The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It gives me great pleasure to be here with you once more. And to see the fine progress our building has made during the time we could not meet is a pleasure no less great. In the name of our striving to serve the needs of our time, a hearty thanks is truly due to all our friends who have been devoting themselves to the necessary tasks of this building. Some of these things take months to accomplish, so allow me to say, by way of a greeting, that every step our work progresses has great significance for our spiritual movement. In these difficult times, when the fate of spiritual movements can be said to depend upon an uncertain future, we need above all to maintain a lively awareness of the eternal significance of precisely the kind of work that takes place here. It is important that such work has actually been taken up, that some human hearts and souls have actually been touched by the spiritual implications of the work, and that some human eyes have actually beheld it. For this creates a womb that will always be able to carry the future, and what we are doing thus enters into the developing stream of human aspiration. We may hope that what our dear friends accomplish here in their souls will also be able to bear the most manifold fruits out there in the world. And these fruits will most certainly be beautiful for, from its inception, this work has been done in the spirit of progress and with a desire to build the future—a desire to lead our times forward.

It gave me deep joy, for example, when I walked past the house that has been newly erected in the vicinity of the west portal¹ for the first time. It is significant that this house also stands within our precincts. For it is significant that it has been possible to build such a house. It stands there as a living protest against all merely traditional style in building and against an architecture that no longer has anything to contribute to our path of development. So this little house stands there as a preliminary announcement of something new. And the fact that in our circles the need to build something new was understood, is much more significant than one might at first think. For this house to stand here is of very great significance! Whatever objections may still be raised against this style of building and this kind of architecture, it is nevertheless the style and the architecture of the future. And if one tries to acquaint oneself with the artistic longings of the present, one finds everywhere the same: there is an obscure striving, but none of those who strive know where they want to go. By and by it will be seen that those who strive in darkness are striving for the goals that already are being sought here. It will be seen that one needs to become acquainted with these forms that are born out of the womb of spiritual science. However shocking some aspects of our buildings may now seem, it will not be long before they cease to be shocking and appear as the obvious result of the experience and the feelings of the present and of the immediate future. And at present, when there is so much to cause us sorrow, we have this to raise our spirits: that we are permitted, in the midst of these times of uncertain destiny, to establish what mankind needs for its future.

And now, today and tomorrow I would like to talk to you about some things that are evidence of what is rooted in the depths of the human soul, rooted in such a way that a person finds much of it incomprehensible when it emerges from the depths. Moreover, it makes self-knowledge difficult, for it is rooted in the soul in such a way that the inner destiny of a person is connected with what thus emerges from the depths of the soul. The nearer one comes to self-knowledge, the more these life-obscuring clouds arise. It is about human nature, therefore, that we want to speak—about some indefinite and often indefinable aspects of human nature.

I will begin with an example; our times provide us with many examples like it. You are aware that for a long time people have called our times ‘the age of decadence’, and have even been pleased to feel themselves to be true children of such times. One felt something about our times that made it proper and even stylish to be a ‘decadent’. Many adhered to a kind of gospel which proclaimed: In order not to be a philistine you must have a certain degree of nervousness. Anyone who was not nervous was a thick-headed philistine—or was some other kind of person who was bound to fail to achieve the heights of his age. More than a few people really did feel like this during the last few decades. To be distinguished one had to be, at the very least, nervous. Only as a decadent could one really belong to the new spiritual nobility.

Today we will first consider one type of decadent as an example. Later he will provide us with a basis for some more general conclusions about certain world-views. So, as I said, he will only be an example of one type and should only be viewed as such. There are numerous contemporary examples which we could equally well consider.

Today I want to discuss a relatively young man who developed along these lines. He wrote two books that attracted much attention. The first was called Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter). The second book was only published by friends after his death. It bore the title, Concerning the Last Things (über die letzten Dinge).³ I am speaking about Otto Weininger,² a man whom many saw as a true genius of his time. When he wrote the fat book, Sex and Character, it attracted a great deal of attention, and the various judgments passed on the book differed greatly. There were people who viewed it as a kind of gospel proclaimed by the archetypal spirit of the times. They claimed that this book, Sex and Character, touched—if somewhat one-sidedly and perhaps not entirely explicitly—on the deepest truths of the contemporary era. There were also others—those, for example, who by profession were doctors to the insane—who maintained that the only serious libraries in which the two books, Sex and Character and Concerning the Last Things, belonged were the libraries of asylums for the insane. They did not mean in the patients' library, either, but rather in the doctors' library—so that the doctors could study the two books as typical examples of contemporary lunacy.

As you see, a greater divergence of opinion could not be imagined. On the one hand there was an almost prayerful reverence for a great work of genius; on the other, this work was viewed as a product of lunacy. And some of what is to be found in the book, Sex and Character, is indeed curious. But it could only have surprised those who had not concerned themselves intensively with certain thoughts that had been coming to the surface during the last few decades.

To begin with, Weininger said (not in precisely these words, for with so fat a book it is necessary to abbreviate): Up to now the views of mankind have been the views of philistines and pedants. The philistines and pedants have always believed that there are two kinds of human being in the world-men and women. But only a true philistine could believe that there are just men and women in the world. To really understand the world, one must rise above the philistine view that there are just men and women in the world, for Weininger believes it is not true that there are only the two sexual identities, masculine and feminine. With great correctness and diplomacy he calls the masculine and feminine characters respectively M and W. But, according to Weininger, there is no one in the world who is exclusively M or W. And it would be unfortunate if there were someone who would have to be designated as entirely M or entirely W. For, asks Weininger, what is a proper woman? A proper woman is not even a something, but is the negation of a something—is nothingness. Now there are some individuals walking about who are not properly here in this world. They are only here as a kind of maya. But those we designate as W would not be here at all—not if they are exclusively W. The truth of the matter is that every human individual consists of M + W. Every human being has both masculine and feminine characteristics. If there is a preponderance of M, the person gives the impression of being a man; if there is a preponderance of W, the impression of being a woman. And because a woman does not have so very much M in her, she is both a Something and a Nothing. The fundamental character of a person depends on how much M they possess and how much W, and on the way these are combined.

This is how Weininger observes humanity. He says that everything depends on our giving up the old prejudice that there are men and women. He believes that very much indeed depends on our finally seeing that every human individual is a Something in so far as there are M characteristics present in him, and a Nothing in so far as there are W characteristics, feminine characteristics, present. Thus every human being fundamentally consists of a combination of the Something and the Nothing.

Now, this is the point of view on which the whole fat book is based. Everything from the life of the individual to the course of history is observed, with mathematical rigour, from this point of view. Naturally, Weininger finds, for example, that the basic character of an individual depends very heavily on the quantity, the quantum, of W, contained in that individual—on how much of the Nothing they contain. A different type of person arises depending on whether more or less W is mixed into their character.

You must excuse me for confronting you with some of Weininger's train of thought. You might be of the opinion that it is not quite proper to talk openly about such things. But if we want to know what is going on, we cannot stick our heads in the sand like ostriches. So I am simply describing this one type of person. At present there are actually many people who think like this, only many of them do not know it. Therefore you must excuse me, for I am not expressing my own judgements; they are Weininger's.

Let us assume that much W were mixed into the character of a particular individual, a maximum quantity, so that the person appeared to us in the maya form of a woman. If less were mixed in, then the person would be of a different type and would only have the outward appearance of being exclusively feminine. If there is much W in the mixture, we have the type of the mother; if less, then we have the type of the hetaera. Thus, two basic types of individual have been distinguished: the mother and the courtesan. The mother is the most retrograde type of human being. She floats on the lowest plane of human existence and can only be a friend of men who are philistines, for, possessing the highest degree of W, she comes closest to the Nothing and has nothing to contribute to cultural progress. If there is less W mixed in, we have the type of woman who can be the friend of a genial man: the type of woman, whom Weininger calls the hetaera, who can participate in the cultural progress of humanity and who lives on a higher plane of being.

The other kind of human being is also divided into two kinds—those who have much M and those who have less M. These are the men, although we can only call them men if we lapse into the old, traditional way of speaking. Those who have much M have the great honour of being able to burden themselves with much guilt and are capable of doing great evil. Those with less M tend to exist on a lesser plane of existence and are less capable of doing evil and creating guilt in the world. And what is the greatest guilt that those with much M in their nature can load upon themselves? What, indeed, is the greatest possible guilt there is within the limits of our physical, historical existence? Now, you must remember what I have told you—that according to Weininger's theory, W is really the Nothing. But how can this Nothing exist in the world? Why is the Nothing in the world at all? What is this Nothing when one examines it more closely? It is nothing but the guilt of the men. Thus W has no existence at all in its own right. It exists only through the guilt of M. If men had not laden themselves with guilt by creating woman out of their longing, woman would not even exist. That is the Fall Of Man.

Yes, according to Weininger's theory, those of you who have the outer appearance of women are to believe that fundamentally, in some unknown, occult way, you have been summoned into existence by the guilt of men! And one must concede that there is genius in the way the book's argument is presented—precisely the kind of genius that has been used frequently in recent decades. In viewing Weininger's literary accomplishments one critic even said that the presence of such spirits as Weininger proves that one still can take sonic joy in present-day life, in spite of all its philistinism and pedantry!

The book is not intended frivolously, nor is it merely an item of belles-lettres. The man who wrote it received his doctorate from a university for the first part of it—not the whole book, but the first two or three sections of it. Thus, the first part of it was accepted by a university as a doctoral dissertation. Later he changed it somewhat. If one wants to write a doctoral dissertation, naturally one has to translate what has been written in a genial vein into something a little more pedantic. He was able to do this, of course. And so the book was received in all seriousness and it furnished a basis for subsequent theories. The book caused a great sensation and, not only that, it has had great influence.

Let us look a little more closely at this man. From the very beginning, Weininger was the kind of child one calls ‘gifted’. Even in his early years he was full of the kind of clever ideas which make so many parents happy. He was a serious child who was interested in intellectual matters. Once he had entered school, it is impossible to discover one instance in which his teachers made a mistake—which is as is to be expected, is it not? But for him, the teachers could not do things satisfactorily. Weininger was always wanting to do something different from what his teachers expected of him, especially once he had entered grammar school. While the teachers were talking about things that bored him, he read all kinds of things for himself. Of course others do that, too: one ignores the teacher who is going on about things that are, in any case, in the books, and can be read up at home in less time-meanwhile, under the desk ...!

When he had compositions to write, the teachers who corrected them were sometimes astonished, sometimes repelled, by what they read. Nor did he care to please the schoolmasters. When he entered university he showed himself to be a gifted person, with many ideas about what was presented to him there. He came under the most diverse literary influences. The various cultural streams of the end of the nineties of the last century had a marked influence on him. And the society around him naturally had a great influence on him, too. He lived in the Vienna of the end of the nineteenth century, a member of circles of which it was said—correctly—that there were many geniuses among them, but decadent geniuses. At the turn of the last century Weininger was a member of circles whose most gifted members were said to have dismissed Raphael as an idiot by the time they were twenty. Of course, at the age of twenty it is to be assumed that one is a genius. One reforms the whole world daily. This applies to Weininger, too, but as a genial, gifted man with ideas. For, to draw what I have been telling you to a conclusion, he does have ideas. However mistaken one may hold them to be, they are ideas. Moreover, they are new ideas.

Weininger was influenced by certain racial theories that are deeply rooted in our times. He was Jewish, and early on he acquainted himself with the development of humanity and with how it moves towards the Mystery of Golgotha. He was much concerned with the Christ. And he constructed a very unique theory for himself. On the one hand, he saw Christ as a Jew. But, precisely because Christ was a Jew, it was possible for him to overcome Judaism in the most thoroughgoing way. Weininger believed that the result was a total reversal in the development of mankind, and this observation made a deep impression on him. Whereas previously he had raised a kind of pessimistic defence of his Judaism, he now took heart in the thought of converting, of imitating Christ, by changing and becoming a Christian. At this stage there entered into his thinking the idea of a kind of modern Christ, but a Christ who had freed humanity from evil and from original sin. What Weininger does not say at this point, although one sees that it is the idea that rules his soul, is that the feminine is the thing from which Christ, out of his deeper knowledge, is to free modern humanity. Our redemption lies in being totally freed from W. Only then can mankind develop further. Not only must we be redeemed from sin, we must also be redeemed from W. Then W will no longer exist and the sin of man will also cease to exist, because the sin of man is what W is. Weininger saw this as the fulfilment of Christianity which he, as a Jew, could introduce: the redemption from F. He saw this as his mission.

Such were the thoughts that occupied him at the age of twenty or twenty-one. In a relatively short time he was able to write this gigantic book, a book in which a very great deal of contemporary learning and science is dealt with, and which is saturated with the kind of ideas I have been sketching for you. Then came a period when he was preoccupied with thoughts about how his kind of genius could not be understood in the present day. He believed that it was a foregone conclusion that he would not be understood by any people in whom the F plays a significant role—those with the outer appearance of women and others who possess a large amount of W, even though they do not outwardly appear to be women. All of these people he must do without. That, of course, is far, far more than the half of humanity. ‘Women will never understand me’, Weininger told his father. So they must all be put to one side.

Then, when his book appeared, he developed a kind of wanderlust. He wanted to travel, so he took a journey to Italy. At this point in his life, extraordinary things begin to emerge. On a journey to Sicily he wrote down the ideas which then were published in the book, Concerning the Last Things, which was published posthumously by his friend Rappaport.

This second book contains extraordinary ideas, ideas much more radical than those to be found in Sex and Character. But there is something curious about these ideas: they are reminiscent of what we call imaginative knowledge. There are ideas, aphoristically expressed, covering just about the whole range of human life. Mind you, what is said there about illness alone would be enough to convince any doctor that Weininger was completely insane. Yet all the ideas collected in Concerning the Last Things actually contain imaginative knowledge. They are paradoxically expressed, but they contain imaginative knowledge. They are constructed in the manner of imaginative knowledge. Consider one of them: Weininger points out that both evil and neurasthenia are present in mankind. He believes, furthermore, that if we observe neurasthenia, we will discover it growing everywhere in the external world, for the whole world of the plants is an embodiment of neurasthenia! It is comparable to neurasthenia. If that which rightly lives in the plant world gains the upper hand in a person, that person becomes neurasthenic; for a human being is also in a certain sense a plant, and he is neurasthenic to the extent that his plant nature gains the upper hand. Paradoxical! But by no means a mad idea—just one that has been paradoxically expressed! Or one could say, rather, that something that must be kept within the limits of imaginative knowledge has been dragged into the sphere of intellectual knowledge and has thereby been turned into a caricature.

He says similar things about the way evil lives in man. Just look about you, he says. Evil is to be found living wherever there are dogs. The dog is the symbol of evil. Just as a person is neurasthenic in so far as he resembles a plant, he becomes evil in so far as he resembles a dog. All the rest of nature, you see, is condensed in the human being.

Everything that is spread out before us in nature is contained in man—it can all be found in man. In this fashion, deeply felt aperys emerge from Weininger's soul. For example, he is standing on a mountain. It is spewing forth fire. What he compares that to I will not even mention. But then he sees the setting sun and says, more or less, ‘At this place and on this soil, such a setting sun is only endurable if the crater is at one's feet; otherwise it would be disturbing.’

So you see in what an extraordinary fashion this soul experiences the world: another soul would experience the beauty and grandeur, of a sunset, but a sunset is only endurable to him if there is something with which to contrast it. And there is much in which this soul differs from the souls of other men. It is interesting how he describes what happens when one meets a person and looks them in the eyes—how one being gazes out of one eye, another being out of the other. He observes the thing exactly. He possesses imaginative vision, but presents it in a confused manner.

Then he returns home, having recently felt much distress at the world's lack of understanding and asking himself how long it will be before the world will be able to understand the kind of things he writes. Weininger's father is still thoroughly convinced that his son is just a genial young man, even though he has had to move house because he cannot live with his family. Although he naturally does not agree with all his son's ideas, he does not notice anything abnormal about him. After all, what state would we be in if all the parents in the world thought that their children were insane just because they disagreed with their ideas!

Then Weininger took a room in the house in which Beethoven died. After living there for some days, he shot himself, exactly in accordance with a programme he had formulated. Beforehand, he had announced to a company of his younger friends that he was going to shoot himself because this corresponded so well to his personality. He was twenty-three years old. He shot himself in the house in which Beethoven died.

So you see that we are dealing with an extraordinary individual. And yet his personality is typical. This is an especially pronounced example, with certain ideas developed in a unique way, but there are many people about who possess similar natures. Contemporary humanity includes many individuals with natures similar to Weininger's. It is quite understandable that a doctor who treats the insane should see nothing but crazy nonsense in either Sex and Character or in Concerning the Last Things. A psychiatrist would compare Weininger's biography with the ideas he developed and would find numerous, obvious symptoms of abnormality. But some such signs are to be found in almost anyone. It more or less depends on the subjective viewpoint, but the psychiatrist does not know this. As I said, however, it is easy to point to a pre-existing abnormality in someone who set himself against his teachers as Weininger did and who read books under the desk while his teacher lectured about something entirely different. And it is a dubious trait to see oneself as a prophet, and dubious to rent a room in the house in which Beethoven died in order to shoot oneself there! Weininger exhibited many such traits, and one must acknowledge that it is quite appropriate to make him the subject of psychiatric studies, even though one could write in this same vein about many people. Nevertheless, it would be appropriate. But what most stands out as genuinely serious and significant in the distorted and caricature-like ideas of Sex and Character and Concerning the Last Things is the particular direction and fundamental character they express. One can concede that the whole of it is crazy nonsense, and yet it is interesting because of the manner in which the ideas are shaped.

If one were to express his fundamental insights in terms of a more strict, spiritualised, healthy science, one would have to put it thus: We can see how everything that fills the external world, the macrocosm, corresponds to something in the human being, the microcosm, for man carries within himself everything that is out there. Thus I am saying that Weininger is following the pattern of imaginative knowledge when he produces the idea, albeit in a distorted, caricature-like form, that the plant is the embodiment of neurasthenia, and that the dog is the embodiment of evil. It is as though someone had twisted genuine imaginative knowledge into a caricature, but it nevertheless follows the pattern of imaginative knowledge. And yet this man Weininger is wholly unsuited for life; he is a man who can be totally ignored as far as life goes! For, fundamentally speaking, no one can learn anything from these two books. It is characteristic of the literati of our time that they are much more interested in such tests of endurance than in confronting imaginative knowledge which has been expressed as it should be expressed. That holds no interest for them. It becomes interesting, however, when it comes expressed in insane ideas.

We are really talking about imaginative knowledge, therefore, but in a distorted form. What, then, is actually going on here? One needs to get to the bottom of things to understand why an individual of Weininger's calibre should still be unfit for life. Why did Weininger develop into such an extraordinary person? Now, suppose that one could have observed Weininger at times when he was sleeping normally. (Although I am convinced that what I am about to say must have been so, it is hypothetical, for I did not personally observe Weininger's case.) If he had been observed when he was sleeping a healthy sleep—something that must have been a rare occurrence—one would have seen that truly grandiose intuitions and imaginations of the spiritual world were present in his ego and his astral body. So, if we could have observed his ego and astral body when they were separated from his physical and etheric bodies, we would have perceived a grandiose, genial soul, a soul filled with wonderful intuitions and inspirations that were absolutely accurate. This soul, rightly understood, would actually have become one of the great teachers of our times. But it was only permitted to work as a teacher while separated from the sleeping physical and etheric bodies. Only in the state of sleep were the students permitted to behold what the I and the astral body of their teacher had to say to them. But Weininger himself was not far enough advanced to be aware of this. He was not awake enough to perceive it; he had not undergone what in these days would be called initiation. In other words, he himself was not aware of what happened in his I and astral body while he was separated from his physical and etheric bodies. In our times, what would Weininger have had to become in order for him to have been able to work for the spiritual benefit of his fellow men? Through initiation he would have had to acquire the ability to behold the great gifts he possessed while outside his own physical and etheric bodies, for these can only manifest themselves outside the physical and etheric bodies. Then he would have been able to submerge again in his physical and etheric bodies in order to use the spiritual faculties and powers they contain for looking at the things he had experienced while outside his physical and etheric bodies. Then he would not have believed that he needed to present these truths by deriving them from the physical body, in the way one would demonstrate a mathematical truth.

But instead of this, something else happened. What happened instead is the following. Imagine that this is Weininger's physical body, and that these are his etheric and astral bodies. (They were drawn on the blackboard.) If one were to observe this astral body and its I, one would see the most beautiful and significant things ... But now this astral body and I submerge in the physical body and are inside it.

Instead of the person being able to separate himself from the astral in order to behold the astral realm, this astrality is pressed into the physical body. There it acquires the vitality which otherwise would only be possessed by the astrality of a normal man. That is to say, the giant imaginations which are contained in the astral body, and which should remain there, are pressed into the physical body. The brain does not function in the way it has been formed to function, the way appropriate to our present cycle of development. What should simply remain in the astral body as imaginations is pressed into the brain as though it were a lump of soft wax. Think of the brain as being like butter, or wax. A properly formed human brain allows the astral body to submerge in it like in air, filling it but leaving it unaltered. But this brain has not retained the form proper to a human brain; instead, things that should remain in the astral body have been pressed into it. This now expresses itself in the brain, leading that to come to expression in the physical man which would receive its rightful expression only in the spiritual man.

Why does this happen? What leads the astral body to thrust itself into the physical body in a manner for which it is not intended? What enables this to happen?

Well, my dear friends, there is a good reason why this happened, for those intuitions and imaginations that were being expressed, in our day, through Weininger, are ideas that really belong to the future? Please do not let what I am saying upset you; do not think that all the ideas about masculinity and femininity that we have been following are really ideas of the future. Those are not ideas of the future, but the caricature-like results of ideas that already have been pressed into the brain. But there is more to them than just this business about M + W. If they are separated-out and observed from within, they become something grandiose, something that people of today cannot yet understand. In the future something will be poured out over humanity; people will no longer be so aware of one another in terms of gender, but will meet more as human beings. Once one isolates this idea and clarifies it as regards the way it has been pressed into the physical body, it really does contain something of the future. All ideas, however, must be said to contain something of the future, for although the ideas you develop as you live in the twentieth century belong to the twentieth century, the ideas you need for your next incarnation are already there beneath the surface. They are there in your astral body and I, and you will need to take them with you as fruits of this incarnation. Everyone already carries a little bit of the future, but normally it does not come to expression in this life. The ideas for the next incarnation are already there, at work in the brain, just as the seed is within the plant. What happened to Weininger, however, should not happen. The independent astral body and I should not have influenced his physical and etheric bodies as they did. That is something that should only have occurred during the time between death and a new birth, when the body for his next incarnation was being formed. Then it would have been right for the ideas to press into the body—the body that was to come.

So you can see what is involved: the present and the subsequent incarnation are out of tune with one another. They are creating disturbances in one another instead of remaining properly distinct. The future incarnation is erupting into the present incarnation. What would be significant and right for the next incarnation is forcing its way into the body of the present incarnation, where it causes disturbances and where it appears in caricature.

I have often told you that we live in a time of transition, and that there will come a time when the people living today will again incarnate. When that time comes, these people will have a different relation to their previous incarnations. Unlike today, when everyone is aware only of his present incarnation, they will have to look back to their previous incarnation. This change is being prepared, and sometimes aberrations occur. Aberrations of this process can be observed in precisely such individuals as Weininger. The aberrations can be followed all the way to their ultimate consequences. Why, then, do we die? In order to be able to live the next incarnation! Of the many things that make death magnificent—and I am speaking now about a life that has run its full course—one is the way in which we are able to carry the fruits of this incarnation with us through the gates of death and then use them to shape the next incarnation. Death is as much a part of life as birth and growth. A plant is killed by the seed it carries within itself; the seed is what leads it to wilt. First the leaves come, then the flower and fruit, then it wilts—and this is more or less how we are killed by our next incarnation. If our next incarnation is somehow off its tracks or turned around, then some of the things it needs to accomplish can happen in a distorted fashion instead of happening in the way they should. The next incarnation is the rightful bringer of death in the present incarnation. If the next incarnation erupts into the life of this incarnation, as Weininger's did, it brings a caricature of death, suicide. The next incarnation should rest, quietly embedded in this one. But if it is not attuned to it, the next incarnation can erupt into the present one, bringing about the caricature of death, suicide. So you can follow the results of a dissonance between this individuality's physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, his astral body and I on the other, all the way to these consequences.

I would like to point out how this particular example illustrates what is living in many people of today. The important thing is to notice it when it occurs in the present, and to understand it. The literati, who do not understand him, see Weininger as the genius of the age; the psychiatrists see him as insane. But for those who want to respond to events with a loving understanding, he is an example of the transitional nature of our times, an interesting example. It is important to take hold of life by way of such interesting examples. This is how spiritual science becomes practical, for we live in times in which life will become more and more difficult, in which men will become more and more involved with themselves, times when self-knowledge is becoming more and more difficult. The upward thrust of what is living and stirring within us will grow and will make us seem to be afflicted with confusion and depression. The knowledge of spiritual science must help us win through to an understanding of mankind.

Tomorrow we will speak further about this and begin the approach to a greater theme.

• 1. The house near the west portal is ‘Haus Duldeck’, the house of Dr Grosheintz.
• 3. Otto Weininger: über die letzte Dinge, Vienna and Leipzig, 1904.
• 2. Otto Weininger, (1880 – 1903): Geschlecht und Charakter, 17th edition, Vienna and Leipzig, 1918.

Today I would like to begin by considering a simple fact of which everyone is aware. If we cast an understanding and observant eye over the variety of natural occurrences, we will notice that they seem to fall into two very different and distinct realms: one realm which manifests the greatest kind of regularity and order, and another realm of extensive disorder, irregularity and virtually impenetrable interconnections. This, at any rate, is how we experience them. Even though there is a sharp dividing-line between these two realms, our normal natural sciences do not distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have all the things that happen with the regularity with which the sun rises and sets each morning and evening, and with which the stars rise and set, and with which all the other things associated with the rising and setting of the sun occur—such as the plants, which regularly send forth their growing shoots in the spring, develop through the summer, then fade away and disappear in autumn. And the realm of nature presents us with many other things in which we can see a similarly great degree of regularity and order.

But there is another realm of nature, one which cannot be experienced in the same way. One cannot anticipate storms in the way one can anticipate the sunrise and sunset each morning and evening, for storms do not occur with that kind of regularity. We can say that the sun will occupy a certain position in the heavens at ten o'clock tomorrow morning, but we cannot say that we will see a certain cloud formation in a certain position, let alone say anything about how the clouds will look. Nor can we predict, in the way we can predict the quarters of the moon, that, here in our building in Dornach, we are going to be surprised by a storm or shower at some particular time. It is possible to calculate eclipses of the sun and moon that will happen centuries hence quite accurately, but the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cannot be predicted with the same degree of certainty.

You see here two distinct realms of nature, one that manifests regularities our reason can grasp, and the other whose manifestations are irregular and cannot be experienced in the same way. Great regularity and extreme unpredictability are intertwined in what we call nature as a whole. I would like to describe the overall impression that nature makes on us at a given instant as a mixture of the orderly procession of regular events with those other events, the ones that can take us by surprise, even though they come again and again with at least a certain degree of consistency.

Now, there is a profound truth that we have considered from many points of view in the course of our studies here, the truth that man is a microcosm—that man mirrors the macrocosm and that everything that is to be found at large in the macrocosm can be rediscovered in some form in mankind. So we would expect to find these two spheres of nature expressed in some human form, one which exhibits great order, the other which exhibits a pronounced lack of order. Naturally, in a human life these would be expressed very differently from the way they are expressed out there in nature. Nevertheless, that twofold division of nature into order and irregularity should remind us of something in man. Now, consider the typical example I tried to present to you yesterday.

That typical individuality was well able to think logically. When it was a matter of logical thinking, he could reckon, pass judgements and regulate his life with a degree of order, overseeing it and planning and acting accordingly. In other words, he had access to everything that regularity can contribute to the functioning of our understanding, our reason, our capacity for experience and our will-impulses. But, alongside these, this person also lived another life, a life that was expressed in those two works I described to you. From the little I have told you about the content of these books you can well imagine how stormy a life this was, how erratic when compared with what human reason has to offer. There were storms in the depths of that soul, profound storms, and these storms were lived out in the way we described yesterday. Such things truly do happen in the way thunderstorms and outbursts of wind and weather play into the regular procession of sun and moon, into the orderly succession of sprouting, fading away and dying in the plant world. Into all that develops out of the human head and the regular course of the human heart come the storms we experience as waking dreams or as lightning flashes of genius. These flash through the soul and discharge themselves like storms. But be in no doubt about it, every human soul has the tendency to experience the very same things that Otto Weininger experienced in such an extreme, radically paradoxical fashion. They are there in the depths of every human soul. Ordinary people who are not so disposed, as Weininger was, to experience their own genius, express it through their dreams—but always as dreams. Everyone dreams and, in the final analysis, dreams are things that bubble up out of the depths of the astral realm. They make their appearance at times when the astral body is being reflected in the etheric body. Every human being possesses a day-to-day awareness that a man like Weininger dismisses as the pedantic consciousness of a philistine, and every human being possess that other consciousness, the one that bubbles up in dreams.

One should not say, you see, that these dreams and this world of dreams are only present at night when one knows one is dreaming or has been dreaming. For a human being is constantly dreaming. Real dreams, or what one calls real dreams, are only the results of a temporary view of the continuous stream of dreams. Actually, however, one is continuously dreaming. All of you seated here are dreaming. Alongside the thoughts expressed in this lecture which, I trust, are living in you, you are all dreaming. In the depths of your souls you are all dreaming. And the only thing that distinguishes the dreams you have now from the ones you have at night is that at the moment there are other thoughts that are more conscious and stronger, and which I would think outweigh the dreams in most cases. But when waking consciousness has been suppressed and, simultaneously, sleep is interrupted, then what is now being dreamed unconsciously can emerge for a while. That is when a conscious dream appears. The life of dreams, however, proceeds without any interruption.

The contrast in human nature between the regularity of normal thinking and the lack of it in dreams is really of this nature. A person is spiritually ill if he does not have access to the regularity of normal thinking, to the kind of regularity which governs the appearance of the sun at its appointed time. A person must be able to apply the canons of reason and distinguish one event from another. But alongside his healthy waking consciousness a person also has, living in the depths of his soul, this other realm that I have described as stormy and irregular.

The forces upon which waking consciousness is based really do mirror the astronomical pathway of the stars across the heavens. If the pathway of the stars were not a part of us, we would have no waking consciousness. But, as you can see from remarks I made in the lecture cycle, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Humanity, the very same external forces that can be observed at play in wind and weather, in storm and earthquake, are also at work in the depths of the human soul and they are reflected in the unconscious and half-conscious aspects of human life. In this respect, a human being is truly a microcosm in which the macrocosm is repeated.

These days, there is a restricted awareness of such things, for we live in an age when humanity has been called upon to restrict itself more and more to the physical plane—to become materialistic. The cultivation of an understanding and a rationality divorced of spirituality is simply a symptom of this. But, as we have often explained here, humanity will also proceed beyond this age. And the spiritual-scientific movement should be preparing the manifestations of the spirit for the time to come.

Men are little aware that the spiritual world is connected with what they pursue here, with the events and facts of earthly existence. But mankind has not always lived in the spirit-less style of today. Human institutions have not always taken so little account of the influences of the spiritual world on the physical world. Think of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. I once described to you how he wanted to set about establishing institutions here on the physical plane. The story is symbolic, but a significant fact lies behind the symbolism. In order to find out how the eras of history would unfold, he consulted the nymph, Egeria, whose knowledge was derived from the spiritual world. Thereafter, he designated the era of Romulus as the first, his own as the second, and five others that would follow his, making a series of seven. There is something remarkable in this story about a king of Rome: the sevenfold order he constructs is the same as the order on which the seven members of our organism are based. In earlier times there was a tendency for physical life to be arranged so that its institutions reflected the demands of the spiritual world—so that they in some way reflected what happened in the spiritual worlds. Today, men take no account of this.

I have often mentioned how people have lost their sense of piety as regards establishing the time of the Easter festival, the festival of the Easter season. Today there are even some who want to set a fixed day for Easter Sunday, rather than following the present custom of determining the festival in accordance with the course of the stars. For it would simplify our account books if Easter were always to be, say, the first Sunday in April. Then one would no longer have to set up the books for a different Easter each year and it would be easier to close the accounts for the year. This is simply one crass example from among the countless examples that could be mentioned. It shows how little sense the men of today have for arranging their earthly institutions so that they will reflect what is happening in the spiritual worlds and in the stars. But it was not always so. There have been times when there was a profound awareness that a man's own life and the life he shares with other men should be an earthly reflection of what is happening in the spiritual worlds and is expressed in the stars. These were earlier ages, when atavistic clairvoyance was still present.

Let us look at an example from the ancient Hebrews. Their religious year, and thus the year that really mattered, was a moon year of 354 3/8 days. Now that is somewhat shorter than a sun year. So if one reckons in moon years, some days will be lost because the moon year does not entirely fill out a sun year. After a certain time, more and more days will have been left out. Then a balance would need to be established again. But the ancient Hebrews had a very special way of creating a balance between sun years and moon years. I will only go into this method briefly, since what we need today is to let the whole sense and spirit of the matter pass before our souls, not the particular details. Ancient Hebrew tradition recognised a so-called ‘Jubilee Year’. This was a year of universal conciliation and reconciliation. It was celebrated after 49 sun years, which add up to slightly more than 50 moon years. In such a year of reconciliation, people forgave one another for various things for which they held each other to be to blame: those who were debtors could be, or should be, released from their debts, property should be returned to those who had lost it, and such like. It was a year for balancing things out, for reconciling the 7 x 7 sun years with fifty moon years-actually 50 1/2 moon years, but one can call it 50 because this year lasted for a while and it furnished the starting point for one's reckoning. Thus, a Jubilee Period lasted 50 x 354 3/8 days; during this period one accumulated all the various things that would need balancing out.-If one takes into consideration that this Jubilee Year was a time for reconciling 49 (which equals 7 x 7) sun years with 50 moon years, one can say that it is ordered in accordance with the number 7. Therefore the institution of the Jubilee Year was based on a certain awareness of the significance of seven-foldness.

Today we want to make the spirit of the thing present for our souls, so we should give special heed to the following. We want to see what it would have been like to live in the ancient Hebrew times when one said: we experience the course of the days, one following after the other. After 354 days, a new year begins. And after experiencing 49 or 50, respectively,—years in a row, then begins a special festive year for humanity. And now just imagine how it would have been if, accompanying everything that people lived through, there was the awareness that it is 7, 8, or 9, years since the Jubilee Year, and that one would have to wait a certain number of years for the next Jubilee Year. Nor is this set up arbitrarily; it is established on the basis of an occult division according to certain numbers.

You need have no doubts that those who were living 24 years after a Jubilee Year would be reckoning back 24 years to the last Jubilee Year and 26 years forward to the next one. That gives you some degree of access to those times. In other words, the human souls here on earth were occupied with something that involved them in a particular numerical relationship, and this numerical order affected the way they felt things-this numerical order flowed through their souls in an uninterrupted stream. In the course of thousands of years, human souls became accustomed to living with what I have just characterised. And as you know, experiences that are repeated again and again are imprinted on life. They become part of the life that shapes the soul and gives it its configuration. Thus, investigating the ancient Hebrews, one discovers an awareness for a particular temporal order living in their souls, a particular temporal configuration which expressed itself in their awareness of the passage from one Jubilee Year to the next Jubilee Year. This gave every single day a special relationship to the passage of time. The soul had become accustomed to an order that was based, on the one hand, on 354, and on the other hand, on 49 (7 x 7)—or, respectively, 50. And this accompanied the soul wherever it went.

This is comparable to the way it is necessary to learn in one's youth the calculations that one will need to use later in life; once learned, they become a possession. A certain configuration has been established in the soul. We want to take note of that as we now move on to another consideration.

According to the calculations of today's astronomy, Mercury circles the Sun much more rapidly than the Earth does, so that if we refer to the revolutions of Mercury, we obtain a picture of the Earth slowly moving about the Sun while Mercury moves quickly. Now keep the orbit of Mercury in mind. We want to take 354 of these—in fact, we can take 354 3/8 of them; and then we want to multiply yet again by 49 or, respectively, by 50. Simply picture these numbers. If you think of one orbit of Mercury as a kind of celestial day, then 354 of these Mercury orbits would be a kind of Moon year on the planet Mercury. Then take 49 or 50 of these: that would be one celestial Jubilee Year. Naturally, one celestial Jubilee Year is much longer than an earthly Jubilee Year, but of course it is calculated with reference to Mercury.

Thus we are calculating a Jubilee Year that is based on Mercury, just as the ancient Hebrews calculated a Jubilee Year based on Moon and, respectively, on Earth. For 354 3/8 times they experienced one Earth day after the other. One year had passed. That, multiplied by 7 x 7 (49 or 50), made up one of the ancient Hebrews' Jubilee Years. Corresponding to this would be 354 3/8 Mercury orbits multiplied by 50 (or 49). Naturally, that is an entirely different expanse of time, an entirely different expanse of time from an Earth year, although it is based on the same numbers.

Now let see how yet another number is determined. Now we take Jupiter. Jupiter is much slower, it moves much more slowly. It takes twelve years to go around the Sun once. Mercury moves much more quickly than the Earth, Jupiter much more slowly. Now we will take Jupiter and consider one of these years for Jupiter. Actually, it would be a Jupiter year, but because Jupiter is in the heavens where we can think on a very large scale, we look upon that as one Jupiter day. We will let one of the periods in which Jupiter circles the Sun correspond to one of our Earth days. Then 354 3/8 of these days would add up to a large Jupiter year of the kind based on the Moon: one large Jupiter year. We will not multiply it by 7 x 7, but only once, because it lasts so long. Using the same method, then, we have calculated one Jubilee Year for Mercury, and one for Jupiter—just a single, great year.

Then we consider yet another planet, one not known to the ancient Hebrews. They were, however, aware of its sphere, which they thought of as being beyond the planets; they thought of it as the crystal sphere that formed the vault of the heavens. Much later it was discovered that one could speak of Uranus as being there. But we can consider Uranus, even though it was discovered much later. The only difference is that the ancient Hebrews thought of a sphere in the place where Uranus was later located. We will take 49 (or 50) orbits of Uranus, which moves very slowly.—And now we will compare all of this with Earth years.

Each of these would correspond to a definite number of Earth years, would it not? Thus, 354 3/8 x 50 revolutions of Mercury around the Sun would correspond to a certain period of Earth years. One great Jupiter year, consisting of 354 3/8 orbits, would correspond to another period of Earth years. And 49 (50) orbits of Uranus would give us yet another period of Earth years.

The extraordinary thing is that each of these yields the same number of Earth years. One obtains a given number of Earth years if one takes 50 (49) orbits of Uranus. One obtains the same number if one takes 354 3/8 orbits of Jupiter, or 50 x 354 3/8 of the orbits of Mercury: each yields that particular span of Earth years. In the case of Uranus, you multiply by 50, with Jupiter, you multiply by 354 3/8, and with Mercury, by 50 x 354 3/8—in each case you obtain the period I have already called a celestial Jubilee⁴ Year based on Mercury. All three planets give us the same number.

And how did the ancient Hebrews experience this number? The number is 4182. (Naturally, there are certain irregularities which play into this and which we are ignoring today.) In each of the three cases the number comes out at 4182. One has to say that this is approximate, but you can investigate it exactly, for the irregularities are balanced-out by compensating movements: it comes to 4182 Earth years! And what would an ancient Hebrew have had to say about this? He could say, ‘Here on Earth your soul experiences 354 3/8 x 50 days in each Jubilee Year, and that is one great year of reconciliation. But something is also happening out there where cosmic thoughts are formed. Out there live beings for whom one revolution of Mercury is equivalent to one of your Earth days. These beings also experience the macrocosm in other ways, for example, in a way that corresponds to your experience of a Jubilee Year. And such a being would tell you that one orbit of Mercury is equivalent to one day and that 354 3/8 x 49 (or 50) of these days is equivalent to one Jubilee Year reckoned on the basis of Mercury. The being would also tell you that this same number is identical to one Jupiter year and is also identical to 50 revolutions of the celestial sphere.’

The ancient Hebrews had reasons for calculating time from the beginning of the Earth in the following way—we also place an event at the beginning of our reckoning of Earth time, although it is a different event. According to their reckoning, 4182 years after the beginning of the Earth would be the time of a great, cosmic year of reconciliation, the year in which the Christ would appear in the flesh. In other words, the ancient Hebraic culture lived in a time-span that extended from the beginning of the Earth to the appearance of Christ in the flesh. This span was that of a single Jubilee Year of Mercury, one great Jupiter year, or 50 revolutions of the outermost, celestial sphere, which we now know as the orbit of Uranus.

In this wonderful example you see how the human soul was being prepared for the great, cosmic Jubilee Year. It was prepared by social institutions that based the temporal reckoning on 354 3/8 and 7 x 7, or 50. Thereby the soul was enabled to experience the ordering of the cosmos, which means that cosmic forms were inscribed in the soul. This is a tremendous thing. The connections are immensely profound.

And if you follow the thoughts of those who have emerged from Judaism, you will see that these souls bore thoughts of a cosmos inhabited by infinitely lofty beings. And they assumed that the laws governing the movements of the stars would announce to their interpreters the time of the Christ's descent from the sphere of the Sun to the Earth. The events out yonder were thought of in terms of 354 3/8 and 7 x 7. Out yonder, things were ordered so that someone who followed the clock of Mercury, counting one orbit of Mercury as one day, could determine the span of one Jubilee Year from the beginning of the Earth to the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as man thinks of the beginnings of earthly existence, so also do the cosmic beings think of that moment which, for the ancient Hebrews marked the beginning of the Earth—but cosmic beings think on a cosmic scale. Meanwhile, here on Earth a human institution was preparing human souls for thinking the great thought that is spread out before them in the heavens; it was shaping their souls so they would be able to apply the thought to their own passage through time. Those who lived in the time of Christ's coming and who could understand the place of the Mystery of Golgotha in the course of time were men who had gone through this preparation and whose souls had been shaped by it. Thereby they knew: The Mystery of Golgotha is approaching. They were thereby enabled to write the Gospels, for they could understand what lay behind the descent of the cosmic Sun Spirit to Earth. Such an understanding presupposes that the soul has been prepared.

Here you have a wonderful example of how social institutions that have been spiritually ordered by initiates can prepare the human soul for understanding an event—or for comprehending it at all. What does this show us? It deepens our understanding of why we should use our waking consciousness to shape our human social life so that it is related to the world of the stars. The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood—one cannot bring it within the scope of reason—until one has understood the connection of reason itself to the course of the stars. This is expressed in numerical relationships. Thus, everything that is connected with our waking consciousness is connected—consciously or unconsciously—with the orderly procession of the stars. In this case it was consciously determined by initiates. And so, emerging from the depths of our souls, these things begin to make their appearance in the forms I have described to you, in dreams or in the lightning flashes of genius of a man like Weininger. As I explained yesterday, these things do not belong to the present course of the stars and will only be developed in later incarnations.

What, then, are these things connected with? All the things that are consciously or unconsciously thought by our heads and felt by our hearts,—in short, everything connected with our waking consciousness—corresponds to the movement of the stars. What, then, corresponds to the things that go on in our more dreamlike or fantasy-filled states of consciousness and often fill our more inspired moods? These latter correspond more to the elemental world of natural events, the world on which such things as thunder and storms and hail and earthquakes depend. And in this fashion we can look deeply into nature. It begins to appear to us as it has appeared to men who are to some degree initiated and who have always asked, ‘What, then, is this part of nature that is not regulated by the regular course of the sun and moon and their like—this part of nature that does not proceed regularly or in accordance with rules? What is this nature of rain, of hail, of storms, of thunder, of earthquake, of volcanic eruption?’ And these initiates have always answered, ‘Here nature appears as a somnambulist!’

And now let us look up at the procession of the stars. In its regular, numerical relationships, as in its occult connections, it presents us with the macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Then let us contemplate our dream consciousness and everything that is to a greater or lesser degree expressed there. There we find mirrored all the irregular happenings of the external world. Looking up to the heavens, we behold the external, macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Looking down towards the Earth and its manifestations, we find nature as a somnambulist, a somnambulistic dreamer, who is the mirror and the outer picture of what goes on in the depths of our souls. Our waking spirit thinks in accordance with astronomy. Our dreaming, fantasy-filled, often somnambulistic soul lives and weaves in harmony with the great, somnambulistic consciousness of earthly nature. That is a profound truth.

Between now and tomorrow, reflect on the extent to which astronomy is governing your waking consciousness, and the extent to which meteorology rules in your unconscious. Yesterday, Otto Weininger provided us with an example of a man in whom astronomy came to expression only to be obscured by meteorological clouds. We will speak further about this tomorrow.

• 4. For the sake of clarity, the exact astronomical calculations for the three cases discussed are shown here (one Sun-year / 365.26 days):
  
  Cosmic Jubilee Year:
  Mercury-orbit, 87.97 days x 354 3/8 x 49 = 4,182 years
  
  Jupiter Year:
  Jupiter-orbit, (11.86 years = 4,332.59 days)
  4,332.59 days x 354 3/8 = 4,203 years
  
  Uranus:
  Uranus-orbit, (84.01 years = 30,688.39 days)
  30,688.39 days x 49 = 4,117 years
  x 50 = 4,201 years

When we cast a glance back over the discussions of the previous two meetings, allowing the main experience to stand before our souls, we become aware of the fundamentally dual nature of the human being. We have seen how everything that comes to life in a human soul during waking consciousness can be traced back to the influence on man of the heavens and of the universe—to what these, taken in their cosmic significance, have imprinted on humanity. The foundations of certain other, deeper regions of human nature, regions which in a normal life only well up in dream-consciousness, can be traced back to terrestrial influences and impressions that are earthly in a more narrow sense. When the world is observed in the light of spiritual science, everything that is perceived by the senses must be seen as a real expression of the spirit.

The picture a human being presents to the senses reveals his dual nature. That is most easily imagined if you consider the skeleton. There it is most clear, for the skeleton is clearly divided into two distinct parts: the head—the skull—and the remaining parts of the body. And, in principle, the only thing that holds these two together is a thin skeletal cord. The head really has just been set on top of the rest. One can knock it off. This is an outer, pictorial expression of the dual nature of a human being, for the head makes waking consciousness possible. The remaining parts, the parts of the skeleton that hang down from the head, form the basis for the life that plays itself out more or less unconsciously. The unconscious life only wells up in dreams or in the creative fantasy of poets and artists, penetrating normal consciousness with its fire and warmth and light. In that, something of an unquestionably earthly nature is working into usual waking consciousness—the noblest part of earthly nature, perhaps, but earthly all the same. Yesterday, in the awareness of time that was typical of the ancient Hebrew culture we found direct evidence that mankind once possessed knowledge, explicit and fundamental knowledge, of the connections between super-earthly occurrences and human waking consciousness. We saw how that which can be called cosmic thought, and which is expressed in the movements of the stars, creates an image of itself in waking human consciousness. Man has a waking consciousness because, in the first place, he is able to make use of the organs in his head. And we have considered the wonderful way that mankind participates in the whole universe, and includes both its heavenly and its earthly aspects.

If one is going to do justice to everything connected with these weighty and significant facts, one must free oneself from prejudice. One ahrimanic prejudice is particularly common in those who still harbour a longing to be mystics. The prejudice comes to expression in a certain sensibility, and consists in the belief that what is earthly is worthless and absolutely must be overcome—that it is coarse, contemptible stuff that a spiritually striving person does not even mention. That for which one must strive is the spirit! This is the way such people experience things, even if their concept of the spirit is confused and they can only picture it in terms of the physical senses. Therefore I said that this prejudice expresses itself more as a sensibility in a particular direction. But one will never be able to understand the nature of either mankind or of the world as long as one clings to this prejudiced mode of experience. A person who is living on earth in an earthly human body can only preserve such a sensibility by viewing the earth in a one-sided way. Following from this attitude to the earth comes a longing—a partially justified longing—for the super-earthly and for things that should be experienced between death and a new life. But one will never be able to develop any sort of clarity in one's feelings for the life between death and a new birth as long as earthly things are regarded in the manner to which I just alluded. For, paradoxical though it may sound, the following is a true statement—and you will find it clearly expressed in various lecture cycles: the dead, those living in spirit and the soul in the interval between death and a new birth, speak of the earth in the same way that men on earth speak of heaven. The earth is a shimmering vision that hovers in front of them in the way the vision of heaven hovers in the mind's eye of those on earth. Earth is the desired other world for which those living in heaven yearn. They speak of earth in the way we speak of heaven. It is the longed-for land towards which they strive, the land of their approaching incarnation. If one loses sight of this, one forms a false picture of how the dead live.

I have often warned you not to interpret the basic dictum, ‘In the spirit, everything is reversed,’ too pedantically. One cannot obtain a correct picture of the spiritual world simply by turning around all one's pictures of the physical world. Nothing very special comes from applying such a rule abstractly. The particular facts must be considered, even though, as I have told you, this rule about reversal applies to many things. Then, for example, someone who is investigating the spiritual worlds can get to know an extraordinary land, a land where individuals find themselves among other men. The men among whom they find themselves are normal, earthly men like the devout people we meet on earth. I say, specifically, like devout people on earth, for these are people who have a certain feeling for things of the earth and a certain feeling for the things of heaven. Also among the people to be met there are those who totally deny everything earthly. They deny all matter, all substance. They maintain that only spirit exists and that it is a superstition to believe in matter.

The land I am describing is not in the physical world; it belongs to the spirit-region that is revealed when one's gaze is directed towards a particular part of the spiritual world that lies between, say, the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries. All of you were then living in the spiritual world. At least in the first part of this period, we were all still living in the spiritual world. The majority of us were experiencing the heavenly realms which were about us, and also the earthly realm towards which we were striving and which, over there, was the world beyond. But then there were those who viewed all talk of earthly things as superstition. They maintained that only the spirit exists and that the earthly, material realm is just a dream world. And yes, naturally, these men, too, were eventually born. They were known by such names as Ludwig Buchner,⁵ Ernst Haeckel,⁶ Carl Vogt,⁷ and so on. These men, whose lives on earth you are well-enough acquainted with, are the same ones who explained away belief in material things as superstition and who, during the stage when they were approaching their most recent life in the physical world, viewed the spiritual world as the only real world. They did this because the spiritual world was what was around them and they did not want to consider something that was not around them, some world beyond. Why, you will be asking yourselves, would such individuals be born into souls that developed the view that material is all that exists? You may ask yourselves this, but you can nevertheless understand it, when you see that these individuals showed a lack of understanding for the material world before they were born, and that this remained with them. For anyone who sees matter as something absolute, rather than as an expression of the spirit, has completely failed to understand matter. One is not a materialist when one represents materialism in the way the aforementioned personages represented it. Understanding the substantial nature of the material world does not make one a materialist; a person becomes a materialist precisely because he does not understand the substantial nature of matter. Thus, these individuals did not change, they retained their lack of understanding for matter.

So there you have an area in which the spiritual world is a total reversal of what the appearances in the physical world would lead you to expect. But, as I said, this rule should not be abstractly extended to cover everything. I have gone into all this about how the earthly realm becomes the ‘other world’ when we are living between death and a new birth so that you will not misinterpret the contrast that ancient Greek mythology expressed with the words, ‘Uranus’ and ‘Gaia’. Uranus and Gaia were not incompatible, one referring to what is absolutely valuable and the other to what is absolutely worthless. They were conceived as a polarity that exists within a unity: Uranus represents the peripheral, encircling realm whose polar opposite is the point at the centre, Gaia. To begin with, when they spoke of Uranus and Gaia, the Greeks did not limit their thoughts to the narrow confines of human sexuality or earthly life. They were thinking of the contrast we just mentioned—between heaven and earth. This is the contrast they intended.

I must go into this, as otherwise we will not be able to understand what is to follow. As it is these days, it is difficult to make certain truths about humanity accessible. But it is possible to just touch on certain things, which is what we shall do, in so far as that is possible.

As we enter into these considerations, I ask you keep in mind the sense in which human nature is dual, and how this is outwardly expressed in the form of the human body, with its head that is attached to everything else. The whole process of shaping the human head, the whole of the essential process, takes place during the time between the last death and a new birth. The physical head must be produced on earth, of course, but that is not what I am talking about. I mean the form that it acquires; and the way the head is formed depends on forces that go far back in time. The human head is received, ready-shaped, from heaven, for all the powers that are at work between death and a new birth are really concerned with building the head. The human head comes from the heavens, even though it must follow the path of physical birth and physical heredity. The rest of the body is the only part that comes from the earth. So, as regards the form of the body, a human being is a product of Uranus and Gaia: the head originates in heavenly forces, the body originates in earthly forces—Uranus and Gaia.

Now at birth, when a human being makes his appearance, this whole thing is so strongly evident that one can truly say that part of him, his head, has just been introduced into the physical world and still expresses only the forces of the heavenly realm from which it has come—and that another part, the body, is the expression of earthly forces. This is especially evident just after birth. There is a strong contrast between the head and the rest of the body for those whose sight is informed by a deeper knowledge of the human being. With a little child there really is this strong contrast. One has only to learn to observe such things without preconceptions; then one will soon notice what an immense and pronounced contrast there is between the head, which is the Uranus sphere of the human being, and the remaining body, which is the sphere of Gaia.

Lets us consider the first significant phase of life, the phase up to the change of teeth at approximately the seventh year. As you know, this marks the end of the first significant stage of human life. It is a very important time, a time marked also by the appearance of a paradox that it is very important to understand. For, during the period leading to the change of teeth at around the seventh year, those who observe a human being physically are observing falsely. I have frequently alluded to this from other points of view. To put it briefly, people look upon a human being during the first seven years as if it already were male or female. From a higher point of view this is entirely false. But the materialism of today does hold this view. That is why the materialists of today look upon manifestations during the first seven years as if they were already manifestations of sexuality, which is not at all the case. Matters will be in a much healthier state when it is understood that a child is an asexual being during its first seven years, and not a sexual being at all. To use a trivial expression, it only looks as though a child were already male or female during the first seven years. This is because there is no physical distinction between what one calls masculine or feminine during the first seven years and what one calls masculine and feminine later. For materialism, the physical is all that there is, so what comes later seems to be a continuation of what was already there. But that is not the case at all. And I now ask you to really experience what I am saying, to take it into yourselves, so that it is not misunderstood and immediately mixed up with value judgements. What I say is meant objectively, so please do not fall into the pattern so often found in other areas today, whereby one judges on the basis of previously-held values instead of judging objectively.

During the first seven years, what appears to be masculine is not masculine as such—and here I ask you to keep in mind what I have said about Uranus and Gaia; it has the external form that it has in order that the heavenly forces working from the head can continue to influence the individual being and the human form in accordance with what is super-earthly and heavenly. That is why it appears masculine. But it is not male; it is formed by Uranus in accordance with the super-earthly! I said: the head is the part of the human being where the heavenly takes precedence, the earthly takes precedence in the rest of the body. But the earthly radiates into the heavenly, just as the heavenly radiates into the earthly. Mutual relationships connect them; it is only a question of which one predominates. I would like to describe matters by saying that, with one kind of human being, the heavenly aspect is the preponderant influence on the body, including the parts other than the head, with the result that one says he is male. But this still has nothing to do with sexuality, but only with the fact that this particular organisation is more Uranian, whereas in the case of other individuals, their organisation is more terrestrial, Gaian. During the first seven years, the human being is not a sexual being; that is maya. The bodies differ in that some show more how the heavenly side is at work and others show more from the earthly side. In anticipation of value judgements that might insinuate themselves into our discussions, I began by saying that from a universal point of view the earthly sphere has as much value as the heavenly. I did not want anyone to harbour the belief that we were devaluing the feminine, in the style of Weininger, by taking some elevated, mystical standpoint that makes it out to be merely earthly or merely Gaian. Each is the pole of the other, and this has nothing to do with sexuality.

What, then, is going on in the human being, in the human organisation, during the first seven years? You must take what I am going to describe as the predominant circumstances; the opposite is also there, but what I am characterising is the predominant situation. For you see, during the first seven years the head is constantly being worked on by forces that stream to it from the rest of the organism. There are also forces that flow from the head to the rest of the organism, of course, but during this period these are relatively weak in comparison to the forces that stream from the body to the head. If the head grows and continues to develop during the first seven years, this is due to the fact that the body is actually sending its forces into the head; during the first seven years, the body imprints itself into the head and the head adapts to the bodily organisation. With regard to human development, the essential thing during the first seven years is that the head becomes adapted to the bodily organisation. This welling-up of the rest of the organisation into the head is what is behind the distinctive facial metamorphoses that someone with a finely developed sense for it can observe during the first seven years. Just watch once the development of a child's face, and observe how it changes at the time of the change of teeth, when the whole body is more or less poured into the facial expression.

Then comes the period that leads to sexual maturity—roughly from the seventh to the fourteenth year. And now exactly the opposite happens: the forces of the head flow uninterruptedly down into the organism, into the body; now the body adapts to the head. The resultant total revolution in the organism is very interesting to watch: the welling-up of the forces of the body into the head during the first seven years concludes with the change of teeth. Then there is a reversal in the flow of forces, which begin to stream downward. It is these downward-streaming forces that turn a human being into a sexual being. Now, for the first time, the human being becomes a sexual being. To begin with, what turns the organs that are simply heavenly or earthly into sexual organs, comes from the head; and that is spirit. The physical organs are not even intended for sexuality—that is exactly the way to put it—they are only adapted to sexuality later on. And the judgement of those who maintain that they are originally adapted to sexuality is superficial. On the contrary, the organs are adapted to the heavenly sphere in one case, to the earthly sphere in the other. They first acquire a sexual character during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, when this is introduced into them from without by the forces that stream down from the head. That is when a human being begins to become a sexual being.

It is extraordinarily important to form a precise view of these things, for in practice one is constantly being confronted by people who come with their very small children, complaining about sexual improprieties. But such things are not possible before the seventh year, because nothing sexual is yet present, nothing that has sexual significance. In such cases no healing can come from a medical direction; it needs to come naturally, as people stop calling things by false names and thereby cease to surround them with false concepts. One should recover that holy innocence with which the ancients viewed such matters. Given their atavistic knowledge of the spiritual world, it never would have occurred to them to begin applying sexual terms to those who were still children. I have already alluded to these things in other contexts.

In the light of these important truths about the human being that we have obtained from the spiritual world, truths concerning man's relation to the earthly and heavenly worlds, you can begin to appreciate how the caricature-like ideas of such a man as Weininger do have a certain justification. For if he could have understood matters in the way they have been presented here, he would have been justified in saying: ‘A human being comes into this physical world from the spiritual world in such a way that the head must first develop here in the physical world for seven years before it can produce the masculine out of heavenly forces and the feminine out of earthly forces.’ Later on, it will be our task to look at other currents and forces important to human development. For the moment, it will be helpful to concentrate our attention on the first fourteen years of human development. Only through such things will you begin to see how true it is to say that external life is a life of maya—is the great deception. For it really is a deception that a human being seems to arrive in the world as a male or a female. A human being first becomes a sexual being through what is acquired by the head from the earth during the first seven years there.

Now, those who take these things into their hearts, as well as their heads, are sure to stumble over a question at this point. Nor is it a question that can easily be evaded: How is it that man comes to live in maya, in deception? What is the meaning of this? Is the fact that we live in deception not grounds for an inherent sadness? Surely it would have been better if the Godhead, the gods, had not allowed human beings to live in deception at all? Would it not have been better for man to apprehend the world without being deceived, so that he would not always have to seek truth behind the appearances? Why, why must man live in a world of deception? These questions about why we must live surrounded by deception can lead to a very pessimistic view of the world. But there are good reasons why we must live in the midst of deception; for if we were born into truth to begin with, if truth came at birth without our having to search for it, we would never be able to develop a personality and would never be able to acquire freedom. Only in the sphere of the Earth can a human being achieve freedom. And he can only do so by developing a personality through his earthly striving. Initially he confronts a world of mere appearances whose inner substance has to be sought out. The search releases inner forces that will make him, gradually and through many incarnations, into a free person. Take some worthwhile book like Dante's Divine Comedy. Theoretically, and not only theoretically for it is altogether conceivable, a person of today might come to know Dante's Divine Comedy in an entirely different way from what is usual. Today how does someone become acquainted with The Divine Comedy? Either it is recited and he hears it presented in external sounds that have nothing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy, or else he reads it. If he reads it, in reality he has nothing before him but abstract characters, which do not have the slightest thing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy. Yes, this is how people become acquainted with the contents of a worthwhile work today. One becomes acquainted with it externally through recitation, although speaking has nothing to do with the work as it sprang from Dante's head; it is only an external means of communication. Theoretically—and I say emphatically, not only theoretically—it would be possible for us to approach the contents of The Divine Comedy in a different fashion: it could make its appearance from within us if, at a particular age, the contents were to simply rise up out of our soul and appear in waking consciousness through a dream. This is not just theoretical; it could very easily happen if the world were not organised so that, to begin with, we had to make our way through maya. If it were not that we first had to make our way through maya, there would come one fine day when we would experience, rising up like a dream, everything that has ever been accomplished by the likes of Homer, say, and Dante, and Plato, and so on. We would not have to resort to anything external in order to become acquainted with it. Raphael would not have had to create external pictures. He need only have brought them to life in his spirit, and those that lived after him, without recourse to anything beyond a certain orientation towards Raphael, would have been able to experience the pictures rising up out their own inner being.

What I am telling you is no hypothesis; on the Moon this is how things stood with us, this is how things were passed on. This is how things really were then. On the Moon, one did not have to learn to read; everything arose out of one's own inner being. An event had to happen once; thereafter it rose up from within. But freedom was not possible. One was an automaton, subject to the past. What rose up from within was determined by the past. It was not possible to become a free person. Not there. We do not have to strive for knowledge in order to repeat, pointlessly, what is already there, but in order to become a free person. And we have progressed to the Earth period from the Moon period, from a time when we were not free beings and when everything simply rose up in our imaginations. Now we have to reach out to the external world. Our spiritual experience of the process of reading or listening enables us to be there as a free individual. It is not entirely true to say that man strives for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Humanity achieves knowledge in order to become free and individual. We do not want to lose sight of this fact.

The other thing we do not want to lose sight of can be introduced with a further question. One can question why the external world should need to be repeated in our concepts and ideas. What, really, is the point of it? Why should we, with our thoughts and ideas, repeat the external world? Surely it is of no concern to the external world that we repeat it!—If you pursue the following train of thought you will get a more exact grasp of this: A man is there. If he had been murdered in his youth, he would not be there. Because he is there, he experiences—in addition to the fact that the world is there—a repetition of that world as a picture within his own inner world. That picture would not exist at all if he had been murdered in his youth. And yet nothing would be different in the outer world. It is a different matter if he intervenes in that world, but as far as the external world is concerned, what lives in our knowledge is pure repetition. If we were robots, and everything we did between birth and death were a reaction to the external world, then our knowledge would be entirely superfluous. We would do all that we had to do, and knowledge would just be a superfluous parallel phenomenon. You could imagine that the knowledge man carries with him is something added to nature and to the universe, but that it makes no difference to nature or to the universe that such a thing is added to it. Nature could just as well have produced robots whose thoughts do not mirror everything that happens. For nothing out there is changed when we accompany events with our thoughts and concepts, creating pictures of them. If you take a picture of some place with a camera, then, in addition to the place, there also is a picture of it, but it is entirely the same to that place whether the picture exists or not. This is how it is with our ideas. They are an addition. So why should nature not be organised like this?—thus one might question. All of us have long since become so accustomed to thinking that we do not ask this question any more; we have grown so fond of thinking. Like eating and drinking, we are used to it, so the question does not arise for us. But you know how many people there are out there who would be quite delighted not to have to think and to be able to function like a machine. Thinking is too heavy a burden to them and they flee from every thought. Now that, too, is contained in the question: Why hasn't nature fashioned man so that thinking is not even included among his possessions? We have answered one part of this question. Man becomes a free individuality by virtue of his thinking. Such a question, however, allows of many kinds of answers. Nor is it the only thing that can help us to understand.

Let us suppose that we had been born with a different organisation. As children, after we had received our head from the heavens, our body from the earth, and had been set down by the beings of the hierarchies, by the angels, the archangels, and so on, suppose that we had proceeded to go about doing what we had to do without our ever having to suffer under the strain of all the pains and torments this so often involves—without our ever developing an inner soul life. If we assume that this were so, then very important consequences would follow. We could only be born once and die once if we were organised like this; we could not live a succession of lives on earth. A plant whose blossoms never develop into fruit only lives once. A plant develops further through its seeds. The seed of our next earthly life develops within our developing soul life. Within it is the seed. If we did not have an unfolding soul life, with its knowledge, our earthly death would be the end of our life. Therefore, the understanding we develop in our inner soul life is not a mere repetition of what is out there; to the extent that our souls are shaped by knowledge, we carry the future within us. And that has great significance. Except for the things related to knowledge, everything we bear in and with us, is more or less the work of the past. The understanding we develop represents the real seed of the future. The real seed of the future develops within the sphere of our knowledge.

Now, in closing, I would like to touch on the leading thought of our next lectures. It will take us into important areas concerned with the cosmic aspects of human nature.

We carry all our knowledge within us, all of it, from the most naive understanding to the most abstract knowledge—and the two are not so terribly different—we just have an incorrect sense of their value. Thus, deep beneath our outer surface we carry this within us. It is super-sensible, for the content of knowledge is, of course, a super-sensible thing. In reality it is a collection of forces that rest within us. And then we pass through the gates of death; what happens then? Now, I have often described what happens then, but I would like to describe it once more from the standpoint of these forces.

A human being consists of head and body. No matter how precious it may seem, our head actually is ‘on the way out’. Here I am referring to forces, not to the outer form. You can let a person's body waste away, or you can burn it, of course, but the forces do not cease to exist. They remain externally present, and the spiritual forces on which the body depends also remain. But the head disappears. As I said, you may well consider it to be a valuable part of your organism, but after death that does not matter—after death it is nothing special. This refers to the outer form of the head, of course, not to its soul content. For, as regards your passage from death to a new birth, what is important to the heavens is the part of your last earthly life that you could only receive from the earth, namely, the rest of the body. That, with its various forces, is what is transformed into the new head during the time between death and a new birth. Here you have the head, there, the rest of the body. This head was the body of your previous incarnation; your present body will be the head of your next incarnation. The forces that you develop by means of your head in this life are what will transform the forces of your body into a head for the next life. The earth gives you a body for that purpose. The head you carry around now is the transformed body of your previous incarnation, for metamorphosis applies to all of life. It is not only there in the transformation of a plant's leaves into the petals of its blossom; metamorphosis does not just affect our subordinate aspects; metamorphosis rules throughout. Your body is a head that is yet to come—your head is a transformed body.

These are the ideas I wanted to touch on. You carry your head about in its present state. Phrenologists study the shapes of the head, but what they do is not worth much unless it is based on initiation, because everyone possesses his own kind of head. The head is nothing other than the inherited body of the previous incarnation. Every person's head is different from the head of anyone else and the characteristic types the phrenologists describe are merely rough observations. Just think what a marvellous connection there is: A human being has a dual nature. But not only does man have a dual nature; in addition to that, his external shape also carries both past and future. The human head gives you reincarnation where you can really put your hands on it, for the shaping of the head is the result of our previous life. The head we bear in the next life will be a transformation of our body. Wherever one looks deeply into the foundations of existence one finds metamorphosis. Someone who understands the things I have just been explaining is enabled to look deep, deep into the nature and origins of world existence and human existence. As I said, I wanted to touch on these ideas because they will provide the leitmotif of the next two lectures. These will be concerned with how one incarnation works on in the next incarnation, and how the previous incarnation works over into the present one, through the metamorphic relationship of man's head-ness to his body-ness, if I may be allowed to use these expressions.

• 5. Ludwig Buchner (1824 – 1899).
• 6. Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919).
• 7. Carl Vogt (1817 – 1895).

If we set out to compare the way in which people of today speak about matters of the soul and of the body, with how the Greeks once spoke of these things, we will discover a time, not very long ago, when the Greeks were much more aware of the relationship between body and soul than is the case today. In so doing, it is extraordinarily important for us to be clear that, given the Greeks' view of the world, a materialistic explanation of the connections between body and soul would have been out of the question. Today, when someone says that this or that convolution of the brain is the speech centre, he is thinking about the location of the faculty in a very materialistic way. For the most part, such a person is only thinking of how the speech sounds might be produced, purely mechanically, at some particular place in the brain. Even if he is not explicitly a materialist, at the very least he will think that anyone who wants to understand the real connections must conceive of the act of speaking in more or less materialistic terms. The Greeks could speak much more extensively about the inner connections between body and soul without arousing any materialistic assumptions, for they still felt that the things of the external world could be seen as revelations and manifestations of the spirit.

Today it does not occur to someone who is speaking about the speech centre in the brain that this speech centre is, in the first instance, built in the spirit. Nor does he think of what is there materially as being a sign or symbol or likeness of the spirit that is behind it and exists quite independently of those spiritual events that are played out in the human soul. The Greeks always saw the entire, physically existing human being as a likeness and a symbol of the super-sensible, spiritual reality that stands behind him. It must be conceded that most people of today would not find such a conception at all easy, for even though we may not want them, many materialistic notions have adhered to our souls. Just consider what was said in the last lecture about how a person's head has actually been formed in the spiritual world, how its source is in the spiritual world, and how, essentially, it was prepared in the spiritual world in the time between the previous death and this birth. These days, it would be astonishing to meet someone who does not say, ‘We know for certain that the head is formed in the mother's body during the time of pregnancy; it is mad to say that it is really formed during the long period between the last death and this birth or conception.’ Anyone who thinks in wholly materialistic terms—‘thinks naturally’, one is almost bound to say—must view these aforementioned assertions as a form of madness.

But, as you shall see, if you picture matters in the manner of what follows, it will nevertheless be possible for you to arrive at the appropriate thoughts.

Naturally, prior to conception everything to do with the head is invisible. No meteor descends from the heights of heaven to lodge in the mother's body—of course not. But the forces required for the human head, namely, the forces that form and shape it, are active during the time between death and a new conception. Think of it as a more or less invisible, but already shaped, head. Of course, when I use lines to draw it, they represent something invisible. Only forces are present. (See drawing.)

Nor should these forces be imagined as having the shape of the physical head. But they are the forces that cause the physical shape of the head—bring it about. And these begin to work on matter during the time in the mother's body; the matter takes on form in accordance with these forces. The form of the head is not made there, but the head that is built there is built according to the form that has moved into the mother's body from out of the expanses of the cosmos. That is the real truth. Of course it is only when physical matter comes into this form that it becomes visible for the first time. The physical matter crystallises more or less within the field of certain invisible formative forces. The forces connected with inheritance also play into this, but the principal formative forces of the head are of cosmic origin. In the mother's body, matter is drawn into the field of these forces, which I would like to describe as forces of crystallisation.

Thus, one must keep in mind that what is visible is extraneous material that has, so to speak, been shot into a field of forces. The lines of force originate in the cosmos. Thus you can see how the material part of the head really can he pictured as analogous to iron filings within a magnetic field. The iron filings align themselves in accordance with the magnet's invisible lines of force. The form of the head is to be imagined as radiating in from the cosmos, invisibly, like the force-field emitted by a magnet. What the mother contributes is incorporated into the head in accordance with the cosmic patterns, like iron filings in a magnetic field.

Picturing things in this way will help you to fashion the concepts you need for understanding how the human head is shaped during the period between death and a new birth, and how the formative forces that shape the rest of the organism—not totally, but more or less, as in the previous case—originate in the earthly sphere, in the stream of inheritance passed through the generations. By origin, a human being is both cosmic and earthly: cosmic with respect to the principal source of the head, earthly with respect to the rest of the body. These things are manifestations of the most profound mysteries, so one always has to limit oneself to speaking only about particular aspects. They are unimaginably far-reaching mysteries which contain keys to understanding the origins not only of humanity, but of the whole cosmos. The mysteries at work here actually are keys to understanding the whole cosmos.

So, from this point of view, we can already conceive of man as a being with a dual nature. Because humanity has this dual nature, it is necessary to our studies that we draw a sharp distinction between everything that is a part of the head, or is connected with it, and what is a part of the rest of the organism, or is connected with that.

This brings us to a subject that a contemporary mind finds particularly difficult to understand, for people of today like to explain everything in the same way, to stuff everything into one pigeon-hole. One cannot do this if one keeps the realities in view, but keeping realities in view is the last thing our modern science does! The whole body except for the head—everything to do with the human body with the exception of head—must be seen as a pictorial representation of the spiritual forces standing behind it. What is related to the head, however, is not a pictorial representation in the same sense, but is more like the kind of representation you have in a drawing. A picture resembles its subject more closely than a mere drawing. The painter and the sculptor try to reproduce certain aspects of the original; someone writing a description of a thing uses letters that have very little similarity to the original. Letters are the most extreme example of drawings; paintings and works of sculpture are pictures and resemble their originals much more closely.

Now the difference we are considering here is not so great as the difference between a picture and a written description, but the situation is similar. The rest of the body, excluding the head, is a picture of what stands behind it; the head and all that concerns it is more like a drawing. The head we see with our physical eyes has less resemblance to what stands behind it than does the rest of the body; the body our physical eyes see is more like what stands behind it. The discrepancy is already very pronounced if you observe the etheric body; it is even more pronounced when you observe the astral body—not to mention the ego. Thus, as regards the head—its shape, expression, and so on—we are dealing with something that is more like a drawing; when we look at the rest of the body with our physical eyes we are seeing something that more closely resembles what stands behind it spiritually—it is a closer copy of the super-sensible, invisible forces in which it originated. We must maintain this distinction, for today there is a tendency to observe these two things in the same way. People are fond of reminding themselves of the old saying, ‘Everything transitory is but a likeness.’ And that is rightly said—but there are different degrees of likeness. I want to consider the whole human being as a likeness of the super-sensible, but in such a way that the body is a likeness in the manner of a picture, whereas the head is a likeness in an even higher sense. This follows from the way the rest of the body is formed by the forces in whose midst we live during the period between birth and death, while the head is more the product of the forces in whose midst we live during the period between death and a new birth, or conception. If we want to consider the human being as a whole, both as the being who goes through the life between death and a new birth as well as the being who lives between birth and death, we cannot leave the parts of the human being that remain strictly super-sensible—even when he is here in the physical world—out of our considerations.

I would like to use three words to describe the part of the human being that always remains strictly super-sensible—words that have been particularly significant since time immemorial. During certain periods they have degenerated into mere phrases, as have many such words, but they need not be taken as mere phrases if one gives them their full meaning. In the course of his development, a person comes into contact with truth, beauty and goodness. Truth, Beauty and Goodness are the three concepts to which I refer and which have been spoken about since time immemorial. Even a superficial examination begins to reveal something of these ideas to us. What is normally called truth is related to the life of thought, what one calls beautiful is related to the life of feeling, and what one calls good is related to the life of the will. One can also say: the life of the will brings us into a relationship with morality. Everything to do with aesthetic enjoyment and creativity is related to the life of the feelings. All matters of truth are related to the life of thought.

Naturally, these things are always meant to be taken in a restricted sense. One thing plays over into the other. So is it always with the significant truths. A person develops here on the physical plane by participating in the moral life, in the aesthetic life, and in the life that is concerned with truth. But only the most crass of materialist could believe that the ideas of morality, of aesthetic worth, and of truth, refer to a concrete physical thing. Even for the man living here in the physical world, these three things point to the super-sensible.

Now, in this respect, it is instructive to become acquainted with the spiritual-scientific results that come to light when one addresses the questions: What is the origin of the truth for which man strives? What is the origin of that for which he strives in his artistic, aesthetic enjoyment or in his creative artistic and aesthetic efforts? And what is the source of the morality for which he strives? For you see, in the physical world, everything to do with truth is related to the forces that are developed by means of the physical head. Indeed, it is related in such a way that matters of truth depend on the interaction between the physical head and the external, earthly world—extended, obviously, to include the cosmos, but the earthly, external world all the same. Thus, one can say: Matters of truth involve a relationship between our head and the outer world.

What do we observe when we turn to matters of beauty, to the aesthetic? All these things rest on interactions and relationships. If truth is based on the relationship of the head to the external world, then what relationship provides the basis for aesthetic experience, for artistic experience? In the one case, our experience depends on the relation between the head and the rest of the body. It is very important to be entirely clear about this. Consider how here, in this world, a total, unqualified, absolutely awake consciousness is necessary for grasping the truth. Anyone who without further ado accepts a dream as truth,—truth in the same sense that we acknowledge it on the physical plane—is ill, is he not? Thus, in matters of thorough-going waking consciousness, our head is the organ that comes into consideration. And the consciousness of truth that we develop here on earth, or need to develop, is based primarily on the interaction between our head and the outer world. Of course this includes the spiritual parts of the external world in so far as we can come into contact with them, but they, also, belong to the world that surrounds us. With aesthetic experience, what comes into consideration is what lives in the head and in the rest of the organism, for aesthetic experience arises either when the head dreams about what is going on in the rest of the organism, or when the rest of the organism dreams about what is going on in the head. These are interactions that involve more than can be contained in our normal life of ideas. The roots of these experiences reach beneath the conscious levels and they depend on the inward, more unconscious way our body and head interact when we enjoy something beautiful. The same elements that we are otherwise aware of in dreams surge back and forth, back and forth. This is the primary thing with aesthetic enjoyment: either the head is dreaming about the contents of the rest of the body, or the rest of the body is dreaming about the contents of the head. And then, afterwards, we bring this back from our inner world into waking consciousness. The waking consciousness comes second. The occult basis of all aesthetic and artistic enjoyment is this surging and weaving back and forth between the head and the rest of the organism. In the case of lesser aesthetic pleasures, the head is dreaming of the body; with the higher and highest aesthetic pleasures, the body is dreaming about the head.

What I have just been explaining to you is the source of much of what I would like to call—if you will forgive the barbaric expression—the extensive spread of Botocudianism,⁸ of the botocudian attitude people have regarding aesthetic matters. Everyone strives for truth, do they not, and also to do the good and follow the dictates of conscience, but when it comes to the aesthetic sphere we find botocudian attitudes in many circles. The feeling for beauty is not regarded as being necessary for a human being here in the physical world in the same way that truth and goodness are regarded as necessary. A person who does not strive for truth displays a human defect; a person who opposes the good also displays a human defect; but a person who is unable to understand the Sistine Madonna would not be seen as humanly defective because of this—and you will have to agree that there are many people who are unable to approach the artistic side of such a work of art. This is because the aesthetic sphere is something very inward, it involves something that must be done within oneself; it involves an interaction between our two parts, the head and the rest of the body, and in this we are answerable to no one but ourselves. A person without regard for the truth is harmful to others; a person who has no regard for the good is harmful to others, as well as to the spiritual world, as we know. But a person who is a Botocudian in his attitude to the sense of beauty deprives himself without harming the rest of mankind—except for those few who find it distinctly not beautiful for there to be so few who can respond openly to beauty.

Actually, our materialistic age has a false conception of the good, for it is assumed that the good approaches us in the same way as truth approaches us. But that is utter nonsense. The good signifies an interaction between the human body and the outer world, but in this case the body includes the head.

So these things are naturally interwoven! When we speak of the striving for truth, we are talking about the head in relation to the external world. When we speak of the striving for beauty, we are talking about the head in relation to the body. And when we speak of morality, we are talking about the relation of the body to the rest of the world. But in this case we are including the head as part of the body, so that we are talking about the relation of the entire human being to an external world—and, indeed, in this case a purely spiritual outer world. Morality is concerned with the relation of the entire human being to the external world—not, however, to the physical external world, but rather to the spiritual forces and powers that surround us.

My dear friends, you know that when I speak of materialistic science I am speaking of something that has its rightful place, not of something that has no justification for existing. I have given many lectures here about the rightful place of materialism in the external sciences provided it remains within its own borders. But for a long time it has been impossible for scientific materialism to speak correctly about the relation of morality to humanity. It has not been possible for the simple reason that our materialistic science has long been suffering—and still suffers—from a fundamental disease and it will not be able to speak until the illness has been removed. I have mentioned this fundamental illness frequently, but when one, speaks of it our scientifically-minded people regard one as a thorough-going dilettante.

You will be aware of the fact that present-day science talks about two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves that serve feeling and perception, and the nerves connected with the motor system which are supposed to serve human will impulses and acts of will. The sensory nerves are said to connect the periphery with the inner parts, the motor nerves to connect the inner parts with the periphery. A nerve that issues from the brain and mediates the lifting of my hand is called a motor nerve; whereas it is a sensory nerve that is supposed to be involved when I touch something and feel that it is warm or smooth. Thus, the anatomy and physiology of today assumes there are two kinds of nerves. This is utter nonsense. But it will be a long time before it is recognised as nonsense. Even though it is known that there is no anatomical difference between the motor and the sensory nerves, it will be a long time before people admit that there is only one kind of nerve and that the motor nerves are not different from the sensory nerves. Actually, arousal of the will does not depend on these motor nerves, which serve rather for perception of the processes brought about by the will. For in order to be fully conscious when I lift my hand, I must be able to perceive the movement of my hand. The only thing this involves is an inner sensory nerve which perceives the movements of the hand. I am of course very well aware of all the objections that one can raise against this, based on diseases of the spinal cord, and so on; but when these cases are properly understood they do not furnish contrary evidence, but rather are proof for what I am saying.

Therefore, there is only one kind of nerve, not the two kinds that haunt today's materialistic science. The so-called motor nerves are only there to serve our perception of movement. They also serve perception. They are internally situated nerves of perception which reach towards the periphery of the body for the purpose of perception. But, as I said, this will only gradually come to be recognised, and only when it has been recognised will it be possible to have some understanding for the connection between morality and the will, or for the direct connection between morality and the entire human being. For morality really works directly on what we call the I. Working down from there, it affects the astral body, the etheric body and, finally, the physical body. Therefore, if a moral act is committed, the moral impulse radiates, so to speak, from the I into the astral body, then into the etheric body, and then into the physical body. Now it becomes movement, becomes something that happens outwardly; and it is only at this stage that it can be perceived by means of the so-called motor nerves.

Morality is truly something that works into humanity directly from the spiritual world. It comes more directly out of the spiritual world than, for example, beauty and truth. In the case of truth, truths have to be approached in a sphere where physical truths, as well as the pure spiritual truths, have a say. In order to enter us, spiritual truths have to make the same detour through the head that is necessary for ordinary physical perceptions mediated by the senses. Moral impulses involve the entire human being, even when we take hold of them in a purely spiritual fashion as moral ideas. That is the fact to keep sight of: they affect the entire human being.

In order to understand this matter more fully we must look further into the way the difference between the head and the rest of the body is revealed. As regards our uppermost part, the head, the things that most come into consideration are the parts we refer to as the physical body and the etheric body. These are revealed distinctly, here in the physical plane, by the head. When I have a physical head before me, I must say to myself: ‘Yes, here I have something expressed like in a drawing. There is a physical shape, the physical body, and the etheric body. But there is already less of the astral body present. And as for the I, it is almost entirely absent; it cannot come very strongly at all into the formative forces of the head. Its presence there is almost entirely restricted to the soul level.’ Thus, the presence of the I in the head is very much on the soul level; although it saturates the head with its soul forces, it remains fairly independent of it. This is not the case with the rest of the body. There—paradoxical and strange though it may seem—there the physical body and etheric body are much less physically, bodily present. There the astral body and I are more strongly active. The I is active in the circulation of the blood. Everything else that lives in the body is a strong expression of the astral. On the other hand, the parts of the physical body that are actually physical cannot even be directly observed. (I refer to, as physical, those parts that are governed by physical forces, those subject to physical forces.)

Naturally, it is terribly easy to deceive oneself in this regard. Anyone who accepts materialistic criteria will say that breathing is a physical process in the human being: a person takes in air and then, as a consequence of the breath, certain processes occur in the blood, and so on, all of this being physical processes. Of course these all are physical processes, but the forces on which the chemical processes of the blood are based come from the I. It is precisely in the human body that what is really physical is less involved. For example, physical forces are expressed in the human body when a child begins to crawl and then to assume an upright position. That is a kind of victory over gravity. These extraordinary relationships with balance and with the effects of weight are always present, but they are not physically visible. They are what spiritual science refers to as the physical body: they are physical forces, to be sure, but they are, essentially, forces that cannot be observed. It is like having a balance on a stand; in the middle is the hypomochlion; forces are acting on one side because of the weight that is there; other forces are working on the other side where another weight is hanging. The strings by which the weights are attached are not identical with the forces at work there; even though the forces are physical, they are invisible. This is the sense in which parts of the human body can be called physical—for the most part, they are to be thought of as forces.

When we come to the etheric sphere, there is still a considerable amount that remains unobservable. There are physical processes that are brought into play by sense perceptions, as when perception of taste affects the taste-nerves. All of these, however, are basically very subtle processes.

Then we come to what happens in the muscles, and so on. Although the muscles provide us with a likeness, a picture that we can physically perceive, this picture depends on astral forces. The processes that occur in the nerves also depend on the astral.

And then we come to the circulation of the blood, to the forces of the I. The forces of the I and the astral body are at work in everything associated with the processes of inheritance through the succession of the generations. But astral body and I do not work in the same way in the human head, especially not the I. You could say that the I is very active in man's head when he is awake, but it never brings about any inner processes there in the way it does in the rest of the body, in the blood. The blood that goes to the head is dependent on the rest of the body—that is the kind of thing I meant when I said that one cannot separate things absolutely. One thing plays over into the other. Although blood flows to the head, the actual impulse of the blood does not originate in the head; the blood is pressed into the head. To the extent that this is a bodily process it originates in the I.

Thus, one really can say that when we look at a person's head, the most prominent and most important things to be seen are those that have been pressed outward into the physical and etheric bodies. If we look at the rest of the body, the most important things are the impulses and forces that are at work in it. These originate in the I and the astral body. Therefore, when you contrast the head, on the one hand, with the rest of the body on the other, it is the physical and etheric bodies that are relatively prominent in the head, whereas the astral body and the I that flow through it remain relatively independent. With the rest of the body it is the I and the astral body that are directly at work in the physical processes, whereas the remaining members are only present as the basis of an invisible framework—a physical and etheric framework that is not normally even considered. The place where the I is really present is in the circulation of the blood.

And now, what about the part we could call the moral-etheric aura? First of all, this part works on the entire human being. But it works on the I and the I works on the bodily part of man—for example in the blood. As we saw, the most important thing in the blood is the I. Morality affects the blood. You should not concentrate too much on the physical aspects of the blood; the physical blood is only there to occupy, so to speak, a position in space where the forces of the I can work. Instead, consider the blood in the light of what I have described. Morality, therefore, affects the I. In the blood, the forces of the I encounter the forces of morality. This is true for the man who stands here in the physical world: there is a spiritual encounter between what pulses in his blood and the moral forces that radiate into it. In the course of this encounter, the really moral impulses drive out what otherwise would emanate from the blood. Picture this as the bloodstream: the I flows in it and morality is at work there, too. (See the drawing.) Morality, then, has to counter the initial stream of the I. Therefore it must be a counter-force to this flowing force of the I. And so it is. When someone has the impulse to take a strong moral stand, this moral impulse has a direct effect on his blood. This effect even precedes the perception, mediated by the head, of the moral event and the moral process. This is what led Aristotle to make a wonderful observation. (Aristotle always took note of these things, both the physical and the moral, with an exacting eye.) He said that morality depends on a skill and that actual moral practice is the child of something further—it is the child of intellectual judgement.

To put it radically, the head is a spectator. And so, as we move about here on the physical plane, the forces of the I that are the basis of the circulation of the blood interact with moral impulses pressing in upon us from out of the spiritual world. Essentially, this interaction is based on the fact that we occupy our entire body with our waking consciousness. The I really does have to be present as conscious ego in the pulsing of the blood. Perhaps you are wanting to say—I will slip this in parenthetically—Yes, but the I and the astral body are outside of the physical body and etheric body when one is sleeping. How can the I and the astral body be the prime active forces here, since the shapes and movements still persist during sleep, during the time the astral body and I are absent! To be sure, the essential parts are outside the body, but, as I have often emphasised, this withdrawal from the body only applies essentially to one part of it, the head. I have said explicitly that the interaction of the I and astral body with the rest of the organism is all the more intensive when these are not at work in the head. That has often been said here. The I and the astral body are not separated from the rest of the organism in the same way as they are from the head.

But it is through the head that morality pours in when it encounters the ego forces in the blood. That is why I said earlier that the head must be included here as part of the entire body. For moral impulses cannot pour into the body directly, but have to enter by way of the head. This implies that the person must be awake. If a man is asleep and his I and his astral body have withdrawn from his head, morality would have to pour into the head and body by way of the physical and etheric, rather than spiritually. But this is not possible, for these have nothing to do with morality.

Now, if you will be entirely honest with yourself, there is a simple thing that will convince you of the truth of what I am saying. Just ask yourself how moral you are in your sleep or in your dreams—assuming that morality is not just a reminiscence of physical life! Now and then morality and everything to do with morals has rather a bad time in the world of dreams, does it not? Things can be quite amoral there; the criteria of morality are no more applicable there than they are in the world of plants. As such, moral impulses can only be applied to waking life. So you can see that morality involves a direct influence of our spiritual environment on the forces within us radiating from the I.

Now let us turn to beauty and to the things that have aesthetic effect. We already know that this depends on an interaction between the head and the rest of the body. The head dreams about the rest of the body, the rest of the body dreams about the head. If one investigates what lies behind this, one discovers that everything aesthetic originates in certain impulses that come from the spiritual world and stimulate that interaction. Those representatives of botocudianism to whom I earlier referred are less susceptible to these impulses; they do not allow themselves to be inwardly moved by the impulses that summon up such interactions. These impulses, however, do not affect the I. They work directly on the astral body, as distinguished from moral impulses, which work directly on the I. And that lack of consciousness associated with morality, that half-unconscious quality of conscience, is a result of the way morality must pass through the head—to which the I is not so intimately bound—and thence into the more subconscious realm of the body, seizing the whole person. The aesthetic sphere works directly on the astral body. There it brings about that extraordinary interplay between the part of the astral body that is intensively connected with wakefulness, whether it be wakefulness of the nerves or wakefulness in the muscles of the body, and the part of the astral body that is connected with the head and has less to do with wakefulness in the nerves or muscles of the body. For the head and the rest of the body are related in different ways to the astral body. This is why there are two kinds of human astrality; the more or less free astrality associated with the head, and the astrality that is bound to the physical processes in the rest of the body. The aesthetic impulse causes the free and the bound parts of the astral to interact and play into one another. They weave and surge, back and forth, through one another.

And when we enter the realm of truth, we find that truth, also, is something super-sensible. But it affects the head directly. Truth as such is directly connected with the activities and processes of the head. But the most curious thing about truth is that a human being grasps it in such a way—and truth affects him in such a way—that it flows directly into the etheric body. You may infer this from our numerous discussions of the past. In so far as truth lives in human thoughts, it lives in the etheric body. As I have often said, truth lives with thoughts in the etheric body. Truth enters the etheric part of the head directly. From there, naturally, it is passed on, as truth, to the physical part of the head.

This, you see, is the human being as he is when he is possessed by truth, beauty and goodness—by knowledge, by the aesthetic, by morality. When a person is in the grip of knowledge, or perception, or truth, the external world flows directly into his etheric body from outside-flowing through the I and the astral body in so far as the head is involved in the process. And because a person is not able to submerge himself consciously in his etheric body, the truth appears to him as a thing that is already complete in itself. One of the overwhelming and surprising experiences of initiation comes when one begins to experience truth as a free impulse that resides in the etheric body, in the same way as one experiences morality or beauty in the astral body. This is overwhelming and surprising because the one who goes through an initiation enters into a much freer relationship to truth and, as a consequence, into a much more responsible relationship with truth. As long as we remain unaware of truth as it enters us, it appears as something already completed. Then we simply say, applying the normal logic: this is true, that is false. As long as this remains the case, one has much less of a sense of responsibility towards the truth than one has after discovering that the truth is just as dependent on deeply-rooted feelings of sympathy and antipathy as are morality and beauty. Then one begins to relate to truth in freedom.

At this point we touch on yet another mystery, an important mystery of the subjective life. It manifests itself in the fact that the feeling for truth of some who approach initiation in an improper, unworthy way does not increase. They do not develop a greater sense of responsibility toward the truth. Instead, they cease to feel responsible about violating the truth and come under the influence of a certain element of untruth. Oh, herein lies much of significance regarding mankind's evolution towards spiritual truth, which in its purest form is wisdom. To the extent that it flows into the I and the astral body, truth directly enters the etheric, the human etheric. Beauty affects the human astral body; morality penetrates to the I—it is admitted into the ego. Thus, when truth pours into us from out of the cosmos it still remains for it to work on into the physical body. It must still imprint itself on the physical body—in other words, on the physical brain. There, in the physical realm it becomes perception. When beauty streams into our astral body from out of the cosmos, it still has to work its way into the etheric body and thence into the physical body. The good works into the I, and must imprint itself so strongly on the I that its vibrations are able to penetrate the astral body, the etheric body and, finally, the physical body. Only there, in the physical body, can it finally become effective.

Thus is mankind related to the true, the good and the beautiful.

In truth, man opens his etheric body directly to the cosmos—initially, it is the etheric part of the head. In beauty, he opens his astral body directly to the cosmos. In the sphere of morality, he opens his I directly to the cosmos. Of these, truth is the one that has been in preparation for mankind for the longest time. We will speak further about these things tomorrow and see how they are related to the laws that govern life between death and a new birth, as well as life between birth and death. Relatively speaking, beauty has been in preparation for a shorter time. Morality is something that is only now in its first earthly stages. What lives in the truth and, in its purified state, becomes wisdom, underwent its first stages during the Sun stage of human evolution. It achieved its highest point during the Moon stage, lives further during the Earth stage, and will essentially have reached completion by the period that we call the Jupiter stage of evolution. By then, mankind will have more or less completed the aspects of its development that have to do with the contents of wisdom. Beauty—which is a very inward thing for man—had its first beginnings during Moon evolution. It continues to develop now, during Earth evolution, and it will reach its final completion during Venus—during what we call the Venus stage of evolution. In all these cases where we have had recourse to the occult in assigning names to things, there are good reasons for choosing the names. It is not for nothing that I call one stage of development ‘the Venus stage’; it is so named to correspond with what will then be the dominant process.

During the Moon stage of development there was nothing that could be called morality. At that time, the bonds of necessity, of what was virtually a natural necessity, connected human beings to their acts. Morality could only begin on Earth. It will reach its culmination during the Vulcan stage when the purified I—the I that has been purified by morality and entirely moulded by it—will be the only thing that pulsates in the fiery processes of the blood. Then the forces of the human ego and the forces of morality will have become one and the same thing. Then the blood of mankind—in other words, the warmth of the blood, for matter is just an external sign of this warmth—will have become the holy fire of Vulcan.

Tomorrow we will speak further about these things.

• 8. Botocudian: The Botocudos are an Indian tribe of eastern Brazil. According to Chamber's Encyclopaedia of 1901 (Vol. 11, pp., 356-7), they are ‘the most barbarous of the Indian tribes of Brazil’. The tenor of the description that follows suggests how ‘botocudian’ could have become synonymous with extreme barbarism. The article concludes with the comment, ‘Ungovernably passionate, they often commit outrageous cruelties; but through systematically cruel treatment they have been almost annihilated, and now number not more than 4,000.’

Today the essential thing for which I would like to use our time is to develop some things that will provide the basis for tomorrow's discussion. These things are an expansion of what was described yesterday.

Consider how birth or, say, conception, is the entry into the life a person leads between birth and death. Think of what we have said in the course of the past years about how a human being enters the physical body. We know that in a certain sense the three lower realms of nature—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—flow together in man, and that he rises above these three realms that are joined together symbiotically in him. But as a being of soul and spirit he also grows into these realms. Man becomes human by descending to the physical plane and growing into the mineral, plant and animal realms. After death, he ascends again. Then something similar happens from a spiritual point of view: in the spiritual world something happens that resembles the growing into the three kingdoms of physical existence on earth. With all such descriptions you must be clear that everything that has already been said in earlier presentations still holds true. Everything we have previously said about how a human being grows into the spiritual world after passing through the gates of death still holds good—the further details that arise are only to be taken as additions to that. Thus we can say: as a human being grows into the spiritual worlds he is received into the realm of morality, the aesthetic realm and the realm of wisdom, or truth. Now, in this life when we speak of the moral realm, the realm of the good, the aesthetic realm, the realm of the beautiful, and the realm of truth, of wisdom, naturally we are speaking more or less abstractly. But the forces in the spiritual world into which a human being grows and which are left behind when physical existence is once more taken up, are absolutely concrete forces. They are real, spiritual modes of existence. We use names like these just to summarise. Here on earth, a person's aura carries a kind of remnant of the things he received when he had ascended to the spiritual world. Having left behind the realms of wisdom, of beauty, of truth, mankind must enter the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. But the three spiritual realms continue to shine into the human aura, so that if we include his spiritual parts, then the whole man is a being who lives most directly in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and lives more at a distance from that which, so to speak, comes down from the three spiritual realms, hovers before him, and shines and weaves through him. The light from the three spiritual realms shines over a human being. A schematic kind of a drawing will help us see how these things are connected with human nature, but please note that it is just a schematic drawing. All that I am going to show you is just schematic, but it will clarify much for you if studied carefully. For the sake of clarity, I will draw everything to do with the I like this (green). Everything to do with the astral body will be yellow; everything to do with the etheric human being, lilac, and everything to do with the physical human being, red.

Now we will take a schematic look at mankind. We will observe how mankind stands in the cosmos, in so far as a human being is a moral being, that is, through his participation in the moral forces of the cosmos. Then we will observe mankind in so far as a human being participates, in the way we described yesterday, in the aesthetic impulses of the cosmos. And then we will observe mankind's participation in the impulses of wisdom. Thus we are going to outline a kind of psychic physiology—forgive the slightly nonsensical form of the expression, but you will understand what I mean. Naturally, this outline is meant imaginatively.

When we observe the human being who stands in the moral sphere, you will be especially reminded of what we said yesterday—that the Greeks felt and experienced the relationship between the physical and the soul-spiritual more strongly than is the case today. Hence Plato, for example, was able to give a clear account of how man is taken hold of, gripped, by moral impulses coming from the spiritual universe. Plato says that there exist four virtues. The whole of morality takes hold of the whole human being. But all that is naturally to be taken with the well-known grain of salt. Naturally, even though it grips the whole person, the human being is subsequently divided up into the particular virtues. The first virtue Plato mentions is wisdom—wisdom now understood as a virtue, not as science. Since wisdom as a virtue is related to the way truth is experienced, it takes hold of those forces that flow from the moral sphere to the head. Therefore it can be pictured like this. (See drawing.) And therefore Plato says: The head of the moral man is gripped by wisdom; the breast is gripped by the virtue of strength of heart (Starkmut)—I cannot find a better word—strength of mind, or industriousness, but a kind of industriousness that includes the forces of the heart: an industriousness of the soul.

The person who does not give in to his animal instincts is not necessarily wise. The wise human being—wise in the sense implied by strength of heart—is the one who possesses moral ideas, ideas he can grasp and according to which he is able to direct his life. But even though the moral impulse is grasped in the form of moral ideas, it nevertheless streams into the physical person, into the body. Therefore we can picture morality as flowing into a human being here (green); here it flows into the I. That is where the Platonic moral sphere of wisdom would be located.

Whenever strength of heart—strength of mind, industriousness of the soul—streams down out of the moral sphere, it streams into the area of the chest, which encloses the heart. We can say: When morality radiates down, it is here, in the area of the chest and heart, where it particularly takes hold of the astral. So we will show this next in-pouring (yellow). Thus we now have wisdom as virtue in the head (green), strength of heart as virtue in the area of the chest (yellow).

Plato calls the third virtue temperance, sophrosyne, and he quite rightly assigns it to the abdomen. Human desires are aroused in the abdomen, and the temperate person is the one who is able to rule over his desires by thinking about them, feeling his way into them and consciously experiencing them. It is no virtue to live a life that simply chases after desires. Animals can also live like that. Temperance first arises when the desires are made as conscious as it is possible for them to be made. This happens in the etheric body; for, to the extent that thought, temperance and courage are human, they must be taken hold of by the etheric body. Therefore we must put this (violet) into our drawing. Thus, as I said yesterday, the moral sphere takes hold of the whole physical human being. And the head is included, as I explicitly stated yesterday.

And then Plato refers to a fourth, comprehensive virtue that flows into the whole physical body, which is actually invisible, as I showed you yesterday. He calls this virtue dikaiosyne. We have to translate this as justice, although the modern sense of the word does not entirely match Plato's meaning. Plato's word, ‘justice’, is not meant abstractly. It refers to the ability to give our lives direction, the ability to know ourselves and to orient ourselves in life. So we can say that here (red) the moral sphere, as justice, as uprightness, streams into the whole physical body. This gives us a schematic indication of how, in the human aura, morality streams into the human being.

Now we want to indicate how aesthetic impulses stream into man. Here there is a slight displacement. Things are simply displaced upward by one stage. What we previously pictured as within the head must now be pictured higher (green), so that it is hovering around the head. In aesthetic experience, the etheric stream circumvents the I and flows directly into the astral body, giving one the impression that the I hovers in the etheric that surrounds the head. A person who feels and responds a little to beauty does not need to be very clairvoyant to experience how he seems to live in the space that surrounds his head while he is contemplating a work of art. Within the head, however, the person is gripped directly; there the astral body is taken hold of, which we will draw in with these (yellow) rays.

On the other hand, beauty works in the area of the breast in such a way as to allow that surging back and forth I described yesterday.

One could say that the aesthetic glows through the region of the breast. And beauty actually affects nothing beyond what belongs to the aura of the head, the head itself, and the breast. In other words, in the case of beauty, not all of the area wherein sophrosyne lives comes into consideration. But our materialistic age is distinguished by the way it so thoroughly involves the sphere of sexuality in artistic considerations—a piece of mischief for which our age is responsible, for it is precisely in the contemplation of beauty that such things are absolutely irrelevant and should be absolutely out of the question. Thus, only the lowest kind of aesthetic considerations, those that no longer have anything to do with art, are to be located in the physical body (red).

Now we want to use the same schema for picturing the man who is striving for truth. Once more, there is a displacement, a kind of outward displacement. Yesterday I mentioned that the striving for truth circumvents both the I and the astral body and flows directly into the etheric portion of the head where thoughts are generated. So here, directly into the head, is where I must draw the ether streaming into the etheric body, here where thoughts are generated. On the other hand, when we strive for truth—and this is something one only notices after initiation—it only affects the I and the astral body outside us, in the aura; then it streams into the etheric portion of the head; then into the breast, where its life already affects the physical body (red). If we are to feel truth—and we must feel truth—it has to work into us; it must stream down into the region of the breast. Spirituality has to be experienced in the way we experience the moral.

All of the preceding lives in the aura of the physical plane and therefore applies to the physical plane. In this instance, that into which we enter after death participates in the aura on the physical plane. Just as our physical organism connects us to the forces of the mineral, plant and animal realms, so the moral sphere, the aesthetic sphere and the sphere of wisdom connect us to the forces of the spiritual world.

Even though some of the things I have said have come out very badly—perhaps they will come out better later—I want to present something further to you, something that belongs in the context of the whole. One can say: Whereas it is our physical body that connects us with the realm of physical becoming, our brain connects us with certain elemental beings, namely those elemental beings that belong to the sphere of wisdom. In the third drawing, that which we indicated with yellow was still outside; in the second drawing, it is internal. The green that here (drawing 2) is hovering around the head is even further outside. To etheric observation, this green hovers in the immediate vicinity of our head. The I lives in it, and alongside the I are found the elemental beings of the myths and sagas. There they are called elves, fairies, and so on. When we enjoy something aesthetically, all that is hovering around our heads.

But here (drawing 3), it is spiritual beings from the astral sphere that are hovering around us. It is possible to picture how perception and truth take hold of a person as he wakes from sleep. Although it is not physically visible, the way a person is taken hold of and received on awakening can be expressed in words. Today I would like to put into concrete words how man comes alive in the sphere of truth and wisdom when he awakens. The words are not so bad in their present form, and perhaps they will be improved later. A person should speak to the spirits that surround and take hold of him when he awakens in the following manner:

O, Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,

—spoken to the spirits!—

Stream through it—

—the head—

Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;

with the ordered processes of thought that dissipate madness—

Damp well down his—man's—brain's insane confusion,
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,

—just feel the words! They scatter doubts, banish them as wisdom pours in!—

To guide him within from the paths of illusion.

he would be following a path of illusion if he only followed—the path of dreams; in so far as he enters the sphere of truth, the surrounding spiritual world frees his inner being from false paths.—

In daily experience four goals are clear;

we still have to discuss this; everything here divides into fours—

In daily experience four goals are clear,
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

—lead man toward his goals—

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-wingd senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.

—It will be freed from everything dreamlike and arbitrary that would otherwise rule it with the force of necessity—

Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

—So might man address the spirits that take hold of him when he awakens to the life of truth.

When a person awakens to the life of beauty, other spirits surround him. This is already something that is easier to convey to you. These are spirits that live in the sphere of the I:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,

—for this reaches into the heart—

Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,

—the reproaches are reproaches of conscience, but also of pleasure and displeasure, which have to do with the surging world of the soul.—

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

—Earlier the brain was involved, now it is the inner world.—

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.
Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.
First lower head down on the pillow cool,

—That corresponds to the words of the earlier verse: First strive for countenance that fills with light,—

Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released;

—In the case of wisdom, the words go: To spirit's quest for power hold fast,—

Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,

—Corresponding to: Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,—

In rest, against the day his strength's increased.

—Corresponding to: His day in freedom can unfold.—

Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,

—These are elemental beings. There (drawing 3) it was spirits who live in the etheric, so the verse said: Thus truest spirit duly it fulfils, Through holy light to lead him where he wills.—

Return to holy light man's self.

Here (drawing 1), we are concerned with the influence of the entire cosmic sphere: morality. As I said, the whole of the universe influences the entire human being. That calls for the following words:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,

—Morality, and will, is revealed when man is moved to deeds.—

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.

—For the right employment of the will in the world follows from these, and also temperance.—

So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,

—which emanates from the body in the guise of desires. Yesterday I described how what rules in the bodily passions is related to moral impulses.—

So boldly stamp out torments contradictory,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

—This spirit-fatality is nothing but the consequence of animal passions.—

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,

—In earlier times, one called drives that originate in the body ‘obsessions’—

Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.
Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.

—For deeds of karma work in eternity.—

Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

And there you have a description of the threefold manner in which the surrounding cosmos takes hold of the human aura.

How do the spirits that grip him take hold of the man of wisdom?

O Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,
Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,
To guide him within from pathways of illusion.

In daily experience four goals are clear;
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.
Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

The aesthetic sphere comes especially to the fore in the third act of the second part of Faust, when Faust is united with Helen, who personifies beauty:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,
Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,
Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.

First lower head down on the pillow cool,
Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released,
Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,
In rest, against the day his strength's increased.
Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,
Return to holy light man's self.

And then the moral sphere:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.
So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,
Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.

Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.
Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

You see, the more profound elements are only revealed when one approaches these things spiritually and really takes hold of their spiritual content. Now, in a single stroke, the Faust of Part Two appears before us—the Faust around whom Goethe placed a hovering circle of elves. He represents the human being who stands within the spiritual-aesthetic sphere. And there are parallel occurrences when he stands within the sphere of wisdom and truth, or within the moral sphere.

One really has to call on the assistance of the feelings if one is to grasp these things. In pursuing them, one is somehow reminded of Nietzsche's remark, ‘The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!’ The day represents physical life, physical perception, physical experience. ‘The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!’ And that it is, especially when the entire human being is included as part of it—this being who is following a path of cosmic evolution, and who, for us in our present stage, is beyond our powers to grasp. That means that in our present state of being we do not understand much about ourselves. So much, so inconceivably much, has gone into our becoming what we are. And there is so inconceivably much contained in the Earth evolution that is still to come, and in our passage through the spheres of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan! Only little by little does one disentangle oneself from the implications of current thought and approach that which, because it is more spiritual, is more difficult to conceive and is rarely touched on by the habitual thinking of people of today. Observing man as he presently is on Earth, we see that the seeds, so to speak, of what will develop during Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan already are hidden within him. But the human being is also the result of the Saturn, Sun and Moon spheres. Yesterday I said that wisdom and everything concerned with truth was established on Old Sun and will be completed on Jupiter. Let us picture that graphically once more.

The seed that was planted on Old Sun will more or less complete its development on Jupiter. Thus we can say: The period within which truth develops stretches from Sun to Jupiter. On Jupiter truth will have become thoroughly inward, and so will have become wisdom: Truth becomes wisdom!

Everything that belongs to the aesthetic sphere began on Old Moon. It will be completed on Venus. We could draw it in like this: From here, Moon, to completion here, Venus. This is where beauty develops. You see how it overlaps.

Everything contained within these two streams—and the third stream, also—is actually resting unconsciously in the depths of our being. And now, on Earth, the sphere we can call the sphere of morality is beginning. It will be completed on Vulcan. So we have a third, overlapping stream, the stream of morality. To these must be added a fourth stream that will be completed when the goals of the Earth sphere are achieved. Morality begins on Earth; but Earth also marks the completion of a higher order, one that was already beginning on Saturn. So we have another stream, another order, that flows from Saturn to Earth, and we will now call that the stream of justice—justice in the sense that was explained earlier. As you know, the senses had their beginnings on Saturn. These senses have the tendency to scatter a human being in all directions. You know that we distinguish twelve senses. The development of the twelve senses through Sun, Moon and Earth leads mankind to justice, to a rightness and uprightness that also includes moral justice and moral uprightness once it has been taken hold of by the moral nature of the Earth. Moral justice first makes its appearance on Earth. And justice works inwardly to counter the peripheral tendency of the senses; the sphere—or stream—of justice works toward the centre.

Everything pictured here is contained within the human being, but, as you know, the prevailing awareness includes only the smallest part of what is actively living and weaving in man. Nevertheless, this all continues to live in the depths of his being, working and weaving. And yet one can ask oneself: Are things as they appear? Is it really true that men grasp so little of how humanity is carried by this broad stream of being out of which it emerges?

Such an awareness is not just restricted to circles of the initiated. It is developing in humanity. There really are people who experience what lives and works in the streams which are carrying mankind along. Thanks to what could be called their natural gifts they feel it surge up during especially privileged moments. This is manifested in the most various ways. There are men who feel the depths of humanity in a higher sense than is often the case with external, philistine notions of religion. People often speak of guilt, and there are some pastors who try to deepen their flock's sense of things by leading them to experience guilt. But that is a superficial way of looking at things. This superficiality also has its justification, but one can go deeper. And those who have a deeper experience feel how morality connects with that glowing, resounding force that is streaming up from the powers that rule in the human depths. Self-knowledge would be much more common if people were not so timid and so afraid of getting to know themselves. But the awareness of what rules in the depths is already suppressed in the unconscious levels of the soul because people have such unconscious fear and inhibition and anxiety about confronting themselves in all their manifoldness and complexity. And when it does surge up, what comes glowing and gleaming from out of the depths really does make a sphinx-like impression. The experiences of others who have really felt such things in their own soul can be deeply moving.

The following literary passage expresses beautifully how the human depths can appear to a man from out the surging dreams of his soul life. One must imagine someone who has laid himself down to rest after the toils and the burdens of the day. But as he rests, out of the darkness and shadow, the human depths rise up before his soul in powerful dreams. Here is how a Polish poet once described it:

And in the secret magic of the night,
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous.—
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion—
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
—My guilt, my most great guilt!

These words of Jan Kasprowicz⁹ are a beautiful, lyrical expression of a quite wonderful experience, an experience that is at once questioning and also touches on the answers. The question is contained in the way this literary work makes the transition from memories of the day, through the aesthetic sphere, into the moral sphere—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! One should not shrink from the questions that rise up out of the surging depths of life. These things are not there to rouse fear, but to kindle questions. The ‘unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes that formed a balefully grinning Medusa’ are questions, questions that have taken on the shapes of the plant kingdom. And as for how that is connected with the moon, we only have to remind ourselves of the stream that begins on Moon to understand how the silent floods of moonlight connect outer physical reality with spiritual experience. One has here a wonderful description of a spiritual experience:

And in the secret magic of the night.
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous.—
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion—
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires

—just think of the third speech, to the spirits of the moral sphere—

I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
—My guilt, my most great guilt!

Then think of how the moral sphere shines into the stupefying fires of the senses, conquering them and illuminating that which dies in pleasure—and of how it is greeted by the resounding of ensouled powers that match eternal measure.

Yes, if one wants to delve deeply into everything that relates to humanity, one must certainly call on the help of the feelings. That is the only way one ever will arrive at a picture of how, when a human being steps onto the physical plane, he can live his way into the spiritual realms—the realms of morality, of aesthetics, and of that which has to do with conceptions and with truth. For a human being does not just enter into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Man remains human as he passes through all these realms. Mankind descends through the realms of mineral, plant, animal and human; and mankind ascends through the moral, the aesthetic, and through the realm of truth and wisdom. In this way, humanity participates in that wonderful stream of being that develops as it flows through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth and on towards Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. There are lesser streams that overlap and unite in man, creating the separate forces he needs in the course of his development. These are granted to humanity from out of the deep impulses that rule the cosmos.

• 9. Jan Kasprowicz (1860 – 1926): The source of the cited text has not yet been discovered.

When one is speaking of the being of man and of mankind's relation to the cosmos, some of what has to be said may seem complicated. When it comes to the human being—you may well say—is there anything that is not included! We are confronted, however, with the fact that a human being is formed in an intricate way from the entire cosmos, and we have to come to terms with it. It is especially important that people of our time begin to come to terms with these things, as otherwise it will be too late. Today men are living in an incarnation in which it is just possible to get by without knowing much about the complicated nature of the human being; but the time is coming—a time when these souls will again incarnate—when this will not be possible. Then souls will finally have to begin to know how humanity is related to the cosmos. You could say that we are still just within a period when the responsibility for holding together the different members of which a human being is composed has not yet been turned over to mankind itself. We are still living in an epoch when these various members hold together without our having to do anything, when the easy-going fellow can come to us and say, ‘Really! This so-called anthroposophical wisdom is so complicated! But truth is simple, and anything that is not simple cannot really be true!’ Today, this speech is frequently heard. Those who are misled by Lucifer into speaking in such a fashion do not have the faintest inkling of how they befog their heads with this talk about the so-called simplicity of truth. They are unaware of how they are deceiving themselves. For the time will come when people will experience how complicated they are, a time when people will require knowledge in order to hold themselves together. But everything in the future has to be prepared, and the stream that carries a spiritual-scientific world view has the task of preparing the development of earthly culture for the age when a person will have to know how to hold together the various parts of his being.

Let us remind ourselves of the fundamental truths that have been described in some detail over these last few days—of man's essentially dual nature, and of how his external body already reveals this dual nature. The body divides into two parts which are built according to quite different principles—the head and the rest of the body. If we examine a human head as it is today, what we have is essentially the result of what became of the body in the previous incarnation. And, after we have passed through the period between death and a new birth, our present body, except for the head, will become the head of the next incarnation. Thus, the passage of a person through successive incarnations could be drawn as follows: Man has his head, and he has the rest of his body. What is now his head is essentially lost. When he once more receives a body from the earth, what is now the rest of his body appears, transformed, as the head of that next incarnation. Then this body, in turn, becomes the head of the following incarnation and he receives another body from his forebears, from the earth. The head is always lost. Naturally, we are talking about forces. Of course, the material of the rest of the body is also lost. But this material is not the essential thing-in the truest sense of the word it is maya-all the forces that reside in the body, exclusive of the head, are the essential thing. These forces are transformed into the forces of the head during our passage through the period between death and a new birth. And the forces that were bound up in our bodies during our previous incarnation really are present now in our heads. That was the basic concept whose particular details we were elaborating.

Now, in order to understand these things better and better, we want to call on the help of some other ideas that we have acquired. To begin with, we will ask: How will our present body become the head of our next incarnation? How are the forces of our present body transformed so that they can become the head of the next incarnation?

The transformation of our body into a head is hard to imagine at first. We need to ask ourselves: How is this transformation possible?

In order to answer that question we must review in our souls the things we have been saying about the part of the human soul that is concerned with knowledge and concepts. This is the part that is dependent on the head, and is concerned with truth and wisdom. Today, people usually believe that the knowledge we acquire is only there to give us pictures of the external world and to enable us to learn something about the external world. There are philosophical epistemologists who theorise endlessly about the interconnections, between concepts and ideas, and about the mysterious connection between the nature of a concept and the thing that the concept represents. All such theories are afflicted by a common error. Initially, I can only explain this error by speaking pictorially. Imagine there is a botanist, a gardener, who wants to investigate the nature of a grain of wheat. As he sets about it, he says: ‘I will investigate it chemically to see what substances it contains. I will see if its constituents include all the things man needs in his grain and flour, and such, for nourishment.’ And the botanist then proceeds to seek for the nature of the grain of wheat in its relationship to human nourishment in order to explain why the grain of wheat contains what it does. A man who believed that he was discovering something essential about the nature of a grain of wheat by investigating its suitability as human nourishment would be making a curious mistake. The grain of wheat occurs as a part of the whole wheat plant, as its fruit. A person who wants to discover why it corresponds to the nature of a grain of wheat to be as it is, must investigate die manner in which a new wheat plant can develop from it. Whether or not it contains substances for human nourishment is a secondary matter. It has nothing to do with the inner nature of a grain of wheat. A person who investigates the utility of everything and wants to turn utilitarian knowledge into the true science would investigate the grain of wheat chemically. He would discover that here nature provides something good for human nourishment. But that has nothing to do with the inner nature of a grain of wheat, or with the fact that a new wheat plant can grow from it.

To someone who approaches matters with clear ideas and in the spirit of knowledge, the philosophers of knowledge, the epistemologists, often resemble people investigating a grain of wheat by considering its value as food for human beings. For if one were to question a grain of wheat as to its original task, it would not say that it is originally here for the nourishment of mankind; rather would it say that its original task is to allow a new wheat plant to develop. When someone with clear ideas and a feeling for knowledge considers the epistemologists, he is confronted by mistakes such as the one I have just described. For building up a picture of the things around us is not the original purpose of what we call knowledge—of what lives in us as ideas, truth and wisdom. Building up a picture of the things outside us is just as inessential to knowledge as nourishing human beings is inessential to a grain of wheat. Knowledge does not exist for the purpose of making pictures of external things; it exists for another reason. Its purpose lies in the way it lives and works and weaves in man. As we pass through our existence between birth and death, we gradually accumulate wisdom. We employ it to form a picture of the external world, just as we use a grain of wheat as nourishment. But we withdraw all the wheat that we use in this way from its original purpose of establishing new plants. We similarly withdraw from its original purpose all the knowledge that we use for taking hold of the external world. That is not the original purpose of the realm of truth and ideas. Why, then, does the realm of truth exist—why, I mean, in the sense that the grain of wheat is here to bring about a new wheat plant? Our involvement with knowledge and our efforts to achieve truth exist so that we can develop certain powers. These powers we develop during the period between birth and death are the very powers that transform our organism after death. That is to say, they transform its forces into the forces of the head! This extraordinary connection is what one discovers when one looks at man's passage between birth and death on the one hand, and between death and a new birth on the other. The primary purpose of the knowledge a person acquires is the transformation of the organism, exclusive of the head, into the head of the next incarnation. But there are so many people who acquire no knowledge at all, you will say, and so remain frightfully ignorant; only a few become clever—one usually counts oneself among these latter! But there is more than a little justification for those who say—and many, quite independently of one another, have said this—that a human being acquires more wisdom in his first three or four years than ... well, at the very least, than in his three academic years. In our first three years we really do learn a great deal that can only be learned on earth with the use of our head. We acquire the knowledge necessary for speaking, for understanding what is said, and much, much more. We really do learn a great deal. And that is included in the wisdom we accumulate.

People are actually not so different as regards the wisdom they acquire. In it surge and weave the forces that will transform our organism into a head during the passage from death to a new birth. The picture that we take into ourselves through ideas and knowledge is by its nature quite a complicated one. And it is only in dreams such as those of the Polish poet I cited yesterday that people are given a glimpse of what surges and weaves in among our fully-conscious ideas. But it is there, surging and weaving in us, in order that it can be led over after death to become the power that actually transforms our organism. With the exception of what we use to take hold of the external world, all that we acquire through knowledge accumulates and becomes the power that will transform our organism. In a certain sense, what we use for normal understanding of the external world is lost to our development, it is withdrawn from our development. All the grains of wheat we use for nourishment are withdrawn from the plant's whole, ongoing process of development—and these are much more numerous than the grains that are strewn back over the earth. And this is how things are during our present phase of development. We connect ourselves with external things: we also withdraw very much more from the ongoing stream of human development than we retain. Think back to earlier times when human knowledge was obtained through atavistic clairvoyance. Men's attention was not so dissipated by the external world. The knowledge of such ancient peoples as the old Egyptians and Chaldeans was obtained through atavistic clairvoyance. It depended very little on external development. In this respect, our age is the opposite of that one. Today, much is taken in from what is outside, and, inwardly, very little is added to development. The Greek culture occupies a wonderful middle position, and this is not solely due to their special talents. These they certainly had, but with these alone nothing could have been accomplished. The relatively small patch of earth inhabited by the Greeks and their relatively slight knowledge of the rest of the world, also contributed to the unity of their whole culture. They knew of little else beyond what lay in the direction of Asia Minor and Asia. They knew little about Africa, and nothing at all about America or most of Europe. The fact that Plato still possessed knowledge of morality, of sophrosyne and of dikaiosyne, is in many respects thanks to the fact that the external scope of Greek knowledge was so small. For that reason it was still possible to retain many of the spiritual forces of wisdom for developing the inner life. Nevertheless, the Greeks used less of these forces than the ancient Egyptians or Chaldeans had used, not to mention the ancient Persians and Indians. In our day, when the whole earth has gradually been explored and has become accessible, men seek to acquire as much external knowledge as they possibly can. How that has increased! If that were as intensive as it is extensive, then men would have infinitesimally little to take with them for the transformation of the physical body into the head of the next incarnation. They would have much, much less than a peasant has, particularly in the case of the most educated people. But, thanks be to God, most people have travelled without looking at very much. They have followed their Baedeker or other travel books closely. But, in spite of the great extent of their travels, they have not acquainted themselves with very much, so they have not withdrawn everything. Otherwise, those who rush about everywhere in search of sensations and who want everything they learn to come from outside themselves would be in danger. They would be in danger of arriving in the world in their next incarnation with a head formed from a body that had undergone very little transformation. It would have an animal-like appearance, for that would be the fate of someone who had not accumulated many formative forces.

Now, imaginative comparisons can be expanded. We have said that everything we use externally to develop knowledge and to learn about the external world is separated from its own true inner being—just as the grain of wheat that is used for food is separated from the inner nature of wheat. We can go on to ask: What are the further similarities between external knowledge, or what becomes outer knowledge, and the grain of wheat that is used as food? There are similarities, but they have to be elicited.

Let us once more consider the curious fact that a great number of grains of wheat are used as food for human beings instead of for the generation of new wheat plants! So we can say that the grains of wheat are removed from the direct line of their own ongoing development. Otherwise, a new wheat plant is generated from the grain, and this bears further grains of wheat, and so on. But countless grains are split away from this procession; they are transferred into an entirely different realm, that of human nourishment, and this has nothing to do with the ongoing stream.

Here nature gives you an opportunity to build a concept that must be carefully heeded if you want to achieve a realistic view of the world.

Our external science has gradually brought us to the terrible pass where everything has to be explained by cause and effect, so that a later event must always be explained as following from what came before. There is nothing more foolish than this undifferentiated picture of the world in which all effects can be traced back to a cause and every cause leads on to its effects. There are effects which have no causal connection to anything that preceded them. How could a grain of wheat contain the causes for its being used as human nourishment? Only in the context of a simple-minded teleology such as the one that was taken for granted in some quarters in the eighteenth century. According to this point of view, the presence of cork-like substances in nature was explained as the work of mysterious spirits who put them there so that they could be used to produce champagne corks! But on the contrary, the grains of wheat really do pass over into another sphere.

It is similar when we go about acquiring knowledge of external nature and of outer things. This transfers the things to another sphere. We human beings are able to extract a substantial portion of what is in us, in the form of matters concerned with truth, for the purpose of enabling the body of our present incarnation to be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. We can extract much for the sake of present knowledge, but we must take care that this knowledge is put to a different use. In a certain sense, the grains of wheat are ennobled by being used as human nourishment, so they receive a recompense for being separated from their own original nature. Something similar should come about in the case of external human knowledge, which is developed in a way that runs totally contrary to the nature of ideas and truth. In his heart, man should make a gift to the gods of all the truths acquired in the form of pictures of the external world. Man should always say to himself: When you obtain knowledge, you remove it from the progressive stream. Be clear that the acquisition of knowledge must be in the service of the gods. There is other knowledge, knowledge untouched by any awareness of the holy service that knowledge renders to developing humanity. Such knowledge is taken away from the external world, but it is not given to the gods, who would be nourished by what they thus would receive. The knowledge that is not gathered in this spirit, but is taken, instead, without thanks, is like grains of wheat that fall to earth and rot. In other words, it serves no goal at all—neither its own nor that of becoming nourishment for human beings.

Here we arrive at a point where you will feel how important it is that our spiritual-scientific efforts lead to some very definite practical results. For in our hearts we should cultivate a fundamental mood when we receive spiritual-science. It must not become a thing we merely learn, or just a thing to be known. Therefore, we must unite knowing with the feeling that knowledge should be in the service of the gods, and that it is a fundamental sin against the divine meaning of evolution to profane knowledge by removing it from that for which the gods intended it.

I said that acquiring much external knowledge has only become possible in more recent times. For the ancient Egyptians, most knowing was an inward matter; external knowledge was comprised of only the most immediate things. During the Greco-Roman epoch it became possible for men to acquire more and more external knowledge. That is not very long ago. But at the same time there arose the possibility of discovering the path by which knowing becomes a holy service, for at this time the Christ brought his message to the Earth.

Here you have another relationship, which history makes clear to us. At the very moment in human development when knowing becomes predominantly a knowledge of the external world, the Christ appears from out of the spiritual world. And so does it becomes possible for a person who experiences the guidance of Christ to transform knowing into a holy service—by connecting it with the Christ. Today, mankind has not yet developed much feeling for knowledge as a divine service. But as mankind comes more and more to understand how Christ has brought the life of the gods into earthly life, it will also learn how to put knowledge at the service of the gods.

Thus we can live with everything of which our head is the outer sign. We can establish there a little plot that prepares for the transformation of our body into a head. As for the rest of knowledge, if we use it with the proper feeling, as I have just characterised it, the higher spiritual beings will receive nourishment from the concepts we use. In this way we strive for a knowing that serves the gods, in order that wheat may also be grown for the nourishment of mankind. This is already happening, but mankind still has to learn the measure of this mood. Through our feeling, knowledge will acquire the measure of the mood I have been describing. It is very, very important for the healthy development of humanity that such feelings be developed.

In the ancient Mysteries and Mystery schools it was simply taken for granted that those who acquired knowledge would treat it with holy regard. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons why not everyone was admitted to the mysteries. Those who were admitted had to provide a guarantee that they would regard the knowledge as holy and would treat it as a service to the gods. The attitude was also engendered by atavistic feelings. Today, it is necessary for mankind to achieve this attitude once more. Humanity has passed through an age when it developed in accordance with materialism-and we know there are good reasons for this. Now, it needs to heal itself of materialism, and this will only happen when mankind is reunited with the feeling of holy service that was once a part of knowing. But in the future this will have to be brought about consciously. And that will only be possible if spiritual science spreads to more and more of humanity. Knowledge should not be like the seed that rots on the ground. Everything that is used for external convenience and arranging things mechanically is like the seed that rots. What is not placed in the service of the gods is lost. It is neither used to help us in our next incarnation, nor is it used to nourish the gods. Something really happens when the seed rots; this is a real process. When knowledge is wasted without being incorporated into the service of the gods and without becoming part of a divine process, a real process takes place. It would take us too far today if I were to speak about what the rotten grain of wheat signifies, but it is senseless for it to rot. Nothing can come of it—it simply dies. But Ahriman is able to do something with knowledge that is not acquired in the context of the service of the gods. This knowledge is taken over into the service of Ahriman and establishes his power. His servants introduce it into the world process and thereby create more obstacles for the world process than rightfully ought to be there or would otherwise have to be there. For, after all, Ahriman is the god of hindrance.

This will give you a glimpse of how far the significance of what lives in us in the form of ideas and truth extends. The next two lectures will be concerned with beauty and morality so that we can then bring all three things together. That will furnish us with another opportunity to deepen our understanding of the human being.

When we speak of the great world and the small world, of the macrocosm and the microcosm, we are referring to the whole universe and to the human being. Goethe, for example, spoke in these terms in Faust. He called the whole cosmos ‘the great world’, and the human being ‘the small world.’ We have already had many occasions to observe how manifold and complicated are the relationships between man and the cosmos. Today I would like to remind you of some of the things we have spoken about at various times, connecting these with a consideration of humanity's relationship to the cosmos. You will remember that when we spoke of the senses and of what man, as the possessor of his senses, is, we said that the senses lead us back to the ancient Saturn phase of evolution. That is where we find the first impulses for the development of the senses, the first seeds of the senses. You will find these things described again and again in previous lecture cycles. Now, obviously, the early seed-like phases of the senses during the Saturn period are not to be imagined as if they already resembled the senses as we know them today. That would be foolish. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to imagine what the senses were like during ancient Saturn development. It is already difficult enough to picture the senses as they were during the ancient Moon period. Even that far back in time they were thoroughly different from the senses we know now. Today I would like to throw some light on what the senses were like during the ancient Moon phase of evolution. By that time they were already in their third phase of development—Saturn, Sun, Moon.

As regards their form, the senses of today are much more dead than were the senses of Old Moon. At that period the sense organs were much livelier, much more full of life. Because of this they were not suited to provide the foundations for fully conscious human life, but were only suited to the dreamy clairvoyance of Moon man. Such clairvoyance excluded the possibility of freedom. There was no freedom to act or to follow impulses and desires. Humanity had to wait for the Earth phase of evolution before it could develop the impulse to freedom. Thus, the senses during Old Moon were not the basis for the kind of consciousness we now have, but rather for a consciousness that was both more dull and more imaginative than ours. As I have often explained, it was much more like today's dream consciousness. People generally assume that we have five senses. We know, however, that this is not justified, but that, in truth, we must distinguish twelve human senses. There are seven further senses that must be included with the usual five, since they are equally relevant to earthly, human existence. You know the usual list of the senses: sense of sight, sense of hearing, sense of taste, sense of smell, and sense of feeling. The last of these is often called the sense of touch and is mixed together with the sense of warmth, although more recently there are some who distinguish the one from the other. In earlier times these two completely distinct senses were mixed together, confusedly, as a single sense. The sense of touch tells whether something is hard or soft, which has nothing to do with the sense of warmth. And so, if one really has a sense—if I may use that word—for the way humanity relates to the rest of the world, one will have to distinguish twelve senses. Today I would like, once again, to describe these twelve senses.

The sense of touch is the sense that relates us to the most material aspect of the external world. With our sense of touch we, so to speak, bump into the external world; through touch we are continually involved in a coarse kind of exchange with the external world. Nevertheless, the process of touching takes place within the boundaries of our skin. Our skin collides with an object. What then happens to give us a perception of the object must, as a matter of course, take place within the boundaries of our skin, within our body. Thus, what happens in touching, in the process of touch, happens inside us—

The sense that we shall call the sense of life involves processes that lie still more deeply embedded in the human organism. This sense exists within us, but we are accustomed to ignore it, for the life sense manifests itself indistinctly from within the human organism. Nevertheless, throughout all our daily waking hours, the harmonious collaboration of all the bodily organs expresses itself through the life sense, through the state of life in us. We usually pay no attention to it because we expect it as our natural right. We expect to be filled with a certain feeling of well-being, with the feeling of being alive. If our feeling of alive-ness is diminished, we try to recover a little so that our feeling of life is refreshed again. This vital enlivening or damping down is something we are aware of, but generally we are too accustomed to the feeling of being alive to be constantly aware of it. The life sense, however, is a distinct sense in its own right. Through it we feel the life in us, precisely as we see what is around us with our eyes. We sense ourselves through the life sense just as we see with our eyes. Without this internal sense of life we would know nothing about our own vital state.

What can be called the sense of movement is still more inward, more physically inward, more bodily inward. Through feelings of well-being or of discontent the life sense makes us conscious of the state of the whole organism. Having a sense of movement, on the other hand, means being able to be aware of the way parts of the body move with respect to each another. I do not refer here to movements of the whole person—that is something else. I am referring to movements such as the bending of an arm or leg, or the movements of the larynx when you speak. The sense of movement makes you aware of all these inner movements that entail changes in the position of separate parts of the organism.

A further sense that must be distinguished is the sense we will call balance. We do not normally pay any attention to it. If we get dizzy and fall, or if we feel faint, it is because the sense of balance has been interrupted. This is exactly analogous to the way the sense of sight is interrupted when we close our eyes. When we relate ourselves to the world, orientating ourselves with respect to above and below and to right and left so that we feel upright, we are employing our sense of balance, just as we employ the sense of movement when we are aware of internal changes of position. Our sense of balance, therefore, is due to a distinct sense. Balance is a proper sense in its own right.

The senses mentioned so far involve processes that remain within the bounds of the organism. If you touch something, you have collided with an external object, it is true, but you do not get inside it. If you come up against a needle you will notice that it is pointed, but of course you do not get inside the point. Instead, you prick yourself, and that no longer has anything to do with touching. Everything that happens, happens within the boundaries of your organism. You can touch an object, to be sure, but everything you experience through touch takes place within your skin. Thus, experiences of touch are internal to the body. What you experience through the life sense is likewise internal to the body. It does not show you what is going on somewhere outside you; it lets you look within. Equally internal is the sense of movement: it is not concerned with how I can walk about in the world, but with the internal movements I make when I move part of myself or when I speak. When I move about externally there is also internal movement. But the two things must be distinguished from one another: on the one hand there is my forward movement, on the other, there is the movement of parts of me, which is internal. So the sense of movement gives us internal perceptions, as do the senses of life and balance. In balance, too, you perceive nothing external—rather, you perceive yourself in your state of balance.

The first sense to take you outside yourself is the sense of smell. With smell you already come into contact with the external world. But you will have the feeling that smell does not take you very far outside yourself. You do not experience much about the external world through the sense of smell. Furthermore, people do not want to have anything to do with the intimate connection with the world that a developed sense of smell can give. Dogs are much more interested. People are willing to use the sense of smell to perceive the world, but they do not want the world to come very close. It is not a sense through which people want to get very involved with the outer world.

With the sense of taste we get more deeply involved with the world. When we taste sugar or salt, the experience of its qualities is already very inward. What is external is taken inward—more so than with smell. So there is already more of a connection established between inner world and outer world.

The sense of sight involves us even more with the external world. In seeing we take into ourselves more of the properties of the external world than we do with the sense of smell. And we take yet more into ourselves with the sense of warmth. What we see, what we perceive through the sense of sight, remains more foreign to us than what we perceive through the sense of warmth. The relationship to the outer world perceived through the sense of warmth is already a very intimate one. When we are aware of the warmth or the coldness of an object we also experience this warmth or coldness—we experience it along with the object. On the other hand, in experiencing the sweetness of sugar, for example, one is not so involved with the object. In the case of sugar we are interested in what it becomes as we taste it, not in what it is out there in the world. Such a distinction ceases to be possible with the sense of warmth. With warmth we are already participating in what is within the object perceived.

When we turn to the sense of hearing, the relation to the external world acquires another degree of intimacy. A sound tells us very much indeed about the inner structure of an object—more than what the sense of warmth can tell, and very much more than what sight reveals. Sight only gives us pictures, so to speak, pictures of the outer surface. But when a metal resonates it tells us what is going on within it. The sense of warmth also reaches into the object. When I take hold of something, a piece of ice, say, I am sure that the ice is cold through and through, not just on its outer surface. When I look at something, I can see only the colours at its outer limits, on its surface; but when I make an object resonate, the sounds bring me into a particular relationship with what is within it.

And the intimacy is greater still if the sounds contain meaning. Thus we arrive at the sense of tone: perhaps it would be better to call it the sense of speech or the sense of word. It is simply nonsense to think that perception of words is the same as perception of sounds. The two are as distinct and different from one another as are taste and sight. To be sure, sounds open the inner world of objects to our perception, but these sounds must become much more inward before they can become meaningful words. Therefore it is a step into a deeper intimacy with the world when we proceed from perceiving sounds through the sense of hearing to perceiving meaning through the sense of the word. And yet, when I perceive a mere word I am still not so intimately connected with the object, with the external thing, as I am connected with it when I perceive the thoughts behind the words. At this stage, most people cease to make any distinctions. But there is a distinction between merely perceiving words and actually perceiving the thoughts behind the words. After all, you still can perceive words when a phonograph—or writing, for that matter—has separated them from their thinker. But a sense that goes deeper than the usual word sense must come into play before I can come into a living relationship with the being that is forming the words, before I can enter through the words and transpose myself directly into the being that is doing the thinking and forming the concepts. That further step calls for the sense I would like to call the sense of thought. And there is another sense that gives an even more intimate sense of the outer world than the sense of thought. It is the sense that enables you to feel another being as yourself and that makes it possible to be aware of yourself while at one with another being. That is what happens if one turns one's thinking, one's living thinking, towards the being of another. Through living thinking one can behold the I of this being: the sense of the I.

You see, it really is necessary to distinguish between the ego sense, which makes you aware of the I of another person, and the awareness of yourself. The difference is not just that in one case you are aware of your own I and, in the other, of someone else's I. The two perceptions come from different sources. The seeds of our ability to distinguish one another were sown on Old Saturn. The beginnings of this sense were implanted in us then. The basis of your being able to perceive another person as an I was established on Old Saturn. But it was not until the Earth stage of evolution that you obtained your own I; so the ego sense is not to be identified with the I that ensouls you from within. The two must be strictly distinguished from one another. When we speak of the ego sense, we are referring to the ability of one person to be aware of the I of another.

As you know, I have never spoken of materialistic science without acknowledging its truth and its greatness. I have given lectures here that were for the express purpose of appreciating materialistic science fully. But, having appreciated it, one must deepen one's knowledge of materialistic science so lovingly that one also can hold up its shadow side with a loving hand. The materialistic science of today is just beginning to bring its thoughts about the senses into some kind of order. The physiologists are finally recognising and distinguishing the senses of life, of movement and of balance from one another, and they have begun to treat the senses of warmth and touch separately. The other senses about which we have been speaking are not recognised by our externally-orientated, material science. And so I ask you to carefully distinguish the ability to be aware of another I from the ability you could call the consciousness of self. With respect to this distinction, my deep love of material science forces me to make an observation, for a deep love of material science also enables one to see what is going on: today's material science is afflicted with stupidity. It turns stupid when it tries to describe what happens when someone uses his ego sense. Our material science would have us believe that when one person meets another he unconsciously deduces from the other's gestures, facial expressions, and the like, that there is another I present—that the awareness of another I is really a subconscious deduction. This is utter nonsense! In truth, when we meet someone and perceive their I we perceive it just as directly as we perceive a colour. It really is thick-headed to believe that the presence of another I is deduced from bodily perceptions, for this obscures the truth that humans have a special, higher sense for perceiving the I of another.

The I of another is perceived directly by the ego sense, just as brightness and darkness and colours are perceived through the eyes. It is a particular sense that relates us to another I. This is something that has to be experienced. Just as a colour affects me directly through my eyes, so another person's I affects me directly through my ego sense. At the appropriate time we will discuss the sense organ for the ego sense in the same way that we could discuss the sense organs of seeing, of sight. With sight it is simply easier to refer to material manifestations than it is in the case of the ego sense, but each sense has its own particular organ.

If you view your senses from a certain perspective you can say: each sense particularises and differentiates my organism. There is a real differentiation, for seeing is not the same as perception of tone, perception of tone is different from hearing, hearing is not the same as perception of thought, perception of thought is not touching. Each of these senses demarcates a separate and particular region of the human being. It is this separation of each into its special sphere to which I want you to pay especially close attention, for it is this separation that makes it possible to picture the senses as a circle divided into twelve distinct regions. (See diagram.)

The situation of these powers of perception is different from the situation of forces that could be said to reside more deeply embedded within us. Seeing is bound up with the eyes and these constitute a particular region of a human being. Hearing is bound up with the organs of hearing, at least principally so, but it needs more besides—hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ear, which is what is normally thought of as the region of hearing. And life flows equally through each of these regions of the senses. The eye is alive, the ear is alive, that which is the foundation of all the senses is alive; the basis of touch is alive—all of it is alive. Life resides in all the senses; it flows through all the regions of the senses.

If we look more closely at this life, it also proves to be differentiated. There is not just one life process. And you must also distinguish what we have been calling the sense of life, through which we perceive our own vital state, from the subject of our present discussion. What I am talking about now is the very life that flows through us. That life also differentiates itself within us. It does so in the following manner (see diagram). The twelve regions of the twelve senses are to be pictured as being static, at rest within the organism. But life pulsates through the whole organism, and this life is manifested in various ways. First of all there is breathing, a manifestation of life necessary to all living things. Every living organism must enter into a breathing relationship with the external world. Today I cannot go into the details of how this differs for animals, plants and human beings, but will only point out that every living thing must have its way of breathing. The breathing of a human being is perpetually being renewed by what he takes in from the outer world, and this benefits all the regions associated with the senses. The sense of smell could not manifest itself—neither sight, nor the sense of tone—if the benefits of breathing did not enliven it. Thus, I must assign ‘breathing’ to every sense. We breathe—that is one process—but the benefits of that process of breathing flow to all the senses.

The second process we can distinguish is warming. This occurs along with breathing, but it is a separate process. Warming, the inner process of warming something through, is the second of the life-sustaining processes. The third process that sustains life is nourishment. So here we have three ways in which life comes to us from without: breathing, warming, nourishing. The outer world is part of each of these. Something must be there to be breathed—in the case of humans, and also animals, that substance is air. Warming requires a certain amount of warmth in the surroundings; we interact with it. Just think how impossible it would be for you to maintain proper inner warmth if the temperature of your surroundings were much hotter or much colder. If it were one hundred degrees lower your warmth processes would cease, they would not be possible; at one hundred degrees hotter you would do more than just sweat! Similarly, we need food to nourish us as long as we are considering the life processes in their earthly aspects.

At this stage, the life processes take us deeper into the internal world. We now find processes that re-form what has been taken in from outside—processes that transform and internalise it. To characterise this re-forming, I would like to use the same expressions that we have used on previous occasions. Our scientists are not yet aware of these things and therefore have no names for them, so we must formulate our own. The purely inner process that is the basis of the re-forming of what we take in from outside us can be seen to be fourfold. Following the process of nourishing, the first internal process is the process of secretion, of elimination. When the nourishment we have taken in is distributed to our body, this is already the process of secretion; through the process of secretion it becomes part of our organism. The process of elimination does not just work outward, it also separates out that part of our nourishment that is to be absorbed into us. Excretion and absorption are two sides of the processes by which organs of secretion deal with our nourishment. One part of the secretion performed by organs of digestion separates out nutriments by sending them into the organism. Whatever is thus secreted into the organism must remain connected with the life processes, and this involves a further process which we will call maintaining. But for there to be life, it is not enough for what is taken in to be maintained, there also must be growth. Every living thing depends on a process of inner growth: a process of growth, taken in the widest sense. Growth processes are part of life; both nourishment and growth are part of life.

And, finally, life on earth includes reproducing the whole being; the process of growth only requires that one part produce another part. Reproduction produces the whole individual being and is a higher process than mere growth.

There are no further life processes beyond these seven. Life divides into seven definite processes. But, since they serve all twelve of the sense zones, we cannot assign definite regions to these-the seven life processes enliven all the sense zones. Therefore, when we look at the way the seven relate to the twelve we see that we have 1. Breathing, 2. Warming, 3. Nourishing, 4. Secretion, 5. Maintaining, 6. Growth, 7. Reproduction. These are distinct processes, but all of them relate to each of the senses and flow through each of the senses: their relationship with the senses is a mobile one. (See drawing.) The human being, the living human being, must be pictured as having twelve separate sense-zones through which a sevenfold life is pulsing, a mobile, sevenfold life. If you ascribe the signs of the zodiac to the twelve zones, then you have a picture of the macrocosm; if you ascribe a sense to each zone, you have the microcosm. If you assign a planet to each of the life processes, you have a picture of the macrocosm; as the life processes, they embody the microcosm. And the mobile life processes are related to the fixed zones of the senses in the same way that, in the macrocosm, the planets are related to the zones of the zodiac—they move unceasingly through them, they flow through them. And so you see another sense in which man is a macrocosm.

Now, someone who is thoroughly versed in contemporary physiology and knows how physiology is pursued today could well say to us: ‘This is all just clever tricks; it is always possible to find relations between things. And if a person has divided up the senses so as to come out with twelve, of course he can relate them to the twelve signs of the zodiac; and the same goes for distinguishing seven life processes which can then be related to the seven planets.’ To put it bluntly, such a person might believe that all this is the product of fantasy. But this is truly not the case, for the human being of today is the result of a slow process of unfolding and development. During Old Moon, the human senses were not as they are today. As I said, they provided the basis for the ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance of Old Moon existence. Today's senses are more dead than those of Old Moon. They are less united into a single whole and are more separated from the sevenfold unity of the life processes. The senses of Old Moon were themselves more akin to the life processes. Today, seeing and hearing are quite dead, they involve processes that occur at the periphery of our being.

Perception, however, was not nearly so dead on Old Moon. Take any of the senses, the sense of taste, for example. I imagine all of you know what that is like on Earth. During the Moon era it was rather different. At that time a person was not so separated from his outer surroundings as he is nowadays. For us, sugar is something out there: to connect with it we have to lick something and then inner processes have to take place. There is a clear distinction between the subjective and the objective. It was not like this during Old Moon. Then, the process was much more filled with life and there was not such a clear distinction between subjective and objective. The process of tasting was more like a life process, more like—say—breathing. When we breathe, something real happens in us. We breathe in air but, in so doing, all the blood-forming processes in us are affected-all these processes are part of breathing, which is one of the seven life processes and does not permit of such clear distinctions between subject and object. In this case, what is outside and what is within must be taken together: air outside, air within. And something real happens through the process of breathing, much more real than what happens when we taste something. When we taste, enough happens to provide a basis for the typical consciousness of today, but on Old Moon tasting was much more similar to the dreamlike process that breathing is for us today. We are not nearly so aware of ourselves in our breathing as we are when we taste something. But on Old Moon, tasting was like breathing is for us now. Man on ancient Moon experienced no more of his tasting than we experience of our breathing, nor did he feel a need for it to be otherwise. The human being had not yet become a gourmet, nor could he become one, for tasting depended on certain internal happenings that were connected with his processes of maintenance, with his continued existence on Old Moon.

Sight, the process of seeing, was also different on Old Moon. Then one did not simply look at external objects, perceiving the colour as something outside oneself. Instead, the eye penetrated into the colour and the colour entered through the eyes, helping to maintain the life of the viewer. The eye was a kind of organ for breathing colour. The state of our life was affected by how we related to the outer world through our eyes and by the perceptual processes of the eyes. On Old Moon, we expanded upon entering a blue region and contracted if we ventured into a red region: expanding-contracting, expanding-contracting. Colour affected us that much. Similarly, all the other senses also had a more living connection, both with the outer world and with the inner world of the perceiver, a connection such as the life processes have today.

And what was the sense of another ego like on Old Moon? There could not have been any such sense on Old Moon, for it is only since the Earth stage of development that the I has begun to dwell within us. The sense of thought, of living thought as I previously described it, is also connected with Earth consciousness. Our sense of thought did not yet exist on Old Moon. Neither did humanity speak. And since there was nothing like our perception of each other's speech, the sense of word was also absent. In earlier times the word lived as the Logos which streamed through the whole world, including humanity. It had significance to man, but was not perceived by him. The sense of hearing was already developing, though, and was much more filled with life than the hearing of today. That sense has, so to speak, now come to rest on Earth, to a standstill. When we listen, we stay quite still, at least as a rule. Unless a sound does something of the order of bursting an eardrum, hearing does not change anything in our organism. We remain at rest within ourselves and perceive the sounds, the tones. This is not how things were during Old Moon. Then the tones really came close. They were heard, but that hearing involved being inwardly pervaded by the tones, it involved inwardly vibrating with the sounds and actively participating in their creation. Man participated actively in the production of what we call the Cosmic Word, but he was not aware of it. Thus we cannot call it a sense, properly speaking, although Moon man participated in a living fashion in the sounds that are the basis of today's hearing. If what we hear today as music had been played on Old Moon, there would have been more than just an outward dancing! If that had happened, all the internal organs, with few exceptions, would have reacted the way my larynx: and related organs react when I use them to produce a tone. Thus, it was not a conscious process, but a life process in which one actively participated, for the whole inner man was brought into vibration. These vibrations were harmonious or dissonant, and the vibration was perceived in the tones.

The sense of warmth was also a life process. Today we are comparatively calm when we regard our surroundings; we just notice that it is warm or cold outside. Of course we experience it to a mild degree, but not as during Old Moon, when a rise or fall in temperature was experienced so intensely that one's whole sense of life changed. In other words, the participation was much more intense: just as one vibrated with a tone, one experienced oneself getting inwardly cooler or warmer.

I already have described what the sense of sight was like on Old Moon. There was a living involvement with colours. Some colours caused us to enlarge our body, others to contract it. Today we can only experience this symbolically, if at all. We no longer collapse when confronted with red, nor do we inflate when surrounded by blue—but we did do this on Old Moon. The sense of taste has also been described already.

The sense of smell was intimately bound up with the life processes on Old Moon. There was also a sense of balance, it was already needed. And the sense of movement was much livelier. Today we have more or less come to rest in ourselves—we are more or less dead. We move our limbs, but not much of us actually vibrates. But just imagine all the movement there was to be aware of on Old Moon when tones generated inner movement.

Now, as for the sense of life, you will gather from what I have been saying that no sense analogous to our sense of life could have been present on Old Moon. At that time one was altogether immersed in life, in life as a whole. The skin was not the boundary of inner life. Life was something in which one swam. There was no need for a special sense of life since all the organs that today are sense organs were organs of life in those times—they were alive and they provided consciousness of that life. So there was no need for a special sense of life on Old Moon.

The sense of touch came into being along with the mineral world, which is a result of Earth evolution. On Old Moon there was nothing analogous to the sense of touch that we have developed here on Earth in conjunction with the mineral realm. There was no such sense on Old Moon where it was no more needed than was a sense of life.

If we count how many of our senses were already to be found on Old Moon as organs of life, we find there were seven. Manifestations of life are always sevenfold. The five senses unique to Earth evolution fall away when we consider Moon man. They join the other seven later, during our Earth evolution, to make up the twelve senses, because the Earth-senses have become fixed zones as have the regions of the zodiac. There were only seven senses on Old Moon, for then the senses were still mobile and full of life. Thus there was a sevenfold life on Old Moon, a life in which the senses were still immersed.

This account is the result of living observations of a super-sensible world which—initially—is beyond the limits of earthly perception. What has been said is just a small, an elementary part of all that needs to be said to show that our account is not the product of arbitrary whims. The more one presses on and achieves a vision of cosmic secrets, the more one sees that all this talk about the relation of seven to twelve is not just a game. This relationship really can be traced through all the manifestations of life. The relation of the fixed stars to the planets is a necessary outer expression of it and reveals one of the mysteries of number that underlie the cosmos. And the relationship of the number twelve to the number seven expresses one of the mysteries of existence, the mystery of how man, as bearer of the senses and faculties of perception, is related to man as the bearer of life. The number twelve is connected with the mystery of how we are able to carry an I. The establishment of twelve senses, each at rest in its own proper region, provided a basis for earthly self-awareness. The fact that the senses of Old Moon were still organs of life meant that Moon man could possess an astral body, but not an I; for then the seven senses were still organs of life and only provided the basis for the astral body. The number seven is concerned with the mysteries of the astral body just as the number twelve is concerned with the mysteries of the human I.

The kind of truths we passed in review before our souls yesterday cannot be absorbed with an abstract, theoretical understanding. It is not just a matter of knowing that things are like this or like that. All the human consequences of these things must be inwardly comprehended, for they are very significant. Today I will sketch just a few of them. There is, of course, very much more that could be said along these lines, but we have to begin somewhere. At the very least, we must consider the direction in which such factual, spiritual-scientific presuppositions lead our thinking and our will.

Let us review yesterday's conclusions. The zones of the twelve senses can be seen as a kind of human zodiac. Flowing through all these sense-zones are the seven life processes: breathing, warming, nourishing, secretion, maintenance, growth and reproduction. (See drawing, Lecture Seven.)

To understand these things in their entirety we must be clear that the actual truth is very different from what our materialistic sciences teach us. They believe, for example, that the sense of taste and the related sense of smell are confined to the narrow limits of the tongue and the nasal mucous membrane. But this is not how things really are. The physical organs associated with the senses are more like the capital cities governing the realms of those senses. The realms corresponding to the senses are much more extended. I think that anyone who has applied a little self-observation to the sense of hearing, for example, will know that hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ears. A tone lives in much more of the organism than just the ear, and the other senses occupy similarly extended territories. Liver and spleen, for example, are perceptibly involved in taste and the related sense of smell; so they involve a wider area than materialistic science recognises. This being the case, you will also see that the sense-zones are intimately connected with the vital organs and with the life forces they continuously send streaming through the entire organism. It follows that the relationship between the sense-zones and the vital organs has a manifold influence on a person's inner constitution, on his state of being as regards spirit, soul and body. So we are justified in speaking, let us say, of the forces of secretion being in the sphere of the sense of sight, or of their interacting with the sphere of sight, or of an interaction between the spheres of growth and hearing—just as we speak in astronomy of Saturn being in the Ram or of the Sun standing in the Lion. Furthermore, each sense-zone can come into a relationship with one or the other of the life spheres, since the regions of the senses and the regions of life are related differently in different people. So there really are circumstances in the inner human world that reflect how things are out there in the starry heavens of the macrocosm.

You will therefore be right in supposing that the activities called up in us by the senses are relatively static in comparison with what goes on in the life processes and their central organs. Remember how we described the sense regions as a comparatively stable part of the human being. They are stabilised through being organised around a particular physical organ: the sense of sight around the eyes—even though it involves more besides—the sense of hearing around the ears, and so on. And remember how mobile the life processes are as they circulate uninterruptedly through the whole body, reaching every part of it. The life processes move through us.

If we consider what was said yesterday about how our sense experiences on Old Moon were more like life processes, we must conclude that human existence on Old Moon was altogether more mobile than that of our present Earth era. Moon man was more mobile, more inwardly mobile. Earth man really does relate to what he consciously experiences in the way the relatively fixed constellations of the zodiac relate to one another. During the Earth era the outer surface of man has become motionless, still, as the constellations of the zodiac are still. During the Moon phase, the present-day human senses contained a life and mobility such as that displayed by the planets of our present-day cosmos; for our planets' relationship to one another is constantly changing.

Moon man was capable of transformation, of metamorphosis. Now, I have often drawn your attention to the fact that when a person of today achieves the level of initiation that gives him access to imaginative knowledge, his conscious life becomes more mobile than that afforded by normal, earth-bound sense experience. In such cases everything again becomes mobile, but the mobility is experienced through super-sensible consciousness. And this is how the knowledge obtained from this sphere must be understood. I have often put before you the necessity of making our concepts and ideas more mobile in order to be able to enter into what super-sensible consciousness reveals to us. Concepts appropriate to the sensible world are shut up in their own little boxes and everyone likes to have them arranged prettily beside one another. But for spiritual science we need mobile concepts, concepts that can be transformed and metamorphosed, one into the other. In this you can see one of the consequences of the facts we have been describing.

Another consequence is the following: you will be able to see that a sense life that is as unperturbed and still as the zodiac is only possible for a human being living in the Earth sphere. The twelve sense-zones only are meaningful in the context of life as it is lived between birth and death in an earthly body. When it comes to life between death and birth, things are quite different. One remarkable difference is that the senses that are seen as higher, as far as life on earth goes, lose their higher status when we pass over the threshold of death into spiritual spheres. Just recall what I said in Occult Science about how the relationships between people change during the time between death, and a new birth, and how they are mediated in a much more intimate manner than is the case here on earth. There we do not need the ego sense which is essential to us on earth, nor do we need the senses of thought and speech as we need them on earth. On the other hand, we do need the transformed sense of hearing, but in a form that has been genuinely spiritualised. A spiritualised sense of hearing gives us access to the harmony of the spheres. That it is spiritualised is, however, already evident from the fact that over there we hear without the presence of physical air, whereas here the physical medium of the air must be present in order for us to hear anything. Furthermore, everything is heard in reverse, proceeding backwards towards its beginning. It is precisely because our earthly sense of hearing is dependent on the air that it is particularly difficult for us to imagine what it is like to hear things backwards. We run into difficulties trying to imagine a melody backwards. For spiritual perception this presents no problems at all.

Now, the sense of hearing is the borderline sense; in its spiritualised form it is the sense that most resembles the senses of the physical world. When we come to the sense of warmth as it is in the spiritual world, we already have a sense that is very changed; sight is even more altered; and the senses of smell and taste even more so, for they play an important role in the spiritual world. The very senses that here we call lower, play an important role in the spiritual world. But that role has been very, very spiritualised. A significant role is also played by the senses of balance and movement. But then, when we come to the sense of life we find that it is less significant. And the sense of touch has no special role at all.

So we could say that when death leads us over into the spiritual world the sun sets in the region ruled by the sense of hearing. That sense is located on the horizon of the spiritual world. The sense of hearing is more or less bisected by that horizon. Over yonder, the sun rises in the sense of hearing and then proceeds through the spiritualised senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell—all these are especially important for spiritual perception over there. There, the sense of balance not only reveals to us our inner state of balance, it also shows us how we are balanced with regard to the beings of the higher hierarchies into whose realms we are ascending. Thus the sense of balance has an important role to play; it guides us through the expanses of the cosmos. Here, it is hidden away in our physical organism as one of the lesser senses, but over there it has the important role of enabling us to sense whether we are poised in a state of equilibrium between an Archangel and an Angel, or between a Spirit of Personality and an Archangel, or between a Spirit of Form and an Angel. This is the sense that shows us how we are balanced among the various beings of the spiritual world. And the spiritualised sense of movement, which is now directed outwards, mediates between us and our movements—for in the spiritual world we are in constant movement. The sense of life, however, is no longer necessary because we are, so to speak, swimming in the totality of life. Like a swimmer in water, the spirit moves in the element of life.

Just below the horizon are the lower senses, the senses that lead earthly perception to the internal world of the organism. But when we die, the sun of our life descends to the constellations that are below the horizon just as the setting sun enters the constellations below the horizon. And when we are born again, our sun rises in those constellations—in the senses of touch, life, speech, thought, ego—that stand over us now and allow as to perceive this physical world of earthly existence.

And the life processes are even more spiritualised than these lower senses. More than a few persons who claim to represent a particularly lofty mystical point of view speak of the life processes as something ‘lower’. To be sure, they are low here, but what here is low is high in the spiritual world, for what lives in our organism is a reflection of what lives in the spiritual world. This is a very noteworthy statement. Outside us in the spiritual world there are significant spiritual beings whose nature is reflected within us—within the bounds of the zodiac of our senses through which the planets of our life processes move. So we can say: the four life processes of secretion, maintenance, growth and reproduction are reflections of what exists in the spiritual world—as are the processes of breathing, warming and nourishing. The fourfold process of secretion, maintaining, growth and reproduction mirrors a lofty region of the spiritual world. That region receives us after death and there we live and weave, spiritually preparing our organism for the next earthly incarnation. Everything in our physical organism that is comparatively low corresponds to something that is high and can only be perceived through the faculty of Imagination. There is a whole world that can be perceived through Imagination, through imaginative knowledge. This world that is accessible to imagination is reflected from beyond the constellations of the zodiac into the senses of the human organism. To picture this, imagine that

Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon are reflections of what exists beyond the limits of the zodiac: they have spiritual counterparts that exist there and the astronomical bodies we can observe within the bounds of the zodiac are only reflections of these counterparts.

And then there is yet another super-sensible region. It is beyond the limits of the human senses and perceptible only through the faculty of Inspiration. This is the world of Inspiration. The processes of breathing, warming and nourishing are a reflection of this world, just as Saturn, Jupiter and mars are reflections of their spiritual counterparts from beyond the limits of the zodiac. Moreover there is a profound relationship between what is out there in the cosmos and what, as lower nature, is present in man. These spiritual counterparts of the life processes actually exist. ...And this is how we should mark out the boundaries of the human senses and life processes.

Now we approach that which is higher than life, those true regions of the soul which are the home of human astrality and human egoity, of the I. We leave behind the world of the senses and the realms of space and time and really enter the spiritual world. Now on earth, because there is a certain connection between the twelve sense-zones and our I, it is possible for our I to live in the consciousness sustained by these sense-zones. Beneath this consciousness there is another, an astral consciousness which, in the present stage of human development, is intimately related to the human vital processes, to the sphere of life. The I is intimately related to the sphere of the senses; astral consciousness is intimately related to the sphere of life. Just as our knowledge of the zodiac comes through—or from within—our I, so knowledge of our life processes comes from astral consciousness. It is a form of awareness that is still subconscious in people of today: it is not apparent in normal circumstances, it still lies on the other side of the threshold. In physical existence such a knowing consists of an inner awareness of the life processes. Sometimes, in abnormal circumstances, the sphere of life is included in the sphere of consciousness; it is thrust up into normal consciousness. But for us this is a pathological state. It is an astonishing thing for our doctors and natural scientists to behold when the subconscious intrudes and allows what is normally hidden beneath our twelve-fold sense-awareness to emerge—when eruptions of the subconscious allow the planets to intrude their life into the sphere of the zodiac. Such a consciousness is appropriate when it has been cultivated and developed, really developed in the fashion that is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But if it has not been developed properly, it is pathological.

Recently, a book written by a doctor who is interested in these things has been published. Since he is unaware of any of the contents of spiritual science, his thinking is still wholly materialistic. But he is so free in his investigations that, especially more recently, he has actually worked his way into this realm. I am referring to Carl Ludwig Schleich¹¹ and his book, The Mechanisms of Thought (Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken.) There you will find some interesting accounts of his experiences as a doctor. Let us look at one of the simplest of these: it concerns a woman who comes to him for a medical consultation. He suggests she sit down to wait for him. Just at that moment the wheel in a ventilator cover moves. Immediately she exclaims. ‘Oh, that is a huge fly that is going to bite me!’ And almost immediately after she has said this, her eye begins to swell. Soon the swelling has grown to the size of a hen's egg. The doctor calms her, saying the injury is not so bad and can soon be healed.

It is not possible to reach so deeply into the life sphere that something there actually changes, not if one is employing the consciousness that is contained in the human zodiac of the twelve senses. But we do affect the life sphere when the subconscious erupts into our usual daytime consciousness. The concepts and ideas that occupy our normal consciousness do not yet sink deeply enough into us to reach the depths of the life processes. Now and then, however, the life processes are stirred up and occasionally the ensuing wave is very strong. But with today's proper and normal, externally-orientated consciousness it is not possible—thank God!—for a person to affect the life processes, for otherwise people would make a real mess of themselves with some of the thoughts they entertain. Human thoughts are not strong enough to have this kind of effect. But if some of the ideas people harbour today were to well up out of their unconscious into the sphere of life, as did the ideas of the woman we were describing, then you would see some people walking about with extremely swollen faces and some with much worse problems, too. Thus you see that beneath our surface, which is connected with the zodiac, there is a subconscious world that is intimately connected with the life processes and can profoundly affect them in abnormal circumstances. For example, Schleich reports a case in which a young woman comes to the doctor and tells him that she has gone astray. She continues to insist on this, even after the medical examination shows it could not have been so. She will not tell with whom she has gone astray. But in the next few months she begins to show all the external and internal signs of an expectant mother. Later on, at the appropriate time, when the quasi-expectant mother is examined, the heartbeat of a child is discernible alongside her own. Everything proceeds quite normally—except that no child arrives in the ninth month! The tenth month comes and finally it is realised that something else is going on. At last they decide they must operate. When they do, there is nothing there, nothing at all, and there never has been! It was a hysterical pregnancy with all the physical symptoms of a normal pregnancy. Today's doctors are already describing this kind of thing, and it is good that they are doing so, for such things will force people to think of the human being in different terms from those in which they are accustomed to think.

Here is another case: a man comes to Schleich saying that he has stuck himself with a pen while working in his office. There is a slight scratch. Schleich examines it and finds nothing to be concerned about. But the man says, ‘Yes, but I can already feel blood poisoning in my arm and I know I shall die of it unless my arm is amputated.’ Schleich replies, ‘I cannot remove your arm when there is no problem there. It is certain that you will not die of blood poisoning.’ As a precaution, he cleanses the wound and then he dismisses the man. But he was still in such a state that Schleich, who is a good-hearted man, decides to visit him that evening. He finds the man still filled with the thought that he is bound to die. When his blood is tested later, there still is no sign of blood poisoning. Again Schleich reassures him; but later that night the man dies. He really dies! A death from purely psychic causes!

Now, I can assure you that a man cannot die as a result of the thoughts he forms under the influence of his inner zodiac-one certainly cannot die of such thoughts. Thoughts do not penetrate so deeply into the life processes. And the other case I just mentioned—I mean the hysterical pregnancy—cannot be the result of mere thoughts, any more than it is possible to die of the mere thought that you have blood poisoning.

When it comes to this last case, where imagined, but untrue, circumstances seem to have led to death, our present-day science must look to spiritual science for clarification. Perhaps we can look a little at this case and consider what really happened. We have a man who scratches himself with his pen while he is writing and then dies as a result of what he imagines around this event. Actually, something quite different happened. That man had an etheric body, and death was already present in his etheric body before he scratched himself. Death, therefore, was already expressed in his etheric body when he went into his office that morning, In other words, his etheric body had begun to accept into itself the processes that lead to death. But these were only transmitted to his physical body very gradually. And the man would not have acted so strangely if death had not already taken up residence in him. He just happened to scratch himself while this was going on within him, and the scratch was insignificant in itself. But through it, the thought that he was going to die was able to well up out of his subconscious life sphere. The external events were only the trimmings, only the outer show. But because the outer show was there, the whole thing was able to well up into his waking consciousness. So his death had nothing to do with the usual processes of forming imaginations that are part of our day-time consciousness, absolutely nothing; death was already present in him.

Such things as these will gradually force our natural scientists to enter more and more deeply into the substance of spiritual science. We are already dealing with something complicated when we consider the relationship between the planetary spheres and the life processes, or the zodiac and the zones of the senses. But things get even more complicated when we move on to consider the processes of consciousness that relate in various ways to these spheres: the I relating to the zodiac and the astral body relating to the planetary spheres within man, that mobile life-sphere within the human being. But if we continue to think as we think in the everyday physical world, using the powers of the zodiac within us, we shall be unable to approach matters that concern the mobile human life-sphere., nor shall we be able to approach the relationship of the I to the zodiac. Those things can only be approached when we have taught ourselves to think in entirely new ways.

In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you are advised to imagine things backwards from time to time, to review things backwards. A backwards review involves picturing events as if they proceeded in the opposite direction from that in which they proceed in our normal world. Among other things, this picturing backwards gradually builds the spiritual forces that make one capable of entering a world that is the wrong way round when compared with the physical world. That is how the spiritual world is. It reverses many aspects of the physical world. I have often pointed out to you that it is not simply a matter of abstractly turning around what is in the physical world; among the powers that one needs to develop are the powers connected with the ability to imagine backwards. What is the consequence of this? Those people who do not want to see human culture dry up and who are trying to achieve a spiritually illumined view of the world are eventually forced to imagine a world in reverse. For spiritual consciousness only begins when the life processes or the sense processes are reversed and run backwards. Therefore people need to prepare for the future by getting accustomed to thinking backwards. Then they will begin to take hold of the spiritual world through this thinking backwards, just as they take hold of the physical world by means of thinking forwards. Our ability to imagine the physical world is a result of the direction of our thinking.

So, now that I have guided you through the human zodiac of the twelve sense-zones and through the seven planetary life-spheres, I can only proceed further if I introduce a completely different way of looking at things: a way of thinking that proceeds backwards.

Now, you are aware that our contemporaries are not particularly inclined to devote themselves to spiritual science and really absorb it. They reject it because they are accustomed to materialistic thinking. But for someone who has gone only a little way beyond the threshold of the spiritual world, it is just as foolish to assert that the world only goes forward, never backward, as it is to say that the sun only goes in one direction and can never return! Of course it comes back along this apparent path on the other side. (Steiner illustrated this with a drawing.)

It is easy to imagine that someone who is well and truly frozen into contemporary modes of thought might shrink in horror from thinking backwards and from imagining the world turned backwards. And yet without this world turned backwards there would not be any consciousness at all. For consciousness is already a kind of spiritual science—even though the materialists deny the fact. Consequently, this imagining backwards particularly horrifies our contemporaries. We could picture one of them asking himself, ‘Is it illogical to picture the course of the world backwards as well as forwards?’ And he could also come to the conclusion that it is not really illogical to follow a drama backwards starting from its fifth act, and that it is not illogical to follow the drama of world development backwards, either. Nevertheless, this is a terrible thing with which to confront contemporary habits of thought. Someone who lives entirely in present-day habits of thought, believes it is a fact that one cannot think the world backwards, and that it is a fact that the world does not move backwards. As soon as such a person stumbles across this question he senses that there is something special in it. One can imagine a solitary thinker wrestling with the problem of thinking backwards and drawing particular philosophical conclusions from the impossibility of thinking backwards.

One can make a further assumption. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that thinking backwards is especially difficult to imagine in the constellation in which the sun goes down, in the sense of hearing. Over the course of time, the sense of hearing has undergone some changes, particularly in relation to music. Historians do not usually notice these subtle changes, but they are more important for the inner human life than the grosser changes described in historical accounts. For example, it is of great significance for the transformation of hearing—which is already a relatively spiritual sense as far as the physical world goes—that the octave was experienced as a uniquely pleasant, sympathetic combination of tones during the Greco-Roman period, and that the fifth was particularly loved during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In those days it was called the ‘sweet tone.’ During the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the fifth was experienced in the way people experience the third today. So you see how our inner constitution changes over relatively short periods of time.

On the physical plane, a musical ear listens with deep satisfaction to things going in the one direction. So someone with an especially musical ear might well be repelled by the thought of going backwards, for music is one of the most profound things we have on the physical plane. Of course this could only apply to a time when materialism is at its height. Those who are not so musical will not feel this conflict so readily. But a musical person whose thinking is fundamentally materialistic can easily come to the conclusion that thinking backwards is simply beyond the scope of our human head. In this fashion he will resist the spiritual world. So we can assume that somewhere or other there is bound to be such a thinker.

Strangely enough, a book has been published recently: Kosmogonie, by Christian von Ehrenfels.¹² Its first chapter is called, ‘The “reversion”, a paradox of knowledge’. There, looking at it from many sides, in the fashion of present-day philosophy, Ehrenfels asks what it would be like to see the course of world events backwards—from the other side, the asymmetrical side, so to speak. He actually comes up with the idea of thinking things backwards, really backwards. He tries to deal with this paradox. He attempts to think some particular cases backwards. I would like to show you one of these as an example. He starts with a series of events going forwards, rather than backwards:

In the vertical world of the high mountains, moisture and frost break loose a chunk from a compact mass of rock. When the ice thaws, the chunk breaks free. It falls from the overhanging cliff wall, crashes on to a stony surface and shatters into many pieces. Following one of these pieces, we see it go raging down a lower slope shedding further splinters of stone as it collides with other stones, until it finally comes to rest on a slope. At last it has given up the whole of its kinetic energy in the form of warmth conveyed to the places where it collided with earth and stone, and to the air that resisted its motion.—Now how would this certainly not uncommon event look in the backwards world?

A stone is lying on a slope. Suddenly it is struck by apparently chaotic bursts of warmth coming from the earth beneath it. These combine in such an extraordinary fashion that they propel the stone diagonally upwards. The air offers no resistance. On the contrary, there are a series of extraordinary transactions: the air transmits some of its own warmth to the stone and thus gives it free passage, making way for it and encouraging it, with its accumulation of small but well-aimed gifts of warmth, on its diagonally ascending pathway. The stone collides with an overhanging stone. But this neither causes it to lose any fragment of itself, nor does it cause it to lose any of its enthusiasm for movement. In fact, the contrary is the case. Another little stone happens to arrive at the same place of impact, propelled by a collection of gusts of warmth from the earth. And, behold!—always under the influence of impulses of warmth-this small stone collides with our original stone. Their-apparently accidentally formed—irregular surfaces fit together so perfectly, and they meet with such force, that the powers of cohesion take effect and the two grow together to form one compact mass. Further bursts of warmth from the overhanging mountain with which they have collided direct them further on their upward, diagonal path, which they pursue with increased speed.

The bits of stone that earlier were broken apart are joined together again. The whole stone comes together, lying on the mountain cliff. The energies are brought once more into balance, all goes back into its original place, and so forth. This he describes with great exactitude, thinking the whole event backwards. He describes further examples, which he also thinks through backwards. One can see that he really plagues himself with this; he really strains at the yoke:

On a sunny winter's day, a hare makes its way through the snow, leaving its tracks behind it. In many places the wind immediately blows them away, but they are preserved along southerly stretches of path where the snow thaws in the sunshine during the day and freezes again at night. There they remain visible for many weeks until they disappear in the spring thaw. In the ‘backwards world’ the hare's prints would be the first thing to appear, but only a bit at a time, not all at once. At first they would show up in the frozen snow (more accurately, in the ice which is thawing into snow again), and then, after weeks, during which the imprints gradually get deeper and change into more accurate copies of the hare's paws, the prints also begin to appear on the connecting parts of path as gusts of warmth chase loose flakes of snow together—and the whole track is complete. Then the hare himself appears, tail foremost, head facing behind, and he is not moving along the line of the path—rather he is being dragged along in a direction contrary to the impulses of his muscles by the impact of gusts of warmth (always it is through warmth) and this is done so artfully that his paws always fall into the waiting paw-prints of the tracks. Nor do the wonders cease here: each time a paw comes out of a print, well-directed gusts of warmth fill it with loose snow. So well is this accomplished that the filled print exactly merges with the surrounding snowfield, whose faultlessly smooth surface covers the former tracks of the hare as if it had never been otherwise.

You can see how Schleich exerts himself. Now he goes further, saying: if it is difficult with the hare, how much more difficult will it be with an entire hunt:

It is easy to see that the same sort of unbelievable things occur as in the example from inorganic nature, only intensified to the point of being grotesque and uncanny. And the present organic example of the hare's tracks is relatively simple. Just imagine the tracks left behind in the snow, not by a single hare, but by an entire winter hunting party with all its hunters, drivers, hounds, and numerous deer, foxes and elk—imagine how these tracks would criss-cross and cover one another, and how sometimes one would step in the print of another, leaving untrodden patches in between, and so on. Now one must turn these events around and observe how the same type of gusts of warmth seem to guide each living creature through this chaos of apparently fragmentary tracks so that every foot or paw or hoof falls into a print that exactly matches it—the deer into one, elk into another, every hunter's shoe finding an imprint that exactly matches, and always moved, slid, pressed into it by these extraordinary gusts of warmth that issue from the earth, the air and from within the creatures themselves, so that everything matches perfectly. After all this one begins to get some bare notion of the extent of our concept of ‘leaving tracks’, as it applies to our right-way-up, right-way-round world.

You see how hard the man tries to arrive at the concepts he needs. This effort drags up some things of which people today are not conscious. You can see how naturally spiritual science can come into being, for men are longing for it in their souls. Schleich really struggles to come to some degree of understanding of these processes that run backwards. He really sweats over the matter—spiritually speaking. There truly is a thinker in him, a thinker who will not be denied. He declares that it is entirely logical to picture things in this fashion—logical, but unbelievable. For us, this simply means that he is going against his own habitual thinking and, ultimately, that he is completely unable to conceive of the spiritual world.

Ehrenfels concludes, ‘Let us go even further. Imagine that a backward world is actually forced upon us—that the relentless force of our experience actually compels us to deal with a real situation like our “backwards world”!’ Thus he imagines that he might really see his hare or his hunting party proceeding backwards out there in the physical world—the world which, for him, is the only reality. We are asked to imagine that we have been forced to enter a physical world in which all is really backwards:

How would we respond to such a world, how could we try to interpret it? Even if our experience repeatedly forced us to think, as we tried to think in the preceding pages, of a world in which the shapes of the future are sucked backwards, we would have to reject it as absurd.

This, he says, would be terrible. We would be confronted with a world which we could not and ought not think about! And this terrible world is the world Ehrenfels really would have to see if he were to enter the spiritual world. He imagines that it would be terrible if such a thing were to be forced upon him in the physical world!

Forms would take shape with apparent spontaneity. But we would have no alternative but to view them as only apparently spontaneous—and as actually being the result of teleological, intentional, preconceived combinations of material particles and their movements. And the same would hold for the extraordinary interplay of their paths as they converge and leave us with ever fewer and ever diminishing phenomena.

Thus he thinks the whole thing back to the beginnings of the earth in a Darwinian state of unity.

What could the goal of this creative power that sees ahead and plans ahead, possibly be? Can the sudden appearance of a form and its gradual transition into formlessness be the ultimate goal? No, and no again! The very opposite of this is what the goal of the whole must be.

Then he asks himself, ‘How it would feel to be confronted with such a world, to see such a world?’ To which he answers, ‘This world of experience could only be the grotesque joke of a demonic, cosmic power to whom we must deliver up everything but knowledge.’

At this point he stops himself; he cannot go any deeper into the matter. For the knowledge to which he clings consists simply of his old habits of thought. He can go no further. He feels that a world that has to be seen in reverse must be the grotesque production of some cosmic demon, of the devil; it would be the world of the devil. And he is afraid when confronted with what inevitably must seem to him to be the work of the devil. Here you have an example of how one soul experiences something I have often described: fear is what holds us back from the spiritual world. And Ehrenfels expresses this overtly: if he were to see a physical world that is similar to the spiritual world, he would view it as the paradoxical work of some devilish being. So he shrinks back in fear.

There must be some other, comprehensive, universal law that transcends the bounds of our world of experience! In other words: even if the backward world existed, ultimately we would not use backward principles to understand it.

What would the good Ehrenfels do if he were transported into a backward world that contrived to manifest itself to him physically? He would say, ‘Nay, I do not believe this; I will not allow it to be; I will picture it the other way around.’ And this is just what people do with the spiritual world; they really do not want to admit the existence of things that look different from what is presently in front of them.

We would regard this as an exception, as a special enclave, as a counter-stream to the great stream of all cosmic evolution—and yet we would continue to attribute to the evolution of the world those physiognomic features that we find believable.

Thus one would put one's foot down and say, ‘Nay, even though this world conjures up a demon for us, we will not believe in it. We will think about it in the way in which we are accustomed to think.’ There you see the whole story—of how a philosopher resists what has to come. It is helpful to notice such moments in human evolution. What spiritual science shows us must come, and that, my dear friends, that will most assuredly come. And even though people today resist the spiritual in their normal consciousness, as we have often discussed here, at deeper levels of their consciousness they are beginning to turn toward the spiritual. It is only that people are still pretending; they still deny it is there. It will not be long before it is impossible to continue denying the spirit. Men's thoughts are turning with a virtual compulsion towards the sort of things one can observe in Christian von Ehrenfels' Kosmogonie.

I wanted to talk about this book because it has just appeared and is bound to be discussed frequently in the near future. Even though it is written in a philosophical language that is difficult to understand, it will be discussed frequently. The discussions are likely to be very grotesque because it is difficult to grasp the implications of the book. So I wanted to speak to you here about Christian von Ehrenfel's Kosmogonie in order that what needs to be said about it is spoken about accurately for once. We are dealing with a philosopher who is a university professor and who has lectured in philosophy at the University of Prague for many years. This book appeared in 1915. In the foreword he speaks of his own path of development, acknowledging points on which he is indebted to certain earlier philosophers with whom he is more or less in agreement. At the conclusion of this foreword, having cited his indebtedness for one thing and another to the earlier philosophers, Franz Brentano and Meinong, he says the following:

On the other hand, my greatest burden of thanks lies in a direction that is far removed from what is generally recognised as the domain of philosophy.—Throughout my life I have devoted far more physical energy to becoming inwardly acquainted with German music than I have devoted to assimilating philosophical literature. (As a philosophy professor he presents us with this confession!) Nor do I regret this, looking back from the middle of the sixth decade of my life, (So you see, he is far beyond his fiftieth year) rather I attribute to this one of the sources of my philosophical productivity. (And he has only been productive as a philosopher!) For, even though Schopenhauer's account of music as being a unique objectification of the world of the will must probably be rejected, it nevertheless seems to me that his fundamental intentions go to the heart of the matter. Of all mortal beings, the revelations of the truly productive musician bring him nearest to the spirit of the cosmos. Those other ‘mortals’ who claim to understand this metaphysical language of music experience it as a duty of the highest order to translate this received meaning into a conceptual form that is accessible to the understanding of their fellow men.

If one understands religion to be a spiritual possession that bequeaths trust in the world, moral strength and inner power to its possessor, then you must say that German music has been my religion in a time in which humanity has been beset by agnosticism, the loss of metaphysics, and the loss of belief. This applies from the day—in the year 1880—I definitively separated myself from the dogmas of Catholicism, to those weeks in the spring of 1911 when the metaphysical teachings expressed in this book first began to reveal themselves to me.

And this metaphysics takes as its starting point the paradox of reversibility, the impossibility of reversing our ideas.

Yes, today German music is still my religion in the sense that even if all the arguments of my work were proven false, I would not fall victim to despair. The trust in the world in which this work originated would not desert me and I would remain convinced that I am essentially on the right path. I would remain convinced because German music would still be there, and the world that can produce such a thing must surely be essentially good and worthy of respect.

The music of the B Minor Mass, of the statue's visit in Don Giovanni, the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth symphonies, the music of Tristan, The Ring, Parsifal—this music cannot be proven false, for it is a reality, a wellspring of life. Thanks be to its creators! And a salute to all those who are appointed to quench the thirst for eternity from its wondrous springs! The best that I have been fortunate enough to create—and I hold this present work to be my best—is nothing more than insignificant small change out of the riches that I have ‘received’ from that source—from music.

And I am convinced, my dear friends, that this philosopher's special way of relating to the spiritual world could only be found in a person who has Ehrenfels' spiritual kinship with the music of our materialistic age. There are deep inner relationships between everything that goes on in the human soul, even between things that seem to lie in quite different areas. Here I wanted to give you an example of the special way in which someone who is a believer—not just a listener, but a true believer—in the elements of modern music must relate to the habits of materialistic thinking and how he must allow them to flow through his soul. It is different for someone who is not such a musical believer. For if we are to gradually approach the riddles of life and the human riddles, we must investigate those mysterious relationships in the human soul that introduce so many harmonies and disharmonies into its life.

• 11. Carl Ludwig Schleich (1859 – 1922): Doctor, philosopher and poet. Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken, Berlin, 1916.
• 12. Christian von Ehrenfels (1859 – 1922): Philosopher. Kosmogonie, Jena, 1916. The cited passages are to be found on pages VII, VIII, 49-56.

From the description contained in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS you know that when the human being will be able to look into the spiritual world, he will, to a certain extent have that experience which we designate as the “crossing of the threshold”. In my book I have described this crossing of the threshold by pointing out that the three soul-forces of man, which have a rather chaotic and intermingling activity during his physical life begin to organise themselves; the forces of thought, feeling and of the will become independent. These forces become independent through the fact. that the human being crosses the threshold. In many respects, the whole course of mankind's development resembles the life-course of the individual human being. But things have become displaced. What the individual human being experiences consciously when he strives to attain clairvoyance in the spiritual world, namely, the crossing of the threshold, must be experienced unconsciously by the whole of mankind, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, Humanity has no choice in regard to this; it must experience this unconsciously—not the individual human being, but HUMANITY, and the individual human being together with humanity. What does this mean?

What is now a joint activity of thought, feeling and will within man, will in future take on a separate character and this will come to the fore in various spheres. We are just passing through a time in which humanity is unconsciously crossing the threshold of a significant portal, a fact which is clearly evident to the clairvoyant power. Humanity passes through this crossing of the threshold in such a way that the spheres of thought, feeling and will become separated. This imposes duties upon us, the duty of shaping external life in such a way that the great change which takes place in man's inner life may be experienced even in his EXTERNAL life. Through the fact that thinking grows more independent within the life of humanity, we must build up a foundation upon which the activity and influence of thinking can become sounder; we must moreover create a foundation upon which feeling can develop independently, and also a foundation upon which the will can reach its particular development. What has hitherto exercised a chaotic and intermingling activity in public life must now be organised into THREE SPHERES. In public life, these three spheres are: ECONOMIC LIFE, POLITICAL or JURIDICIAL LIFE and CULTURAL or SPIRITUAL LIFE. This need of a three-partition is connected with the mystery of human evolution which pertains to the present time.

Do not think that the “threefold social organism”, which is now being advanced, is just some sort of invention. It has been born out of the most intimate knowledge of human evolution, out of the knowledge of what must occur if the goal of human evolution is not to be renounced. During the past years, we have been involved in the fearful catastrophe of the great war, because of the difficulty which existed in recognising a goal of a spiritual character, and because people withdrew themselves more and more even from the mere act of recognising at least the existence of such goals. We must extricate ourselves from this chaos. The very course of human evolution demands that we should extricate ourselves from this chaos. Indeed, for this reason I think that the necessity of a threefold social organism will only be recognised thoroughly by those who depart from anthroposophical feelings and from a knowledge of the events which are taking place in the evolution of humanity. At present, people do not like to acknowledge such things. The present time likes to turn to tasks connected with the things which lie closest at hand, and it does not like to penetrate into the deeper mysteries of life.

What grieves the heart of one who is able to look into these mysteries, is the fact that humanity has such a strong aversion to the very things which it needs most. Yet it is impossible to abide by the thought which has just been expressed. We may say: every kind of pessimism is wrong. But this does not imply that every kind of optimism is right. Right and justified is, however, the APPEAL TO THE WILL. It is not at all a question of whether something takes place in this or in that way, but that we should WILL things in accordance with the direction of human evolution. We should realise over and over again that the old time has come to an end and that we must close our accounts with it. A real understanding of the present can only be gained if we rightly close our accounts with the old time. For the NEW time can only be taken into account from a SPIRITUAL standpoint! We should not delude ourselves that we can carry over into the new time the things which we have cherished in the past. In our external life, we must begin to turn to the new thoughts, which are now beginning to be active.

Mankind now faces two paths: One of these leads through the mechanization of the spirit. In more recent times, the spirit has become very mechanical, particularly in regard to the abstract laws of Nature, which have also been applied to social life, as ruling laws. Mechanization of the spirit—vegetalization of the soul! Vegetables sleep—and the human soul also tends to sleep. In a sleeping state we pass through the most important events. The most important events of the past years have literally been ‘slept away!’ Even to-day, most important events are being slept away.

Let us now turn our gaze to the East. There we can see that the animalization of the bodies is coming up in a very strong measure. Just as the Americanization of the spirit represents a mechanization of spiritual life, so the Bolshevism which tends to spread out in the East represents an animalization of the bodies. Emotions lead people to reject and criticize this or that, yet they do not wish to grasp real life.

At the present time, humanity has therefore the choice of advancing in a direction where it can find, on the one hand, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetalization of the souls and the animalization of the bodies, or else it may, on the other hand, seek the path leading to an AWAKENING OF THE SPIRIT, discover this awakening of the spirit in the impulses which correspond to the epoch of the consciousness-soul, discover it in the connection of the human soul with the higher Hierarchies, discover, it in the recognition of the conscious human soul which comes from earlier conditions of earthly existence, discover it in the three-partition of social life! All these things are connected. And the human beings who unite in that movement which we designate as a spiritual-scientific movement oriented towards Anthroposophy, should feel that they are a KERNEL from which the forces ray out that can give rise to a new social structure. Everything which comes from other directions and seeks to transform social life may be very useful; but humanity should strive after the goal of transforming social life in a real and true way, and this can only be the outcome of SPIRITUAL IMPULSES!

At present, the human beings still ignore a secret of life which is intimately connected with the present moment of evolution. In the past, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to attach great importance to this mystery, but to-day it is necessary to bear it in mind. This Secret of life consists therein that man, such as he is constituted to-day, from the aspect of body, soul and spirit, contemplates in a certain way every night the events of the following day, but so that it is not always necessary for him to be fully conscious of these coming events, to have them in his day-time consciousness. The one who, is fully conscious of these coming events, is his angel, his ANGELOS. What we experience during the night in common with that Being whom we call our “angel”, is a FORESIGHT, a prevision of the next day. But. you must not consider this from the standpoint of human curiosity, for this would be quite wrong; you must instead consider it from the standpoint of PRACTICAL LIFE. Only if the human being is intimately pervaded by this feeling, will he be able to make the right decisions and take over thoughts into the course of his day. Let us assume quite concretely that someone wishes to do a certain thing at a definite time, say, at midday. What he thus intends to do, has already been arranged during the preceding night between himself and his Angelos. This is the case with the human being ever since the middle of the fifteenth century, but it is not necessary that he should be conscious of it, for it has nothing to do with his curiosity. Man should instead be pervaded with the feeling that the things which he has arranged with his angel during the preceding night should become fruitful in the course of his day.

Many things of the present can show us in an overwhelming way what I have explained to you just now. Particularly the years of sorrow, the past four or five years, can send a great truth trickling into humanity, namely, that the consciousness of being connected day by day with the higher Beings, through the experiences of the preceding night, unfortunately did not exist. What a different course would the events of the past four or five years have taken, had the human beings been pervaded by the feeling: “Whatever you do, is in agreement with the arrangements which you have made with your Angel, during the past night!” These are the things which must be discussed to-day. We must speak of the fact that the human being should, learn to consider his life between birth and death as a CONTINUATION of his soul-spiritual life before birth. We must speak of the fact that throughout his life the human being should be able to feel the revelations of the god within him, and we must speak of the fact that the human being should carry into the life of daytime the conscious feeling: “Whatever you do, from morning, to night, has been arranged between you and your angel from the time of your falling asleep to the moment of waking up!”

The human beings should turn to these kinds of feelings, which are far more real in the face of the spiritual world than the more abstract feelings of to-day pertaining to religious beliefs; they should turn to feelings which do not depart from selfish, but from unselfish human impulses. Feelings of this kind can give rise to the connection which we need with the Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These Beings can then once more interest themselves in the human beings. Man's attitude and feelings towards the spiritual world should move in the direction which I have just now indicated.

One more thing should be grasped clearly. You know that the religions of to-day talk a great deal of “God” and of the “Divine”. To WHAT do they really refer? They merely refer to something which at least exists in the human soul as a pale inkling. It is not so important to consider HOW certain things are named, but rather what exists in the human soul. People speak of “God”, they speak of “Christ”—yet they always mean nothing but their ANGEL! They can still turn to their Angel, for this touches a familiar note in their souls. It is quite an indifferent matter whether the religions of to-day speak of God, of Christ, or of anything else, for the THOUGHT-material which gives rise to their talk merely reaches as far as the Angel-beings that belong to man, as far as the Angeloi. At present, people do not rise beyond this hierarchy, for to-day they feel averse to seek a connection with the spiritual world which is more encompassing than the one which rises out of their egoism. The connection with the ARCHANGELOI, with the hierarchy of the Archangels, must be sought in another way. The present field of human interests must be considerably enlarged, so that the human beings may rise in their feelings from their inclination for the Angeloi as far as the Archangeloi.

The human beings should experience in their souls more or less the following and say to themselves: Terrible events have taken place in the whole civilised world, during the past four or five years. Many people have searched for the cause of these happenings; many have accused one another; they have spoken a great deal of “guilt” and “lack of guilt”. Even if we discard the most extreme form of superficiality, we shall soon lose interest in this empty talk of “causes”, “guilt”, or “lack of guilt”, simply because we can see that what has risen to the surface during the past four or five years resembles the waves Of the sea, which are driven to the surface from below by the sea's own forces. The forces of humanity had been stirred up from year to year. One nation after the other began to participate in the great foolishness which had taken hold of humanity during the past few years and one could say: Something which has the nature of elemental forces has been stirred up and has been driven to the surface; the sea of human life has grown restless. What is that?

A clear view of things is impossible unless we extend this fact, that a great restlessness has taken hold of mankind, to that space of time which we designate as “history”. We must say to ourselves: The armed contest of the past four or five years is only the beginning of events which will be enacted upon an entirely different sphere, events of a kind which has not hitherto existed in the development of humanity. We are not facing an end—for to say this, can only result from a superficial observation of human evolution—but we are facing the BEGINNING of the greatest battles, of the SPIRITUAL battles of the civilised world! Let us concentrate our efforts upon the task of being ready to cope with these, battles. In the near future, the East and the West threaten to face one another AS SOULS, in an ever growing measure!

When we pass through birth, we bring along with us into our physical-sensory existence the forces of the super-sensible world, taken from our super-sensible existence. These forces continue to be active. At the present time, this can only be grasped with greatest difficulty. How do these forces continue to be active?—They are active in everything we develop in the physical world in the form of SPIRITUAL LIFE. It would be impossible to have poets among us, it would be impossible to develop a world-conception or a science, it would be impossible to develop impulses for the education of man, and there would be no possibility whatever for the development of a spiritual life, if we would not bring along with us through birth the impulses that come from our pre-natal life.

On the other hand, what we develop within the economic life as impulses of the will—brotherliness, human love, thinking for others and not only for ourselves, working for others and not only for ourselves—what we do, as it were, “on the quiet”, through the fact that we stand within the economic life, gives us the most important impulses for what we then carry along into the spiritual world in the form of impulses. In the same way in which we bring along with us from the spiritual world forces that constitute, above all, our spiritual life upon the earth, so do we bring back again into the spiritual world those forces that we develop through our economic life in the form of love for humanity and brotherliness. These forces accompany us in the spiritual world; there, they are important impulses for us. If we contemplate that which develops from year to year in the life of a child, we can see in it the inheritance coming from the spiritual world, enabling us to develop a spiritual sphere of activity upon the earth; and if we look upon that which occurs through our economic life, namely, that through our will we develop activities for others, we can see therein the impulses which we carry along with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the portal of death.

What we develop ONLY between birth and death, appears to one who is able to contemplate the spiritual world as a contrast to what we develop in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Read my descriptions of the “Soul-region” and of the “Spirit-region” in the book Theosophy, for there you will find that these things are described in concepts that arise altogether from a living contemplation of those conditions. Everything that constitutes the sphere of law is the, very opposite of the impulses that arise during the life between death and a new birth.

Our spiritual life is based upon the forces that come from the time before our birth, or conception; we develop an economic life in order to carry into the spiritual world forces that we unfold through it; and what we unfold HERE, what pertains exclusively to the earth, is the political, juridical life, the life of the State. This has no connection with the spiritual world.

In addressing a public audience today on the most important question of our time, it makes a great difference if one speaks from a knowledge of the deeper forces of world-historical evolution, that is, from initiation-science, or if one speaks without such knowledge. It is relatively easy to speak about modern questions if one relies upon data of external knowledge which are considered scientific, practical, and so on. It is, however, extraordinarily difficult to speak about these questions from the standpoint of initiation-science—from which indeed everything is derived with which we have to deal at such gatherings as ours today. For he who speaks from that standpoint about problems of the time knows that he is opposed not only by the casual, subjective opinions of those to whom he speaks. He knows too that a great part of mankind today is already under the control, from one side or another, of Ahrimanic forces of a cosmic nature which are growing stronger and stronger. To explain what I mean by this, I must give you a kind of historical survey of a fairly long period of human history.

From various statements which have been made here and which you will also find in some of my lecture-courses, you know that we have to place the beginning of our modern age in the middle of the fifteenth century. We have always called this period—of which we are really only at the beginning—the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. It has replaced the Greco-Latin Epoch, which we reckon from the middle of the eighth century B.C. to the middle of the fifteenth century; and further back still, we have the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch. I have merely indicated this so that you may remember where, in human evolution as a whole, we place the epoch in which we feel ourselves standing as modern men.

Now you know that at the close of the first third of the Greco-Latin Epoch, the Mystery of Golgotha took place. And from many different aspects we have characterized what really came about for human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, in fact for the whole evolution of the earth. Today, into this broad historical survey, we will place various things concerning mankind which are connected with this Mystery.

With this in view, let us glance back into far earlier times, let us say, into the ages about the beginning of the third millennium B.C. You are aware how little is said in external historical tradition about this early evolution of the human race on earth. You know, too, how external documents point over to Asia, to the Orient. From many anthroposophical sources, you will know that the further we go back in mankind's evolution, the more we find a different constitution of the human soul, and something like an ancient, original wisdom underlying the whole evolution of humanity. You know, further, that certain traditions of an ancient wisdom of mankind were preserved in close, secret circles, right into the nineteenth century. They have even been preserved into our own time—but not, for the most part, at all faithfully.

When a man of today learns to know something of this original wisdom, he is astounded at the depths of the realities to which it points. Yet in the course of the studies we have been pursuing for many years, it has been shown that this widespread wisdom-teaching of ancient times must always be contrasted with the understanding of life and the world that was possessed by the old Hebrew people and bore a completely different character. With a certain justice the widespread original wisdom is described as the heathen, pagan element, and to this is opposed the Hebrew, Jewish element. From external traditions and literature you are aware how the Christian element then arose out of the Jewish.

You can already gather from these external facts something that I beg you to bear in mind, namely, that it was essential in humanity's evolution to confront the ancient heathen element and its wisdom with the Jewish element out of which Christianity evolved partially, at all events. The primeval heathen or pagan wisdom in its totality was not destined to have the sole influence on the further evolution of mankind. And now the question must arise: Why had the ancient pagan wisdom, which is in many respects so wonderful, to experience a new form, a transformation, through Judaism and Christianity? This question inevitably arises.

The answer is supplied for Initiation-wisdom only through a very, very weighty fact, through an event which took place far over in Asia at the beginning of the third millennium of the pre-Christian era. Clairvoyant vision finds in looking back that an incarnation of a super-sensible Being in a human being had taken place there, just as in the Event of Golgotha an incarnation of the super-sensible Christ Being had taken place in the man Jesus of Nazareth. The incarnation that took place at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. is extraordinarily difficult to follow up, even with the science of seership, of initiation. It gave humanity something of immense brilliance, having an incisive effect. What it gave to humanity, in fact, was the primeval wisdom.

Viewed externally, one can say that it was a wisdom penetrating deep into reality; cold, based purely on ideas, permeated little by feeling. The actual inner nature of this wisdom can be judged only by going back to that incarnation which took place over in Asia at the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium. It is revealed to the retrospective clairvoyant gaze that this was an actual human incarnation of the Luciferic Power.

And this incarnation of Lucifer in humanity, which in a certain way has been achieved, was the origin of the widely extended ancient wisdom based on the Third Post-Atlantean civilization.

There was still an after-effect, even in Grecian times, of the widespread cultural impulse that was derived from this Asiatic, Luciferic human being. Luciferic wisdom was of the utmost benefit to man in that epoch of evolution—brilliant in a certain way, graduated according to the different peoples and races among which it was spread. It was plainly recognizable throughout the whole of Asia, then in the Egyptian civilization, the Babylonian civilization and even in the culture of Greece.

All that was possible to the humanity of that time in thought, in the realm of poetry, in deeds, was in a certain way determined through the entry of this Luciferic impulse into human civilization.

It would, of course, be extraordinarily philistine to wish to say: That was an incarnation of Lucifer, hence we must flee from it! Such philistinism could make one also flee from the beauty and greatness that has come to mankind from this Luciferic stream, for the fruits of Greek culture with all their beauty, proceeded, as already said, from this stream of evolution. The whole of Gnostic thought existing at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, an impressive wisdom shedding light deep into cosmic realities—this whole Gnostic knowledge was inspired by the impulse coming from Luciferic forces. One must not say that Gnostic thought is therefore false; one is merely characterizing it by saying that it is permeated by Luciferic forces.

Then, considerably more than two thousand years after the Luciferic incarnation, came the Mystery of Golgotha. It may be said that the men among whom the impulse of this Mystery spread were still fully imbued in their thinking and feeling with what had come from the impulse of Lucifer. And now there entered into the evolution of civilized humanity an entirely different impulse, the impulse proceeding from the Christ. We have often spoken of what this Christ Impulse signifies within civilized humanity. The Christ-Impulse—I will only touch on this today—was taken up by the hearts and minds that I have just characterized. One might say that it shone into all the best that came to man from Lucifer. And in the first Christian centuries, men understood the Christ through what they had received from Lucifer. These things must be faced without prejudice; otherwise it is not really possible to understand the particular way in which the Christ Impulse was received in the first centuries of our era.

As the Luciferic impulse began to fade more and more, men were also increasingly unable to absorb the Christ Impulse in the right way. Consider how much has become materialistic in the course of modern times. But if you ask yourself what in particular has become materialistic, you must receive the answer: a great part of modern Christian theology. For it is simply the starkest materialism to which a great part of modern Christian theology succumbs when it no longer sees the Christ in the man Jesus of Nazareth. It sees only the human being, the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ the man whom one can understand if one will only raise one's self a little to some sort of higher understanding. The more the man Jesus of Nazareth could be regarded as an ordinary human being, one belonging to the ranks of other noted human personalities, the better it pleased a certain materialistic trend of modern theology. Of the super-sensible element of the Event of Golgotha, modern theology is willing to recognize little, very little.

The impulses entering humanity from a Luciferic source sank down gradually into the soul. On the other hand, however, another impulse, which we call the Ahrimanic, is growing stronger and stronger in modern times. It will become increasingly strong in the near future and on into future ages. The Ahrimanic impulse proceeds from a super-sensible Being different from the Being of Christ or of Lucifer. Equally with ‘super-sensible’ one can say ‘subsensible’—but that is not the point here. The influence of this Being becomes especially powerful in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. If we look at the confused conditions of recent years we shall find that men have been brought to such chaotic conditions mainly through the Ahrimanic powers.

Just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer at the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium, as there was the Christ Incarnation at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so there will be a Western incarnation of the Ahriman being some little time after our present earthly existence, in fact, in the third post-Christian millennium. To form a right conception of the historical evolution of mankind during approximately 6000 years, one must grasp that at the one pole stands a Luciferic incarnation, in the center, the incarnation of Christ, and at the other pole the Ahrimanic incarnation. Lucifer is the power that stirs up in man all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ Impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium.

Thus these two poles—the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic—are continuously present in man. Viewed historically, we find that the Luciferic preponderated in certain currents of cultural development of the pre-Christian age and continued into the first centuries of our era. On the other hand the Ahrimanic influence has been at work since the middle of the fifteenth century and will increase in strength until an actual incarnation of Ahriman takes place among Western humanity.

Now it is characteristic of such things that they are prepared long in advance. Ahrimanic powers prepare the evolution of mankind in such a way that it can fall a prey to Ahriman when he appears in human form within Western civilization—hardly then to be called ‘civilization’ in our sense—as once Lucifer appeared in human form in China, as once Christ appeared in human form in Asia Minor. It is of no avail to give oneself illusions today about these things. Ahriman will appear in human form and the only question is, how he will find humanity prepared. Will his preparations have secured for him as followers the whole of mankind that today calls itself civilized, or will he find a humanity that can offer resistance. It does not help at all to give oneself up to illusions. People nowadays flee the truth, and one cannot give it to them in an unvarnished form because they would ridicule it and scoff and jeer. But if one gives it to them through the “Threefold Social Organism” as one now tries to do, then they will not have it either—not the majority, at any rate. The fact that people reject these things is just one of the means which the Ahrimanic powers can use and which will give Ahriman the greatest possible following when he appears in human form on earth. This disregard of the weightiest truths is precisely what will build Ahriman the best bridge to the success of his incarnation. And nothing will help us to find the right position in regard to the part played by Ahriman in human evolution except an unprejudiced study of the forces through which Ahriman's influence works, as well as learning to know the forces through which mankind can arm itself against being tempted and led astray. For this reason we will cast a brief glance today at various things which would foster support of Ahriman and which Ahrimanic powers, working out of super-sensible worlds through human minds down here, will particularly employ in order to make his following as numerous as possible.

One of the means is this—that it is not realized what is the actual significance for man of certain kinds of thought and conception which predominate in modern times. You know, indeed, what a great difference there is between the way a man felt himself to be within the whole cosmos in the Egyptian age, let us say, and even in the time of Greece, and how he feels since the beginning of the modern age, since the close of the Middle Ages. Picture to yourselves a well-instructed ancient Egyptian. He knew that his body was constituted not merely of the ingredients which exist here on earth and are embodied in the animal kingdom, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom. He knew that the forces which he saw in the stars above, worked into his being as man; he felt himself a member of the whole cosmos. He felt the whole cosmos not only quick with life, but ensouled and imbued with spirit; in his consciousness there lived something of the spiritual beings of the cosmos, of the soul-nature of the cosmos and its life. All this has been lost in the course of later human history. Today man gazes from his earth up to the star-world and to him it is filled with fixed stars, suns, planets, comets, and so on. But with what means does he examine all that looks down to him out of cosmic space? He examines it with mathematics, with the science of mechanics. What lies around the earth is robbed of spirit, robbed of soul, even of life. It is a great mechanism, in fact, only to be grasped by the aid of mathematical, mechanistic laws. With the help of these mathematical, mechanistic laws we grasp it magnificently! A student of spiritual science is undoubtedly just the one to value the achievements of a Galileo, a Kepler, and others, but what penetrates human understanding and consciousness through the tenets of these great spirits in human evolution merely shows the universe as a great mechanism.

What this means is only revealed to one who is able to grasp man in his whole nature. It is all very well for astronomers and astro-physicists to present the universe as a mechanism which can be understood and calculated by mathematical formulae. This indeed is what a man will believe in the time from waking in the morning till going to sleep again at night. But in those unconscious depths which he does not reach with his waking consciousness but which yet belong to his existence and in which he lives between going to sleep and waking, something quite different concerning the universe flows into his soul. There lives in the human soul a knowledge which, although unknown to the waking consciousness, is yet present in the depths and moulds the soul—a knowledge of the spirit, of the life of the soul, of the life of the cosmos. And although in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of what goes on there in communion with the spirit, soul and life of the universe while he sleeps—in the soul the things are there; they live within it. And much of the great discord felt by modern man is derived from the disharmony between what the soul experiences and what the waking consciousness acknowledges as its world-conception.

And what does the whole spirit and purport of anthroposophical spiritual science say about such things? It says: What the ideas of Galileo, Copernicus, have brought to mankind is grand and mighty, but not an absolute truth, by no means an absolute truth. It is one aspect of the universe, one side from a certain standpoint. It is only through the arrogance of modern man that people say today: “Ptolemaic world-system—childishness; that is what men had when they were still children. We have made such great strides—right ‘to the stars’ and that is what we now take as the absolute.” It is just as little an absolute as the Ptolemaic system was an absolute, it is one aspect. The only right view—according to spiritual science—is to realize that all that is accepted by way of mere world-mathematics, mere world-schematism of a mechanical order, does not furnish man with absolute truth about the universe, but with illusions. The illusions are necessary because mankind goes through varied forms of education in its different stages of evolution. For modern education we need these illusions of a mathematical nature about the universe, we must acquire them, but we must know that they are illusions. And most of all they are illusions when we transpose them into our daily environment, when, in accordance with the atomic or molecular theories, we even endeavour to create a kind of astronomy for the substances of the earth. A right attitude in regard to the whole of modern science, insofar as it thinks along these lines, will recognize that its knowledge is illusion.

Now, in order that his incarnation may take the most profitable form, it is of the utmost interest to Ahriman that people should perfect themselves in all our illusory modern science, but without knowing that it is illusion. Ahriman has the greatest possible interest in instructing men in mathematics, but not in instructing them that mathematical-mechanistic concepts of the universe are merely illusions. He is intensely interested in bringing men chemistry, physics, biology and so on, as they are presented today in all their remarkable effects, but he is interested in making men believe that these are absolute truths, not that they are only points of view, like photographs from one side. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a correct photograph, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree. If you photograph it from four sides, you can in any case get an idea of it. To conceal from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science with its supplement of a superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which grips all circles today and by which men even want to organize their social science, should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then come as a human being into Western civilization and find the scientific superstition.

But I ask you not to draw false conclusions from what I have just said. It would be a false conclusion to avoid the science of the day; that is the very falsest conclusion which could be drawn. We must get to know science; we should get an exact knowledge of all that comes from this direction—but with the full consciousness that we are receiving an illusory aspect, an illusion necessary for our education as men. We do not safeguard ourselves against Ahriman by avoiding modern science, but by learning to know its character. For modern science gives us an external illusion of the universe, and we need this illusion. Do not imagine that we do not need it. We must only fill it in from quite another side with actual reality gained through spiritual research, we must rise from the illusory character to the true reality. You will find reference in many of my lecture-courses to what I am telling you today, and you will see how everywhere it has been sought to enter fully into the science of our time, but to lift it all to the sphere where one can see its real value. You cannot wish to get rid of the rainbow because you know it to be an illusion of light and color! You will not understand it if you do not realize its illusory character. But it is just the same with all that modern science gives you for your imagination of the universe, it gives only illusions and that must be recognized. It is by educating oneself through these illusions that one arrives at the reality.

This, then, represents one of the means used by Ahriman to make his incarnation as effective as possible—this keeping of man back in scientific superstition.

The second means that he employs is to stir up all the emotions that split men up into small groups—groups that mutually attack one another. You need only look at all the conflicting parties that exist today, and if you are unprejudiced you will recognize that the explanation is not to be found merely in human nature. If men honestly try to explain this so-called World War through human dis-harmonies, they will realize that with what they find in physical humanity they cannot explain it. It is precisely here that “super-sensible” powers, Ahrimanic powers, have been at work.

These Ahrimanic powers are working, in fact, wherever dis-harmonies arise between groups of men. Now the question arises on what foundation is most of what we are considering based?

Let us proceed from a very characteristic example.—The modern proletariat has had its Karl Marx. Observe closely how the doctrines of Karl Marx have been spread among the proletariat, with Marxist literature reaching practically immeasurable proportions. You will find all the methods of our present-day science used in the books; everything is strictly proved, so strictly proved that many people, of whom one would never have supposed it, have fallen victim to Marxism. What was the actual destiny of Marxism? It spread at first, as you know, among the proletariat and was firmly rejected by university science. Today there are already a number of university scientists who have veered round to acknowledging Marxist logic. They adhere to it because its literature has proved that its conclusions are in excellent accord, that from the standpoint of modern science Marxism can be quite neatly proved. Middle-class circles have unfortunately had no Karl Marx who could have proved the opposite for them; for just as one can prove the ideological character of right, morality, and so forth, the theory of surplus value and materialistic historical research from the Marxist standpoint, so is it possible to prove their exact opposite. A middle-class, bourgeois-Marx would be fully able to prove the exact opposite by the same strict method. There is no sort of swindle or humbug about it; the proof would work out right.

Whence does this come? It comes from the fact that present human thinking, the present intellect, lies in a stratum of being where it does not reach down to realities. One can therefore prove something quite strictly, and also prove its opposite. It is possible today to prove spiritualism on the one hand and materialism on the other. And people may fight against each other from equally good standpoints because present-day intellectualism is in an upper layer of reality and does not go down into the depths of being. And it is the same with party opinions. A man who does not look deeper but simply lets himself be accepted into a certain party-circle—by reason of his education, heredity, circumstances of life and State—quite honestly believes—or so he thinks—in the possibility of proving the tenets of the party into which he has slipped, as he says. And then—then he fights against someone else who has slipped into another party! And the one is just as right as the other. This calls forth chaos and confusion over mankind that will gradually become greater and greater unless men see through it. Ahriman makes use of this confusion in order to prepare the triumph of his incarnation and to drive men with increasing force into what they find so difficult to realize—namely, that by intellectual or modern scientific reasoning today, one can prove anything and equally well prove its opposite. The point is for us to recognize that everything can be proved and for that reason to examine the proofs put forward in science today. It is only in natural science that reality is shown by the facts; in no other field can one consider intellectual proofs valid. The only way to escape the danger that threatens if one accepts the lures of Ahriman and his desire to drive men deeper and deeper into these things, is to realize through anthroposophical spiritual science that human knowledge must be sought for in a stratum deeper than that in which the validity of our proofs arises. And so, in order to create dissensions, Ahriman also makes use of what develops from the old conditions of heredity which man has really outgrown in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. The Ahrimanic powers use all that is derived from old circumstances of heredity in order to set men against each other in conflicting groups. All that comes from old differences of family, race, tribe, peoples, is used by Ahriman to create confusion. “Freedom for every nation, even the smallest ...” These were fine-sounding words. But the powers hostile to man always use fine words in order to bring confusion and in order to attain the things that Ahriman wishes to attain for his incarnation.

If we inquire: Who stirs up nations against each other? Who raises the questions that are directing humanity today?—the answer is: the Ahrimanic deception which plays into human life. And in this field men very easily let themselves be deceived. They are not willing to descend to the lower strata where reality is to be found. For, you see, Ahriman skillfully prepares his goal beforehand; ever since the Reformation and the Renaissance, the economist has been emerging in modern civilization as the representative governing type. That is an actual historical fact. If you go back to ancient times, even to those that I have characterized today as the Luciferic—who were the governing types then? Initiates. The Egyptian Pharaohs, the Babylonian rulers, the Asiatic rulers—they were initiates. Then the priest-type emerged as ruler and the priest-type was really the ruler right up to the Reformation and the Renaissance. Since that time the economist has been in command. Rulers are in fact merely the handymen, the understrappers of the economists. One must not imagine that the rulers of modern times are anything but the understrappers of the economists. And all that has resulted by way of law and justice—one should only study it carefully—is simply a consequence of what economically oriented men have thought. In the nineteenth century the “economical” man is replaced for the first time by the man thinking in terms of banking, and in the nineteenth century there is created for the first time the organization of finance which swamps every other relationship. One must only be able to look into these things and follow them up empirically and practically.

All that I stated in the second public lecture here (The Social Future, October 25, 1919) is profoundly true. One could only wish that it were followed up in all details; it would then be seen how fundamentally true these things are. But just because this rulership of the mere ‘symbol for solid goods’ (that is to say, money—quotation from the lecture) has arisen, Ahriman has been given another essential medium for the deception of mankind. If men do not realize that the rights-state and the organism of the Spirit must be set against the economic order called up through the economists and the banks, then again, through this lack of awareness, Ahriman will find an important instrument for preparing his incarnation. His incarnation is undoubtedly coming, and this lack of insight will enable him to prepare it triumphantly.

Such means can be used by Ahriman for a certain type of man. But there is another type—indeed the two are often mixed in one personality—and this also, from a different direction, provides Ahriman with an easy way to success.

Now it is a fact that in real life, total errors are not so harmful as half- or quarter-truths. Total errors are soon seen through, whereas half- and quarter-truths mislead people. They live with them, these partial truths become a pan of life and cause the most horrible devastation.

There are people today who do not realize the one-sidedness of the Galileo-Copernican world-conception, or who at least do not see its illusory character, or are too easygoing to examine it. We have just shown how wrong that is. But there are also people today, numberless people who acknowledge a certain half-truth, a very significant half-truth, and who do not go into the question of the purely hypothetical justification of it. Strange as it may appear to many people, it is just as one-sided to view the world solely through the Gospel and reject any other search into true reality, as it is to view the world from the standpoint of Galileo and Copernicus, or of university materialistic science in general.

The Gospel was given to those who lived in the first centuries of Christianity, and to believe that today the Gospel can give the whole of Christianity is simply a half-truth. It is therefore also a half-error which befogs people and thus furnishes Ahriman with the best means of attaining the goal and the triumph of his incarnation.

How numerous are those who think they are speaking out of Christian humility, but in reality out of dreadful arrogance, when they say: “Oh, we need no spiritual science! The homeliness, the simplicity of the Gospels leads us to what men need of the eternal!” A frightful arrogance is expressed, for the most part, in this apparent humility, which can very well be used by Ahriman in the sense I have indicated. For do not forget what I explained at the beginning of today's lecture, how in the time in which the Gospel falls, men were still permeated by the Luciferic impulse in their thought, feeling and general views, and that they could understand the Gospel by a certain Luciferic Gnosis. But the grasp of the Gospel in this old sense is not possible today. No real understanding of the Christ can be gained if one relies merely on the Gospel, especially in the form in which it has been handed down. There exists nowhere today a less true understanding of Christ than in the various faiths and confessions.

The Gospel must be deepened by spiritual science if we wish to gain an actual grasp of the Christ. It is then interesting to examine the separate Gospels and arrive at their real content. To accept the Gospel as it is and as numberless people accept it today, and particularly as it is taught today, is not a path to Christ; it is a path away from Christ. Hence the confessions are moving further and further away from Christ. To what sort of Christ-conception does a man come who will accept the Gospel and only the Gospel, without the depth given by spiritual science? He comes ultimately to a Christ—but that is the utmost that he can reach through the Gospel alone. It is not a reality of the Christ, for today only spiritual science can lead to that. What the Gospel leads to is an hallucination of the Christ, a real inner picture or vision, yet only a picture. The Gospel today provides the way to come to a vision of the Christ, but not to the reality of Christ. That is just the reason why modern theology has become so materialistic. Theological commentators and expounders of the Gospel have asked themselves: What is to be made of the Gospel? They decide at length that in their view the result is similar to what one gets when one examines the case of Paul before Damascus. And then these theologians, who are supposed to confirm Christianity, but who really undermine it, say: Paul was simply ill, suffering from nerves and he had a vision before Damascus.

The point is that through the Gospel itself one can come only to hallucinations, to visions, but not to realities; the Gospel does not give us the real Christ, but only an hallucination of the Christ. The real Christ must be sought today through all that can be gained from a spiritual knowledge of the world.

These very people who swear by the Gospel alone and reject every kind of real spiritual knowledge, form the beginning of a flock for Ahriman when he appears in human shape in modern civilization. From these circles, from these members of confessions and sects who repulse the concrete knowledge brought by spiritual endeavor, whole hosts will develop as adherents of Ahriman. Now this is all beginning to come into existence. It is there, it is at work in present humanity and one who speaks to men today with the knowledge of spiritual science speaks into it, no matter whether he is speaking on social or other questions. He knows where the hostile powers lie, that they live supersensibly and that men are their poor misguided victims. This is the call to humanity: “Free yourselves from all these things that form such a great temptation to contribute to Ahriman's triumph!”

Many people have felt something of this sort. But there is not yet courage everywhere to come to an understanding with the historical impulses of the Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman in the urgent way that is necessary and that is emphasized by Anthroposophy. Even those who have an idea of what is necessary will not go far enough. For instance, look at examples where there arises some knowledge that the secular materialistic science with this Ahrimanic character must be permeated with the Christ Impulse, and how, on the other hand, the Gospel must be illuminated through the explanations of spiritual science. Consider how many people struggle to the point of really shedding light in either of these directions by means of spiritual-scientific knowledge! Yet humanity will only acquire the right attitude to the earthly incarnation of Ahriman if it sees through these things and has the courage, will and energy to illumine both secular science and the Gospel by the Spirit. Otherwise the result is always superficialities. Think, for example, of how Cardinal Newman—who, after all, was an enlightened man, one who followed modern religious development—at the time of his investiture as Cardinal in Rome stated openly in his address that if the Christian Catholic teaching was to survive, a new revelation was necessary. We have no need, however, of a new revelation; the time of revelations in the old sense is over. We need a new science, one that is illumined by the Spirit. But men must have the courage for such a new science.

Think of a literary phenomenon like the Lux Mundi movement that originated with certain eminent theologians, members of the English High Church, at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties of the last century. It consisted of a series of studies, imbued throughout with the endeavor to build a bridge from secular science to the contents of dogma. One might call it a floundering hither and thither, never a bold grasping of secular science, never an illumination of it with the spirit. There was no unprejudiced examination of the Gospel with the knowledge that the Gospel of itself is not enough today, that it must be elucidated and illumined. But mankind must be courageous in both directions and say: secular science by itself leads to illusion, the Gospel by itself leads to hallucination. The middle way between illusion and hallucination is found only by grasping reality through the Spirit. That is the point.

We must see through such things as these today. Purely mundane science would make men entirely subject to illusion; in fact ultimately they would commit only follies. Quite enough folly is perpetuated today already, for surely the World War catastrophe was a great folly! Yet many people were involved in it who were thoroughly saturated with the official secular science of our time. And if you notice what remarkable psychological phenomena at once crop up when some sect or other places one of the four Gospels in the foreground, then you will more easily understand what I have been saying about the Gospels today. See how strongly inclined to all sorts of hallucinations are sects that pay heed solely to the Gospel of St. John, or solely the Gospel of St. Luke! Fortunately there are four Gospels, which outwardly contradict one another, and this has so far prevented the great harm which such one-sidedness would cause. By being faced with four Gospels people do not go too far in the direction of the one, but have the others beside it. One Gospel is read aloud on one Sunday and another on another Sunday and so the illusory power of the one is counterbalanced by that of another. A great wisdom lies in the fact that these four Gospels have come down to the civilized world. In this way man is protected from being caught up by some one stream, which will take possession of him—as in the case of so many members of sects—if he is influenced by one Gospel alone. When solely one Gospel works upon him it is particularly clear how this leads at last to hallucination.

In fact, it is essential today to give up much of one's subjective inclination, much of what one is attached to and thinks pious or clever. Mankind must above all seek universality and the courage to look at things from all sides.

I wished to say this to you today so that you may realize that what one tries now to bring about within humanity has truly deeper grounds than just some sort of subjective prejudice. In fact one can say that it is read from the signs of the times and that it must be brought about.