces work which come from the Folk Soul. This national Folk Soul exists deeply in our unconscious. And there exists, in the main, deeper wisdom which as pictures have been imparted to mankind and which can be understood if one exerts the will to do so.

Just assume that we are speaking or singing. Now, it is purely prejudice if you believe that all that happens when you speak or sing is some form of movement in the physical body. The main factors of the movement really occur within that manifoldness in the ether body of which I just spoke. Hence that which comes to consciousness in song or music comes out of the unconscious depths. It is most difficult to grasp this in words. And again we realize how we are related to the rest of the world when we know that that which is spread out as the animal kingdom lives in our ether body in the way in which I just described it.

When a certain impulse wants to be active in us, obviously it must come up in the astral body. If you consider these things in an orderly fashion, they do not contradict each other. Thus when you speak of the presence of drives and instincts in the human being, you must naturally ascribe them to the astral body. However, the form similarity which we have just spoken about in the animal kingdom is at the basis of the situation. And again, when we consider our astral body, if we are able to separate it out imaginatively as I just indicated in the separation of the ether body, then this astral body would fall apart, because it is only held together through the elasticity of the physical and the ether bodies. If you remove that elasticity, the astral body would fall apart and then it would represent something very similar to the whole outspread plant kingdom. Through the fact that we have an astral body, the different forms of the plant kingdom really exist in us as it is spread out in the world in its manifoldness. If you study the whole plant kingdom in the way in which one form is placed beside another, then you have an externally separated picture of that which has been drawn together in the human astral body. This knowledge also belongs to what has been called the Lost Word, because a consciousness of these things was present in the primal wisdom.

We carry the actual ego within the astral body, but when we speak about this which, for example, we have as consciousness in the human being not only during our waking period, but also that which exists when the human being sleeps, when his forces are unfolded outside in the whole universe during sleep, that is pulsated through by the spiritual forces of the cosmos. We carry all that in us unconsciously. If we are able to separate the ego out of the human being as we have just done with the ether body and the astral body, separating it out completely, then we would receive the whole picture of the mineral kingdom with all its differentiated mysteries of the cosmos. That which is actually spread out in the whole cosmos is contracted together into this ego. Thus we carry the mineral cosmos within us.

In this way we get a picture of what man actually is and how he is related with the cosmos. And when we speak of the fact that man consists of the physical body; of the ether body, of the astral body, of the ego, then we must not only take these merely as words, but we must be able to understand what exists behind these words; and you do that through spiritual science when you can focus the whole connection between man and the cosmos in your mind.

That person who today is able to see through these things knows that in the near future mankind will be presented with much more difficult tasks than the hard tasks of the present, tasks of which very few people today can even have an inkling. However, one must not believe that with the mobility, with the elasticity of thinking which human beings today possess, that it would be possible to be able to solve these tasks. It will not be possible to solve these tasks, because one of the characteristics of our age is that we are immersed in deep lies of life.

Now, in order to illustrate this, I will place proof before you which is near to us showing how people live in an untrue way today. Recall that which exists in that cycle an Christian Initiation where I spoke of the First Stage, of the Washing of the Feet which is a symbolic expression for something which man should exercise in his soul. I described how the human being should develop certain feelings, certain perceptions, which go towards perceiving his connection with the rest of the kingdoms of nature. Indeed, as you look down towards the animal kingdom in this connection with deep inner feeling, you say: This animal kingdom must be there in order that we should have a basis for this human kingdom. What would we higher developed creations be if this lower kingdom were not there? Now, making this into a living perception is the beginning of the first Degree of Christian Initiation. And then to be able to make clear to yourself how the animal as belonging to a higher kingdom must look down upon the plant kingdom and must say to it: You plant kingdom, you are indeed standing lower than I am in the row of phenomena, but I must thank you for my existence. Again, the plants must feel themselves down to the mineral kingdom out of which they grow and say: To you mineral kingdom I am thankful for my existence. And in a similar way, the Angelic kingdom, the next kingdom above the human kingdom, has to look down upon the human kingdom and say: We have to thank you, you human beings, who stand upon a lower stage of evolution for our existence. And so it goes further and further upwards in the scale. All these things can be transmuted into a fundamental ground of perception existing in the human soul.

Now, in this connection, my dear friend who is so close and true to our movement, namely, Christian Morgenstern, has brought this Washing of the Feet into a beautiful poem. We now have it among Morgenstern's last poems which appeared after his death. The well-known poem entitled “We found a Path” is also among this group. The poem entitled “The Washing of the Feet” tells of that which in previous years was said in connection with Christian Initiation and has been republished in this group. (Rudolf Steiner recited this poem)

A criticism of Morgenstern's poems recently appeared. Now you know that Christian Morgenstern was very closely attached to our movement; and this critic writes a book about him but he never mentions the fact that Christian Morgenstern was really one of us. This is an example of the sort of life lies existing today. Also what this critic does instead of getting the real spiritual connotation of Morgenstern's poems, is to try to reduce them down to analogies referring more to the human aspect, and he tries to show how this is German lyric poetry. Christian Morgenstern, if he were alive today, would be the first to say that his poems have as their origin not the external materialistic world to which this critic, Ernst Lissour (sic) comes from, but Christian Morgenstern would say that his poems come from another source, namely, from a spiritual source. Here you have an example of the life lies in which we live.

My dear friends, I would really prefer to say something which is in a sense far more elevating as an Easter consideration however, we cannot afford that luxury. We are living in very bloody times and it is necessary that we should inscribe in our souls that we should correctly perceive as the sort of karma development which which we are living now. We are living in very earnest times and we must acquire a real feeling, a real understanding for this. We are living in the 20th century, but we are surrounded by the sort of judgement that belongs to the 19th century. Very shortly after the outbreak of the war, people gave me a poem and they said it was written by Robert Hamerling and was a sort of prophecy of our present time.

Now, all you need do is just live yourself into the artistic style of Robert Hamerling and you will quickly see that not one line of this poem could have come from him, but many papers have printed this poem and they are filled with admiration about this prophecy saying that Hamerling, who died in 1889, was able to see into our present time. Even though it is not true that one single line comes from him, yet they keep on repeating it.

Now, you cannot blame the broad masses of mankind; it is not their fault. The fault lies with these leaders, and I have given you examples of these representative people of our age, the representative media of our age, how they are filled with lies. In order to characterize our present age, we must say to a person who today for example holds a horseshoe magnet in his hand: Look, what you have in your hand is a magnet which has forces in it. But he says: No, that is no magnet, that is a shoe which we put on horses' hoofs. Then he takes the shoe and dismisses you. People have the magnetized iron in their hand and do not know that there is an invisible force in it. This is just a picture analogous to what we talked about in our spiritual science; they will not recognize our spiritual science. The problem today is that things are very complicated, but our thoughts are not sufficiently developed to be able to take these things into our understanding. Therefore everything splits itself apart; people walk by each other, each finding his own methods in his particular domain and have no inkling that the historical necessity demands that all this can actually be illuminated from spiritual science.

Now, I have often mentioned the fact here that every physical event has its spiritual side, how we are related to the world shows itself in so far as we give back things to the world when we pass through the portal of death. That which I said about the ether body relates itself to the time between birth and death. For a few days after death things are entirely different when the ether body is held together by the ego and astral body. After that it is given over to the cosmos and then it works as I have often told you. Many such ether bodies of the very young have gone through the portal of death and are present in the spiritual sphere and remain there with all the spiritual content which exists in them as a result of their sacrificial death. All these ether bodies that are filled with this sacrificial death have the possibility of helping a future spiritualization of mankind. However, in order for that to be possible, there have to be human souls here on the earth who understand this etheric aspect which is streaming around human beings and is the most valuable residue of those people who have gone through their sacrificial death. This is a real, not an abstract memory process and it is those human beings who understand these things on the earth who can become receptacles for these young ether body forces and place themselves in the service of mankind as is wanted by these young people who have gone through their sacrificial death. However, if human souls here upon the earth are not mature enough to do all these things, then these forces which have been set free by the sacrificial death flow into Ahrimanic and Luciferic streams. As far as spiritual science is concerned, we have responsibilities that have been given to us which are related not only to mere knowledge and cognition, but are connected with feelings which should be stimulated in our souls and be made alive. And, in the main, the correct result of such considerations which we have tried to foster here in one direction or another is to help us in learning to acquire a feeling of responsibility for human souls in reference to the events that are going on all around us which has been permeated with so much blood. When we, in an earnest sense are able to edify ourselves through the contemplation of the connection of man in the world that spiritual science can give us, then we understand the words correctly which we have often used here and which call the feelings out of human souls which are so necessary in our age. May souls direct their conscious mood in a spiritual way into the realm of the spirits and as they do that, say:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood on fields of battle,
From the grief of the bereathed,
From the people's sacrifice,
There will ripen fruit of Spirit
If souls will torn in consciousness
Towards the realm of Spirit.