The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When I have had occasion in recent years to speak on any of the great yearly festivals, Christmas, Easter or Whitsuntide, I have felt bound to say that we have no right, especially under the conditions that obtain today, to commemorate these occasions in the old accustomed manner; we have no right to forget the widespread suffering, the widespread sorrow of the times, and to recall only the greatest Event which took place in earthly evolution. It is our duty, standing as we do on the ground of our Spiritual conception of the World, so fully to realize all that which indicates decline in human civilization today, that this realization permeates our thoughts even round the Christmas tree. It is clearly our duty so to receive the birth of Christ Jesus into our hearts, into our souls, that we do not close our eyes to the fearful deterioration that has overtaken the so-called culture of mankind.

At this very time it is for us to bring forward the question: “Has not the thought of Christmas also suffered the fate of being seized by the forces of general deterioration?” When Christmas is spoken of today are we still conscious of that of which man ought to be conscious when he raises his thoughts and feelings to the contemplation of the festival of Christ? Are men in general conscious of the true meaning of what entered human evolution at the Mystery of Golgotha?

We light up our Christmas trees, we repeat the customary words and phrases associated with the Christmas festival, but all too often we avoid opening our eyes fully, we avoid awakening our consciousness fully to the need of saying to ourselves: “Here, too, there is decline. Where art Thou, O Christ-Power, Thou who canst actively bring about a new ascent?” For it must have been very clear to you in the lectures which for many years have been given in our circles, that only by the power of Christ will it be possible to permeate declining civilization with that impulse which can give it a new uplift.

In these days we must often think of men, in the middle of the nineteenth century, or towards the last third of it, who, from a certain materialistic mentality, spoke quite differently from the way many men speak today. They spoke more honestly than most men do today. I should like to recall to you one personality, a truly materialistic mind—David Friedrich Strauss. You know that his book, The Old Faith and the New, is a kind of Bible of materialism.

Among the questions Strauss asks in this book is the following: “Can we still be Christians?” He answers this question, and the unusual thing about his answer is that it comes from a mind fundamentally materialistic, but at the same time honest.

David Friedrich Strauss constructed a world-edifice of thoughts, of ideas, formed entirely according to materialistic, physical laws. He placed man within it in a world-order in which human nature contained none but physical laws. From these convictions, Strauss answered the question “can we still be Christians?” with an emphatic “No”. For men who held the views on natural science which Strauss held in accordance with the consciousness of his times, could not be Christians.

Thus a fatal, but entirely honest opinion is expressed in this “No” of David Friedrich Strauss, and the feeling often occurs to us today: Would that the official advocates of this or that religious faith were as honest as was David Friedrich Strauss. Could they but see that though they use the name of Christ they are really active opponents of Christianity.

My dear friends, we dare not surrender ourselves in these days to a love of ease, nor close our eyes to the essentially important happenings of the present time. It may not seem to you to be associated with Christmas, though it does indeed seem so to me, when I refer to an experience which came to me through a kind of spiritual investigation of an actual fact of the present day.

You all know those persons who to a great extent are responsible, especially in Central Europe, for the dreadful conditions into which we have drifted, so far as any human being can be called responsible for these things. What did these men do when misfortune broke over Europe? They wrote books! We had books written by all kinds of people.

Now, the following experiment can be made with the help of Spiritual Science. The question can be asked, but strictly in accordance with Spiritual Science: “What forms of thought speak to us from the greater part of these self-vindicating books?” I have tried from every side to answer this question conscientiously. I have asked myself: “Of what kind are the thought-forms of these men on whom so much of the fate of Central Europe depends?” If we do not proceed in the abstract, but enter into things in the concrete, we compare one thing with another. In this way a comparison came to me when I asked myself the question: “About what period in the normal course of evolution in Europe were such thought-forms cultivated as those which we find in the leading personalities during the world war?” After conscientious scrutiny of the facts it was made plain to me that men thought in this manner about the time of the Roman, Julius Caesar. There is no difference between the soul- and thought-life of Julius Caesar at the time, let us say, of his Gallic wars, and the way in which such modern personalities form their thoughts. This means that these men have remained in a life of thought entirely unaffected by Christianity, for Caesar lived before the Mystery of Golgotha had broken into evolution. Even if the name of Christ Jesus is sometimes on their lips, the soul-life of these men has developed in such a way that it has nothing to do with concrete Christianity.

As the result of our many-sided studies we know that if anything develops in its own period, it is fundamentally good for humanity, but that it is otherwise when this thing remains stationary and comes to the front later. When this happens, when for instance that which was suited to the time of the Caesars continues to play a part in the twentieth century, that which was suitable to Caesar's day is transformed into something Luciferic. For that which ought to have worked properly in another period becomes, if it remains stationary, Luciferic. It is indeed essentially Luciferic.

We may now ask: “How is it that people whose fate has placed them in a leading position, have in their lives remained behind in this way?” If this question is to be answered we must turn our attention to those who claim to fill their spiritual life with the Christ-impulse, but who really work in an anti-Christian direction. Let us turn our attention to many official representatives of religious creeds, men who pretend to speak according to the Gospels, but who are opposed to everything that really tells of the living Christ in our day. The most anti-Christian persons are frequently found today among the clergy, among the preachers of the so-called Christian creeds.

If among other writings people would investigate a book—regarded by many as setting the fashion—a book entitled Das Wesen des Christentums (The Nature of Christianity), by Adolf Harnack, they would find an answer to this question. If the name of Christ were struck out of this book and replaced by the name of a God generally little known, a God who permeates and controls human life just as he permeates and controls Nature; if the name of Christ were struck out and replaced by the name of Jahve of the Old Testament, this book would be nearer the truth than it is, and would then have some meaning.

The fact is that Adolf Harnack knows nothing of the real Being of Christ, that he has not the vaguest idea of the real Being of Christ, that he worships a universal, indefinite God and then labels this universal, indefinite God with the name of Christ. And who is Adolf Harnack? Adolf Harnack has become the fashionable theologian of the circles which have provided the ground for the spiritual tendencies of those persons of whom I have been speaking. It is because no true revelation regarding the Christ comes any longer from the representatives of the creeds, that we no longer find in the events of the present day, among the men bound up with these events, any understanding for the true revelation of the Christ.

It hardly means anything to thousands, to millions of people at the present day, when they speak of the festival of Christmas; for they know nothing of the Being of Christ in the sense that is so necessary for our time. We must look into these things if in a deeper sense we will to understand the original causes of the downfall in contemporary events, and in the life of mankind within these events.

I have frequently spoken to you here of that important event which came to pass in the last third of the nineteenth century, the event through which a special relationship was established between the Archangelic Power, that Being whom we call the Archangel Michael, and the destiny of mankind. I have reminded you that since November, 1879, Michael has become the Regent, as it were, of all those who seek to bring to men the beneficial forces necessary to their healthy progress.

My dear friends, in our day we know that when such a matter is indicated, the indication refers to two different things: first, to the objective fact, and second, to the way this objective fact is connected with what men are willing to receive into their consciousness, into their Will. The objective fact is simply this, that in November, 1879, beyond the sphere of the Sense World, in the Supersensible World, that event took place which may be described as follows: Michael has gained for himself the power, when men come to meet him with all the living content of their souls, so to permeate them with his power, that they are able to transform their old materialistic intellectual power—which by that time had become strong in humanity—into spiritual intellectual power, into spiritual power of understanding. That is objective fact; it has taken place. We may say concerning it that since November, 1879, Michael has entered into another relationship with man than that in which he formerly stood. But it is required of men that they shall become the servants of Michael.

What I mean by this will become quite clear to you through the following explanation. You are aware that before the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished upon earth, the Jews of the Old Testament looked up to their Jahve (or Jehovah). Those who, among the Jewish priests, looked up in full consciousness to Jahve, were well aware that they could not reach him directly with human perception. The very name, Jahve, was held to be unspeakable, and if it had to be uttered, a sign only was made, a sign which resembles certain combinations of signs which we attempt in the art of Eurhythmy. The Jewish priesthood, however, was well aware that men could approach Jahve through Michael. They called Michael the countenance of Jahve. Just as we learn to know a man when we look into his face, just as we draw conclusions about the gentleness of his soul from the gentleness of his countenance, and about his character from the way he looks at us, so the priesthood of the Old Testament, through the atavistic clairvoyance which flowed into their souls in dreams, desired to gain from the countenance of Jahve, from Michael's connection with Jahve, that which it was not yet possible for mankind to gain.

The position of this priesthood towards Michael and Jahve was the right one. Their position towards Michael was right because they knew that if a man of that time turned to Michael, he could find through Michael the Jahve-power, which it was proper for the humanity of that time to seek.

Other Soul-Regents of humanity have appeared since then in the place of Michael; but in November, 1879, Michael once more took the lead, and can become active in the soul-life of those who seek the paths to him. These paths today are the paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge. We may speak of “the paths of Michael”, just as well as of the “paths of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge”.

But just at the time when Michael entered in this way into relationship with the souls of men, in order again to become their inspirer for three centuries, at this very time the demonic opposing force, having previously prepared itself, set up the very strongest opposition to him, so that a cry went through the world during our so-called war-years, in reality years of terror, a cry which has become the great World-misunderstanding which now fills the hearts and souls of men.

Let us consider what would have become of the Jewish people of the Old Testament, if instead of approaching Jahve through Michael they had sought to approach Him directly. They would have become an intolerant people, a national self-seeking people concerned with the aggrandizement of their own nation, a nation thinking only of itself. For Jahve is the God who is connected with all natural things, and in the external historical development of mankind, He manifests His Being through the connection of generations, as it expresses itself in the essential qualities of the people. It was only because the ancient Jewish people desired at that time to approach Jahve through Michael, that they saved themselves from becoming nationally so egoistic that Christ Jesus would not have been able to come forth from among them. Because they had permeated themselves with the Michael power, as this power was in their time, the Jewish people were not so strongly impregnated with forces given over to national egoism, as would have been the case had they turned directly to Jahve.

Today Michael is again the Regent of the World, but it is in a new way that mankind must become related to him. For now Michael is not the countenance of Jahve, but the countenance of Christ Jesus. Today we must approach the Christ-impulse through Michael. In many respects humanity has not yet struggled through to this. Humanity has retained atavistically the old qualities of perception by which Michael could be approached when he was still the intermediary to Jahve; and so today humanity has a false relationship to Michael. This false relationship to Michael is apparent in a very characteristic phenomenon.

During the years of the war we heard continually the universal lie: “Freedom for individual nations, even for the smallest nations.” This is an essentially false idea, because today, in the Michael period, the all-important matter is not groups of men, but human individuals, separate men. This lie is nothing else than the endeavour to permeate each individual nation not with the new force of Michael, but with the force of the old, the pre-Christian time, with the Michael-force of the Old Testament. However paradoxical it may sound, there is a tendency among so-called civilized nations at the present day to transform what was justifiable among the Jewish people of the Old Testament, into something Luciferic, and to make of this the most powerful impulse in every single nation.

People wish today to build up the republics of Poland, of France, of America, etc., upon methods of thought suited to Old Testament times. They strive to follow Michael as it was right to follow him before the Mystery of Golgotha, when men found through him the Folk-God Jahve. Today it is Christ Jesus whom we must strive to find through Michael, Christ Jesus the Divine Leader of the whole human race. This means that we must seek for feelings and ideas which have nothing to do with human distinctions of any kind on the Earth. Such feelings and ideas cannot be found on the surface. They must be sought where the spirit and soul-part of man pulsate i.e., along the path of Spiritual Science. The matter lies thus, that we must resolve to seek the real Christ upon the path of Spiritual Science i.e., upon the Michael-path. Only through this striving after spiritual truth is the real Christ to be sought and found; otherwise it would be better to extinguish the lights of Christmas, to destroy all Christmas trees, and to acknowledge at least with truth, that we want nothing that will recall what Christ Jesus has brought into human evolution.

Pre-Christian ways of thinking speak to us from the memoirs of our contemporaries i.e., ways of thinking which in our time are anti-Christian. When men, who are held to be representative, make pronouncements such as Wilson has done in the Fourteen Points, from such pronouncements there resounds nothing but pure Old Testament mentality, a mentality which in our time has become Luciferic.

Whence comes this, my dear friends? What really lies before us? When we travel back through the periods of human evolution prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we find, early in the course of Oriental civilization, within that civilization out of which the Chinese civilization of today has developed, a human personality who was the external incorporation of Lucifer. Lucifer really did walk the earth at that time, in a human body. He it was who brought that human light which we find at the foundation of the ancient pre-Christian wisdom, with the exception of Judaism. In the art, the philosophy, and the statesmanship of Greece, much was still active which had proceeded from this Luciferic incarnation thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must endeavour clearly to understand, that that which today we call human understanding is always, so long as we have not spiritualized it, a gift of that Lucifer. We must not hold merely, in a matter-of-fact, bourgeois way, the one-sided idea that anything Luciferic is dreadful, and we must get rid of it. The more we seek to get rid of Lucifer, the more we are dominated by him, for it was necessary during thousands of years of human evolution to enter into the inheritance of the incarnated Lucifer. Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. And a time will come in the future when, just as Lucifer was incorporated in the East in an earthly personality, to prepare for Christianity among the heathen, so in the West there will take place an earthly incarnation of Ahriman himself. This time is approaching. Ahriman will appear, objectively, on the earth. Just as truly as Lucifer has walked the Earth, and as Christ has walked the Earth, objectively, in human form, so will Ahriman walk the Earth, bringing with him an extraordinary increase of power to the earthly human understanding. We men have not the task of hindering in any way this incarnation of Ahriman, but it is our task so to prepare humanity beforehand, that Ahriman may be estimated in the right way. For Ahriman will have tasks, he will have to do this and that, and men must value rightly and make a right use of that which, through Ahriman, comes into the world. Men will only be able to do this if they are able to adjust themselves now in the right way to that which Ahriman is already sending to the Earth from the Worlds beyond in order that he may control the Economic life upon Earth without being noticed. This must not be. Ahriman must not control the Economic life on the Earth without his being noticed. We must thoroughly learn to know his particular qualities. We must be able to oppose him with full consciousness.

During the time I am lecturing here at Stuttgart I shall point out much that we must carefully note in human evolution up to the time of the Ahriman incarnation, so that when this comes to pass we may know how rightly to assess it. Today I shall only call your attention to one thing more. In this respect many of the modern interpretations of the Gospels are just as bad as the worst materialistic conceptions. When the representatives of so-called religious societies accept the Gospels today simply as they are written, and when every new revelation is rejected, such devotion to the Gospels, such a way of furthering Christianity, is really the best way to prepare for Ahriman's appearance on earth. A great many of the exponents of the so-called creeds of today are working intensively for Ahriman; they leave unnoticed the truth: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth-age,” when they declare heretical all that proceeds from the immediate vision of the Christ today. They leave this truth unnoticed because it is more comfortable to take the Gospels in a literal way only, that is, to hold to what they deem to be the literal interpretation of the Gospels.

Mankind must be protected by wisdom from regarding the Gospels in this way, for the four Gospels, as regards external physical understanding, do contradict one another. He who does not press forward today to a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels, spreads abroad an untruthful interpretation of these Gospels, for he deceives men as regards the external contradictions which are to be found in the four Gospels. He who deceives man regarding the things that concern him most vitally, best furthers the progress of Ahriman.

It is most important for man at the present time to place Christ in the centre between Ahriman and Lucifer. The Christ power must permeate us. But as men we must always seek the balance between the mystic enthusiasm which tends to lift us above ourselves, and the materialistic understanding which by its bourgeois heaviness drags us down to earth. At every moment we must seek the balance between the Luciferic impulses which lift us up, and the Ahrimanic which drag us down. In the effort to gain this balance we find the Christ. When we strive to gain this balance, then alone can we find the Christ.

By a strange coincidence, a remarkable thing happened in human evolution at the time when materialism entered into it. I shall mention (concerning it) only two documents: Milton's “Paradise Lost” and Klopstock's “Messiah”. In these poems the Spiritual Powers are described as if a Paradise had been lost, and man had been driven out of it. The work of both poets is based upon the idea of Duality in the Universe, upon the opposition of good and evil, of the Divine and the Diabolical. It is the great error of modern times that World-Evolution should be represented as a Duality, whereas it should be represented as a Trinity. One set of forces are the upward-striving Luciferic forces which approach man in mysticism, in sentimentalism, in fantasy—in what in fantasy is degenerate, fantastic; these forces dwell in man's blood. The second are the Ahrimanic forces which dwell in all that is dry, heavy, (speaking physiologically) in the bony system. The Christ stands in the middle between these two. His is the third group of forces. Lucifer's is the first, Ahriman's the second, and in the centre, between the two, is the Christ-force.

What then has happened in more recent days? Something has taken place to which men should look up with true spiritual-intellectual fervour, for unless they understand what it is that has happened they cannot enter in the right way into the Christmas festival. We read today Milton and Klopstock, we read their descriptions of the Supersensible World. What do we find? Everywhere we find Luciferic qualities ascribed to Beings who are called Divine. Writers such as Milton and Klopstock describe the fight between Luciferic qualities which appear to them Divine, and Ahrimanic qualities. And a great part of that which modern humanity describes as Godlike, is simply Luciferic. They do not recognize it for what it is; just as little as they recognize that which is Ahrimanic for what it is.

The same thing appears in Goethe's Faust, where we find Mephistopheles contrasted with “the Lord”. Goethe, too, was unable to distinguish between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. Consequently his Mephistopheles is a kind of mixture of the two. I have already pointed this out in my little book Goethe's Standard of the Soul (Geistesart).

True followers of Goethe do not merely quote literally from his works, as do so many academic persons and the like. If we faithfully travel the path that Goethe has taken, so that we are able to recognize the things wherein he must have changed, especially if we follow his Conception of the World beyond the year 1832, we are able to speak of a Goethe of the year 1919, now soon to be 1920.

The way must be found calmly to admit that in the materialistic centuries, much that is Luciferic is hidden behind what is called Divine. There is much by which men seek to spread religion at the present day that reaches humanity only as words born on the wings of Lucifer.

Only when men are once more able to recognize this Dualism—the Luciferic that would lead them above themselves, and the Ahrimanic that would lead them down below themselves—and turn from these to what is truly Christ-like, only then will they again celebrate in the right way the Christmas event, that event by which we should recall how that which gives its own particular meaning, its true meaning to the Earth, entered into human evolution.

Today we cannot help thinking sometimes of Leonardo da Vinci, of Leonardo, who once as you know, painted in Milan his great picture, the “Last Supper”—Christ with His Disciples around Him. Leonardo was a long time painting this picture—twenty years. He wanted to put a great deal into it, and could never finish it, because he was always making a fresh attempt to paint the figure of Judas in the right way. Now under the State organization of Milan, the abbot of the monastery for which the picture was being painted was his immediate employer. When later a new abbot came, a sharp resolute man, not so patient as his predecessor, he went to Leonardo and told him sternly that the picture must be finished forthwith. Leonardo replied that he could now finish the picture, for since the new abbot had come he had a model for Judas. In a short time he had painted the face of Judas as we see it in the picture.

Just as at the beginning of the new age the face of Judas appeared to Leonardo on the ground of a positive faith, so we in our day have frequent occasion to write on our hearts and souls the fact that He whose birth we commemorate at this holy season, is betrayed most of all by many of those who declare that it is in accordance with their creed that they prepare this festival. We know that the Christmas Festival itself is one of those that has been adopted in the course of Christian evolution, that it was not till the third or fourth century that people began in these December days, to commemorate the birth of Christ. The event of Golgotha had already taken place some centuries before, when those whose thoughts were centred upon that Event, adopted something so incisively new, at that time, as the institution of the Festival of Christmas. Much, much later it was still possible for new things to be implanted in Christianity. Many of those who called themselves true Christians, fought at the time against these innovations. Today there are very many such people at work, who will not advance in the way their own creed advanced when it accepted in the third and fourth centuries the institution of Christmas; people who hold rigidly to that of which they say, “it stands written”, people who turn away from every living revelation.

Terrible as is the state of sleep of people at the present day—of people who with their non-moral thoughts soil, too often, things which are seeking to enter the Spiritual life—the most terrible of all is the case of those who betray the true spirit of Christian evolution from out of the very faith itself.

It is in this earnest mood that I wished to present the lights of the Christmas tree to you today; next time I hope to speak of them in another connection.

From the views which have been presented here for some time, and more particularly from the considerations which have come before us these last few days, we see how essential it is for the further cultural evolution of mankind that what we may call the knowledge of Initiation should stream into it. We must say, absolutely without reserve: The deliverance of mankind from a downward evolutionary course depends entirely upon its turning to a revelation which can only come through Spiritual knowledge.

Although it might be said, with a certain amount of feeling or logic, that it would be difficult in our time for wider circles of people to accept such knowledge, which at first can only be given out by few who have reached the height of being able to see into the Spiritual World, all such objections, even when apparently justified, will not contradict the clamorous fact that without accepting that which is here called Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, civilization must sink into the abyss. The work of the Heavenly Powers upon the earth must cease if their further cosmic evolution is not united with mankind. The healing of mankind can only be brought about if a sufficiently large number of people permeate themselves with what we are trying to say here. For only he who will not, who absolutely will not look into what has happened in the whole world as the result of the last catastrophic years, only he can close his eyes to the fact that we are at the beginning of a process of destruction, and that nothing can bring us out of this process of destruction except something new. For what we seek within the destructive force itself can never be anything but a force of destruction. A power for building afresh can only be obtained from a source not belonging to earthly evolution up to the present time.

Now the results of the inflow from such sources are fraught with most significant difficulties. You have often been told that the Science of Initiation cannot be given to mankind haphazard, without preparation, because a certain receptivity is necessary. You have heard this continually; but it is exactly against this attitude of mind that man continually transgresses. Let us take a simple example. One of the first, most primitive demands relative to the acceptance of the Science of Initiation, is that every one should seek to strip off what we call Ambition, particularly when it expresses itself as a judging of others by one's self. Now, it is easy to see that this is exactly what takes place in the Anthroposophical Society. What would be the use of keeping silence about such matters? It is readily admitted that such is the case, but nevertheless the most fatal things in this direction exist within the Anthroposophical Movement, and mutual envy is on the increase. I shall merely indicate this aspect. Today I must speak of other great difficulties in the entrance of the Science of Initiation into our earthly civilization.

In the first place, that which belongs to the Mystery of the Will of Man must be pointed out to humanity in a comprehensive way. This Mystery of Man's Will has been veiled from modern culture especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, since the rise of the fifth post-Atlantean age. The modern theory of the universe knows the very least possible of the Will. We have often characterized this. A man when awake never experiences consciously the real nature of his Will. When awake he experiences consciously the nature of his Conceptions, when in a dreaming state he experiences the nature of his Feelings, but he is sleeping, even when he is awake, partially, with reference to his Will. We go through the world as so-called waking beings, but are only awake with regard to conceptions and ideas, we are only half awake in our life of feeling, and completely asleep in our Will. Let us not delude ourselves about this matter. We have ideas about what we will, but only when the Will becomes idea, when the Will is reflected by the intellect, can we experience it in our waking consciousness. What goes on in the depths of man's being, even if he only raises his hand, which means bringing his Will into operation, of this the ordinary man knows absolutely nothing. This means that the Mystery of Will is to the modern man entirely unknown, and with this is to be connected the fact that our entire modern civilization—especially that which has come about since the fifteenth century—is absolutely intellectual, a culture of the understanding; for the culture of Natural Science is an intellectual culture. The Will plays the least possible part in everything that we grasp with our intellect, our understanding. When we think, when we form ideas, the Will of course plays a certain part in the formation of the ideas, but only in a very fine state. Man does not notice how the Will pulsates in his perceptions and how in other ways the Will is working within him.

For man in this new age the Mystery of the Will is completely veiled by our exclusively intellectual culture. Only when we seek, through those means given by Spiritual Science of which I have often spoken to you, to investigate the Will, that is, when we try with the help of Imagination and inspiration to make those forces active which enable man to see into the workings, the machinery which is set going by Man's Will, then we notice that in our physical life between birth and death, the Will as a living entity is not bound up with constructive processes but only with destructive processes. I have often explained this. If constructive processes alone took place in our brain, if for instance, only that took place which results from the action of the life-forces upon our food, we should be unable to evolve a soul- and spirit-life by means of the apparatus of the nerves and the brain; only on account of the destructive process which is continually going on in our brain do the soul and spirit take root in what is being destroyed. It is just here that the Will works. Man's Will is essentially something which during our physical life works to a certain extent for the death of man. With reference to our head organization, we are continually dying; in every moment we die. We only live because the rest of our organization works against this continual dying in our heads, for which our Will is mainly responsible. Independently of us, there is continually taking place in our head, that which takes place objectively in the outer world when we pass through physical death.

Our corpse, in so far as we are human individuals and enter the world of soul and spirit through the gate of death, ceases to be a matter of importance to us, but it is of great importance to the Cosmos. This corpse in some way or other, it does not matter whether by cremation or burial, is given over to the elements of the Earth; there, in its own way it carries on what our human Will does partially to our nervous system, to our sense-organization in our life between birth and death. We have perception and thought because our Will destroys something in us. We give our corpse over to the Earth, and by the help of the disintegrating corpse, which only continues the same process which we partially carry on in life, the whole Earth thinks and has perception. I characterized this from another point of view a few months ago. That which continually takes place in the Earth through the interchange between the primal earth-substances, through the union (of these substances) with the dead human bodies, is an activity in all respects comparable with the activity of the Will which between birth and death is practised by us continually, unconsciously, while the working, the destroying like a corpse, goes on in our nerve and sense system. Between birth and death the Will, because it is united with our Ego, works through the destructive forces within the bounds of our skin. This same Will works cosmically through our corpse, in the thinking and forming of ideas by the whole Earth, after our death, when we have given our corpse over to the Earth. Thus, we are cosmically united with what we may call the Soul-spiritual process of the whole Earth existence. This conception is a very difficult one, for it places man concretely into that which is Cosmic in our Earth existence. It shows the relationship of man's Will to the manner of working of the universal Cosmic Will within the Earth existence, in the destruction, in the bringing about of death conditions.

But just as our further evolution in the Spiritual World after we have passed through the gates of death, is dependent upon our having left the corpse behind, upon the fact that we no longer work with these forces, but with others, so the healthy further evolution of the whole Earth depends on whether humanity on this Earth unites itself not now with forces of death, but with forces of life, forces which evolve in another direction than do the forces of death. To speak of this today when men are filled with personal ideas and feelings is indeed something fraught with bitterness, for the seriousness of such a truth is only experienced in the most limited degree. Man is unaccustomed to taking in these great truths with the deep earnestness with which they must be taken. Nevertheless, the further question must be asked: “How is that which lies in the Will of man as I have described it, related to the processes of destruction in outer nature? How is that in man's Will which I have described as its own particular characteristic, connected with these destructive forces in outer nature?” Here is something which stands before the man of today as the greatest illusion. What does the man of the present day really do when he looks at Nature? He says, “Here a natural process is taking place. It has arisen from another process which produced it and this again from another which caused it.” And so man finds a chain of causes and effects in the working of Nature and he is very proud when in this way he can grasp what he calls leading threads of casualty to be found in the outer world.

What is the result? If we ask some geologist, physicist, chemist or any right-thinking scientific investigator, his honest opinion, he will often be reluctant to give you the last consequence of his own World-Conception. But ask him if he does not think that the earth as we know it—stones, plants and many animals, too—would have evolved just in the way it has done, had Man not been present, he will reply: “Certainly. No houses would have been built, no machines, no flying machines would have been made by cows or buffaloes, and so on, but everything else which we can see is not the work of man, would be present from beginning to end just the same as if man had not been there, for a chain of causes and effects is found within external nature.” That which takes place later is the result of that which went before. According to present-day thought man has nothing to do with the formation of the chain. This view contains exactly the same mistake as the following. I write a word on the board. Every letter arises only because I have written it, and not because the previous letter has given birth to the next one. It would be utter nonsense to say: From the preceding letter there arises the following one. A thoroughly unprejudiced investigation of that which is essential in the processes of Nature convinces us of the mistake we make when we give ourselves up to the great illusion of modern science: Effects are the result of their causes. It is not so. We must look elsewhere for the true causes, just as we must seek in our intellect the reason of the letters following each other. Taken in the wide sense where do the primal causes for external happenings in Nature lie? That can only be determined by spiritual perception; these causes lie in Mankind. Do you know where you must look if you wish to gain an insight into the actual primal causes of the course of Nature on the Earth? You must investigate how the human Will, quite unknown to present-day consciousness, is to be found in the centre of gravity in man, that is, in the lower part of his body. Only a part of the Will is active in the human head; the chief part of the Will is centred in the rest of his organism. That which comes into existence in the course of external nature is dependent upon man's relation to his unconscious Will. So far we have only been able to cite one significant example as to the course of Nature, but it serves for the course of Nature as a whole. I have often pointed out that during the Atlantean epoch man gave himself up to a form of black magic. The consequence of this was the Glaciation of the civilized world. In a comprehensive sense, the whole course of Nature really is the result of the activity of Will, not in single individuals, but of the various forces of Will working together in humanity as a whole; forces which arise from—the human centre of gravity. If a being adequately developed, a being, let us say, from Mars or Mercury, wished to study the course of the Earth, i.e., wished to understand how the course of Nature went on there, this being would not describe Nature as one of our learned men would describe it, but looking down upon the world he would say: The Earth is there below me; I see there many points; in these points are centred the forces from which the course of Nature proceeds. But these points would not lie for him in outer Nature, but always within man. He, looking from without, would find that he must look upon the centre of man if he wished to find the cause of what takes place in the course of Nature. This insight into the connection of the human Will with the course of Nature as a whole must become an integral part of the Natural Science of the future, for Mankind. With such a Natural Science man will feel his responsibility in quite a different way from what he does at the present day. Man will rise from being a citizen of the Earth to being a citizen of the Cosmos. He will learn to look upon the Cosmos as a part of himself.

Directly our attention is called to such things, knowledge of them takes possession of us. This knowledge does not work in such a shadowy way as our intellectual knowledge does. It is taken far more from realities, and therefore it works in a much more living way. And because the way in which it works is so much more real than the shadowy knowledge of modern man, it is all the more necessary that man should take seriously what is revealed to him through this knowledge. One cannot be a citizen of the Cosmos on one side in the sense described above, and on the other side remain the old Philistine whom the last few hundred years, i.e., the period since the middle of the fifteenth century, has produced in the man of today. We cannot on the one hand consciously want to take a part in the processes of the Cosmos, and on the other hand wish to gossip with our fellow beings as is done so much in restaurants and clubs in this bourgeois age since the fifteenth century. At the same time another Ethics, another moral impulse must surge through mankind if the Science of Initiation is to enter in real earnest. For all that prepares in the wrong way, for the appearance of Ahriman on our earth, as I have told you, works especially strongly as a force hindering the entrance of the Science of Initiation. I have spoken recently about these facts, in order to give some indication of the spirit which should pervade our Christmas Festival this year. I will now only briefly recapitulate.

Looking back over the evolution of our earth we find, preceding our modern materialistic civilization, the Greco-Latin, which goes back to the eighth pre-Christian century. We see, about two hundred years after the beginning of this Greco-Latin time, something rising up, which we might describe as the old Life of Wisdom of earlier times percolating through the land of Greece. Nietzsche felt this to a remarkable degree, even if pathologically. From the beginning of his spiritual activity he felt himself an opponent of Socrates, and he was never tired of speaking of the greater value of pre-Socratic Greek culture than of the post-Socratic. It is certainly true that with Socrates a great age came in for Mankind, an age which reached its climax in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But this age of Socrates has now run its course, has rightly come to an end. The Socratic age is that in which pure logic and pure dialectic arose from the earlier instinctive Wisdom. The rising of pure logic, of pure dialectic, out of the ancient clairvoyant Wisdom is the chief characteristic of our Western culture. This logic, this dialectic, has also impressed its stamp upon Christianity, for the theology of the West is a dialectic theology. But what rises in Greece as dialectics, as thought reduced to abstraction, goes back to the Mysteries of the East. Among these Mysteries were those which founded that civilization which later became the Chinese. Within the early Chinese civilization Lucifer was incarnated in human form. We must not conceal the fact from ourselves that Lucifer once lived in a physical body, as Christ during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha walked on earth in a physical body. But it is only a narrow-minded misunderstanding of the Luciferic incarnation if we look upon everything that has come through Lucifer as “Touch-me-not”. From Lucifer, for instance, has arisen the greatness of Greek culture itself, that unique ancient art, the artistic impulse of mankind, as we ourselves still look upon it. But in Europe all this has hardened into mere words, empty of content. It was through Luciferic wisdom that Christianity was first grasped in Europe. The important point is that in the Greek wisdom which developed as Gnosis in order to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha, the old Luciferic Wisdom had cooperated, had given the old Gnosis its form. The fact that the Mystery of Golgotha had clothed itself in what Lucifer had given to the evolution of the earth, was the greatest victory for Christianity at that time. But when this Luciferic culture, to which, through the incarnation of Lucifer man was given over, was ebbing away, there flowed in gradually, that which was preparing for the coming incarnation of Ahriman in the Western World. When the time is ripe—and it is preparing itself—Ahriman will incarnate in a human body in the Western World. This fact must take place just as the others have taken place—viz. that Lucifer has incarnated and that Christ has incarnated. This fact is predetermined in the evolution of the earth. The all-important fact is simply this: to keep the fact in mind, that we shall rightly prepare ourselves for it, for Ahriman will not begin to work only when he has incarnated in a human body; he is now preparing his appearance from the super-sensible world. He is already working from thence into the evolution of mankind. From that side he is seeking his tools through which he prepares for what must come.

Now, it is essential for the favourable working of that which Ahriman will bring to humanity—he will bring advantageous gifts just as Lucifer did—that man shall take the right attitude. The all-important thing is that man shall not through sleeping miss the coming of Ahriman. When the incarnation of Ahriman takes place in the Western World we shall simply see inscribed in the local Register, the birth of John William Smith (of course, this will not be the name) and people will look upon the child as a citizen in comfortable circumstances like any other, and they will sleep through what has in reality taken place. Our University professors will certainly not trouble whether man sleeps through it or not. For them what has taken place will be merely the birth of J. W. Smith. But in the Ahrimanic age it is all-important that men should knower that they have here to do only externally with J. W. Smith, that inwardly Ahriman is present, and that they must not deceive themselves through sleepy illusion about what has happened. Even now we may not yield to any deception. These things are in preparation. Among the most important means which Ahriman has to work with from the other side, is the furthering of abstract thinking in Man. And because men cling so firmly today to this abstract thinking, they are working in the way most favourable for the coming of Ahriman. You must realize that there is no better way to prepare for the fact that Ahriman is endeavouring cunningly to capture the whole Earth for his evolution, than that man should continue to live an abstract life, steeping himself in abstractions, as he does in the social life of today. This is one of the ruses, one of the clever tricks, by which Ahriman prepares in his own way for his lordship over the earth. Instead of showing men today out of conclusive experience, what has to happen, leaders offer them theories on every subject, including the social question. To those who give out these theories, knowledge gained by means of experience is abstract, because they have no inkling of what real Life is. All this is preparation from the Ahrimanic point of view.

But there is also another form of preparation for Ahriman which can happen through an erroneous view of the Gospels. This, too, is something that must be made known at the present day. You know quite well that today there are very many men, especially among the official representatives of this or that form of religious confession, who are fighting to the uttermost against that new Christ knowledge which is arising among us out of the Science of Initiation. Such men, if they do not swear allegiance to mere Rationalism, accept the Gospels; but what do these men really know of the true nature of the Gospels? These are the men who, during the nineteenth century, have applied to the Gospels the historical-scientific method of the outer world. What has come from the Gospels through the scientific method of last century? Nothing else, except that the conception of the Gospels has gradually become completely materialized. Our attention was first drawn to the contradictions in the four Gospels. Then from the recognition of these contradictions came the slide downwards. Finally, what is the outcome of this Gospel investigation? What else is it but, I might say, lifting the Gospels off their hinges? What does such an investigator as the theologian, Professor Schmiedel of Basle, seek in the Gospels? He seeks to prove that they are not simply products of fantasy brought forward only to glorify Christ Jesus. And so there follow a limited number of now-famous points unfavourable to the Christ. These, he maintains, would have been omitted if the Gospels had only been written for the glorification of Jesus. We are, therefore, left with the feeling that he admits all the objections that are brought against Christ Jesus, so as finally to save for the Gospels a little label of this world's Science. Even this little label will give way. Man will gain nothing from this worldly Science. He will gain nothing as regards the genuineness of the Gospels from the way these people point it out. To have the right relation towards these Gospels we must know why they came into being, that is, we must know their real purpose. This knowledge can only be obtained through an understanding fructified by Spiritual Science.

If we sink ourselves in the Gospels, if we absorb their content and force, then we gain from them a soul-content. No outer historical science will explain the riddle of the Gospels; but we can sink ourselves in the Gospels, and then we receive a soul-content. This soul-content, however, is a great hallucination—certainly a most spiritualized hallucination, the hallucination of the Mystery of Golgotha. The highest that is to be gained from the Gospels is the hallucination of the Mystery of Golgotha, neither more nor less. Now, it is just this secret which is known to the more modern Catholic Church. For this reason the Gospels are not allowed to be studied by the laity, for it is feared that men will discover that they cannot have through the Gospels historical knowledge of the Christ Mystery, but only a hallucination of this Mystery of Golgotha. I might also say, an Imagination; for the hallucination is so spiritualized that it is an actual Imagination. But more than an Imagination is not to be gained from the content of the Gospels in themselves.

What is the path from Imagination to Reality? The path will be opened up through Spiritual Science, not through that which is outside Spiritual Science, but through Spiritual Science alone. That means that the Imagination of the Gospels shall be raised to Reality through Spiritual Science. It is of the most extreme importance to Ahriman so to prepare his incarnation that through Spiritual Science man shall not follow this path of Imagination in the Gospels on to the Reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as it is in the greatest interest of Ahriman that man should keep up the love of abstraction, so it is in his greatest interest that man should cherish more and more a form of piety built upon the mere Gospels. When you think over this, you will realize that a great part of the creeds existing today is the preparatory work of Ahriman for his purposes in this earth existence. In what way could one serve Ahriman better than by resolving to make use of an external power commanding those who believe in, and submit themselves to this power, not to read any anthroposophical literature? No greater service could be done to Ahriman than to make sure that a great number of people do not read anthroposophical literature. I have already mentioned in these lectures who the people are that have resolved upon this course. The only way to present certain facts today is to place them unreservedly in the light of truth. It must be realized today that the progress of the World has a certain relationship to cosmic periods, limited through the Luciferic incarnation, which in time and space, lies before the Mystery of Golgotha. But in the way of this progress the incarnation of Ahriman in the West places itself, so that the forces in opposition are strengthened. The incarnation of Ahriman, in a future not very far distant, can be helped on its way just as well by an obscured worship of the Gospels as by abstract thinking.

Many people today experience an inner sense of comfort in shutting themselves off from these serious facts. Anthroposophists should not feel in this way; on the contrary, they should develop a definite impetus to do as much as possible to spread Spiritual Science among mankind. It is quite wrong to think as is so often done that we should come to an understanding with such people as those of whom I have spoken. It is foolish to believe we can come to an understanding with such people for they do not desire it. The point is to make clear to the rest of humanity what sort of people these are. We must speak out about such people. All that is possible has been done so that they can come to an understanding with us. They only need to read without prejudice what is there, to give it their serious attention. We must strictly discriminate between those persons who do harm to the progress of human evolution and other people to whom we must go and tell how such harm is brought about. The attempt to come to an understanding with the former has absolutely no sense and no meaning; for these men would outwardly incline to an agreement if they no longer had followers to support them. Then they would be ready of themselves to come to an understanding. The urgent need before us is exactly this, to open people's eyes. Only, unfortunately, too often within our own circle, the endeavour is made to come to a compromise in this respect, and the courage needed for unconditional acknowledgment of the truth is lacking. We must not ever be under the illusion that we can come to an understanding with this one or that one, who does not wish in any way to come to an understanding with us. What is required of us is courageously to stand up for the truth as far as we are able. This seems to me especially the outcome of an understanding of what is bound up with the evolution of Mankind.

On New Year's Eve it is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year.

The thoughts which, almost in answer to an inward need, we call up before our souls in reviewing what we have done during the past year, and what we intend to do next year, should be pervaded with adequate earnestness and dignity, in accordance with the spirit of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, so that we may illumine these thoughts with the Higher Light which we can receive from Spiritual Science, through contemplation of the great Cosmic events. How does this human life of ours stand with regard to past and future? It is like a mirror. Indeed, comparison with a mirror approaches reality far more than it may seem to do at first. Striving a little to attain self-knowledge is indeed like standing before a mirror. We stand, looking into a mirror and there in that mirror lies the past, of which we know its reflection is in the mirror. Behind the mirror lies that into which at first we cannot look, just as it is not possible to see in space, what lies behind a mirror. Perhaps the question should be raised here: What is it that corresponds in our world-mirror to the silver covering at the back which turns the transparent glass into a mirror? In the ordinary mirror the glass is coated behind so that we cannot see through it. What constitutes the coating of the world-mirror that reflects the past for us, and at first keeps the future hidden from our gaze? The world-mirror is coated with our own being, with our own human being. We have only to bear in mind that with the usual means of knowledge we are really unable to see ourselves, to see what we ourselves are. We cannot see through ourselves, we see through ourselves just as little as we see through a mirror. When we look into ourselves, many things are mirrored back to us, things which we have experienced, things which we have learnt; but our own being remains hidden from us, because we can see through ourselves at first just as little as we can see through an ordinary mirror. Looking at the matter generally, or I might say, in the abstract, we may consider this comparison with a mirror as I have just described it. But when we come to details modifications are needed. Trying to look back on our life through this mirroring process (for looking back on our life, on what our inner soul reflects, is a mirroring process), we must confess: What we see mirrored there, is only a part of our experiences. When you try to look back on your experiences, you will find that these experiences are continually subject to interruptions. You look back on what the day has brought you; but you do not look back on what the preceding night has brought you. The experiences of the night are an interruption. You look back on yesterday, you do not look back on the night before yesterday, and so on. Stretches of nighttime, not filled in by thoughts upon our experiences, are continually inserting themselves. It is an illusion to think that we survey our entire life when looking back upon it; we only piece together to some extent, what the days contain. In reality, the course of our life comes before us with continual interruptions.

We might now ask: Are these interruptions in the course of our life necessary? Yes, they are necessary. Were there no such interruptions in the course of our life, or, to speak more correctly, in the retrospection upon our life's course, then, as human beings, we should be quite unable to perceive our Ego. We should see the course of our life filled merely by the world outside, and in our life there would be no ego-consciousness at all. That we are able to experience, to feel our Ego, depends on the fact that our life's course is continually being broken up piece-wise. It is precisely with respect to this ego-perception, brought about by interruptions in the course of life, that present-day humanity faces a critical period. When a human being of today looks back on life and, as has just been explained, attains his Ego through this looking back, this Ego of present-day man is, in a certain respect, empty, we only know that we have an Ego. In earlier periods of earth evolution men knew more. Just as in ordinary daily life, the dreams of an individual dimly emerge out of his nightly experiences, so the clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions of the human beings of earlier periods emerged out of the Ego. These clairvoyant-atavistic perceptions were dreams only in their form; what they contained was reality. We may say: The Ego of present-day man has been emptied of the clairvoyant-atavistic content which was the support of men of past ages, permeating them with the conviction that they had something in common with a divine element, that they were connected with something divine. Out of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, there arose in man's sentient life that which condensed into religious feeling and religious veneration towards those beings to whom religious cult and religious sacrifice were dedicated. How does the case stand today? Today the Ego is empty of these atavistic-clairvoyant visions, and when we look back on the Ego it is more or less only a point in our soul-life. The content of this Ego is a firm point of support, but it is nevertheless only a point. Now, however, we are living in an age in which the point must again become a circle, an age in which the Ego must again receive a content. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has made a mighty inroad into our Sense-world, in order that the Ego may again receive a content. This is why, ever since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the Spiritual World has willed to re-enter our physical existence through revelations in a new way. What we are striving for in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this: To receive with goodwill all that is seeking to enter through spiritual revelation from another world—from a world, however, which bears within it this world of ours—and to clothe these revelations in terms by which they can be communicated to man. These revelations are nothing less than that which definitely (in a certain respect) guarantees the future of mankind. It is not, indeed, a direct glance behind the mirror, but it is a guarantee for this, viz., that when we as human beings, hasten to meet the future i.e., hasten to step behind the mirror—which means facing the future—then that which we have to do in the future will be able to come to pass in full power, if we have first tested our forces, if we have first strengthened them through that, which, by means of Spiritual Science, reveals itself to us out of the Spiritual World.

Just as in the past, man's Ego was filled with an atavistic clairvoyant content, which guaranteed his connection with the divine, so today our Ego must be filled with a new spiritual content, received in full consciousness, a content which gives us again the link uniting our soul with the divine Soul-being. The men of the past possessed an atavistic clairvoyance. The last inheritance of this atavistic clairvoyance is abstract reflection, the abstract power of cognition possessed by modern men. It is a much diluted remnant of the early clairvoyance. The man of today can feel that this dilution, this logical dialectic dilution of a former atavistic clairvoyance, is no longer able to support his soul. Then the longing will arise within him to receive something new into his Ego. But that which has formed the end in the evolution of mankind from primeval times up to the present, must now be made the beginning. In olden times, man had clairvoyant revelations and did not understand them. Today man must first understand, must exert to the utmost his intellectual power, must exert to the utmost his reason. If he so exerts it through that which lies before him in Spiritual Science, then mankind will again develop the power of receiving the Spiritual clairvoyantly. This is certainly something that most people today wish to avoid, viz., to make use of their healthy human reason in order to understand Spiritual Science. Were it possible to avoid the use of man's reason, it would also be possible to avoid altogether the entrance of spiritual revelations into our earthly world.

Thus past and future are linked together on this New Year's Eve, this Cosmic New Year's Day. For today, what is impending is indeed a kind of Cosmic New Year's Day. The future stands before us as a formidable question, not an indefinite abstract question, but as a concrete question. How can we approach that which, as a question put to mankind, in the form of a spiritual revelation, is striving more and more since the last third of the nineteenth century, to enter our earthly world? And how are we to place it in relation to revelations of the past? These questions should be livingly experienced. Then we should feel how important it is to direct our longings towards that which is presented here as Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Then we should realize the earnestness and the dignity of the striving for Spiritual Science. It is especially needful to have this feeling at the present time. For we are not dealing with any kind of arbitrary human will (“Willkur”); we are dealing with something that as Cosmic knowledge wills to reveal itself to us from out of the world's evolution; we are dealing in very truth with what the gods will to make of man. But here we are faced with the fact that when we on the one hand turn towards the spirit, on the other hand those who wish only to worship the past, are drawn away by the Spirit of contradiction, by the Spirit of opposition. And the more we try with all our might to grasp the spirit of the future state of man, the more surely will the people of the past be possessed by the spirit of opposition. It is to be noticed among people of today that religious feeling is seeking to assume new life. Groping attempts are numerous. The attempts of Spiritual Science must not be groping. Through such attempts the real, concrete world of the Spirit ought to be grasped. Almost like a premonition of what it ought to be, we are faced by those who say: “Mere religious tradition is not enough for us; we want to have an inner religious experience, we do not only want to hear the message that, according to tradition, Christ lived and died in Palestine so many, or so many years ago—we want to experience in our souls the Christ-experience.” In many quarters we find such ideas arising among men, among people who believe that something of the Christ-experience has arisen in the depths of their souls.

These are groping attempts, often even questionable attempts, because at the same time people are content in the egoism of their soul, and then turn away from all inclination to the Spirit. These longings after inner spiritual experience are there nevertheless, and even groping attempts towards such inner spiritual experience, towards a new interest in the spiritual world, should be recognized. But the spirit of opposition will surely arise.

To judge by what he himself has printed, such a representative of the spirit of the past has recently uttered quite remarkable words at Stuttgart, contrasting attempts, groping attempts, to rouse a new religious interest, a new religious experience, with attempts to reach a really new concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, as in the case of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In the Shepherd-Play, performed at the Waldorf School, one of the shepherds, who has had a spiritual vision, says that he very nearly lost his power of speech. When I read the last page of Gogarten's Spiritual Science and Christianity, I must say that I very nearly lost my power of speech, for it is indeed surprising that anyone should say such things in the present age. It is things such as this that, on the Cosmic New Year's Eve, should stimulate contemplation of the comparison of the past with the inevitable future. What does this representative of religion really say? I do not know if the full import has been realized. He says: “Today—I ought to say at all times—the chief task is to safeguard the elementary feeling of piety of which I have spoken. It is almost wholly lacking today. We are occupied with religious ‘interests’ with religious ‘experiences’. Since Anthroposophy provides such good material for ‘interest’, and is such a good medium for ‘experiences’, people are helpless and without power of resistance when they meet it. People know even less of that fundamental, elementary bond, the bond brought into life by piety, which drives away every religious ‘interest’, and scatters every religious ‘experience’, the bond between God and creature. And because man knows little of this bond, he knows still less of that other bond, the unconditioned direct union between God and man.”

Here in the name of religion we see every religious interest repudiated, every religious experience scattered. A wholly undefined “bond” which cannot of course be differentiated, and which the speaker does not wish to differentiate, takes the place of religious interest, and of religious experience. We do indeed lose our power of speech when a teacher of religion says: “True piety must drive away every religious interest and scatter every religious experience.” We have gone so far that we are unable to realize what it means when an official representative of religion says: “Away with religious interest! Away with religious experience!” You see, apart from the fact that Gogarten does not know that he himself would be quite unable to speak of religion at all, if in the past there had never been atavistic religious interests and religious experience; apart from the fact that he as official representative of religion, could never have stood before an audience had not religion entered into the evolution of mankind, through religious interest and religious experience; apart from all this, everything I have told you just now proves what I told you before, that in the present day the very people who consider themselves the true representatives of religious life, work for the destruction of all that is essential in religion. Have these men lost every possibility of understanding what pertains to the human soul? Can these men no longer understand that when man turns his attention to anything, attention is guided by interest, and that everything entering the consciousness of man is based on experience? It seems as if human beings no longer speak from such consciousness at all, but only from a spirit of opposition. We should bear this in mind in all seriousness when we look into the mirror which so mysteriously unveils the past and conceals the future—though in a certain way the mirror unveils the future, too, in the way I have described.

It is the aim of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science to serve religious interest, and to give a content to religious experience. With what result? In the course of this year (1919) the question was brought forward before the Holy Roman Congregation whether the teaching that is termed theosophical is in keeping with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and whether it is permissible to belong to theosophical societies, to attend theosophical meetings, and to read theosophical papers and periodicals. The answer was: “No”, in every case, No, “in omnibus”. This is the spirit of opposition, of contradiction, and the Jesuit Zimmermann interprets it more particularly by applying this veto of the Holy Roman Congregation to Anthroposophy also. I need not set Zimmermann's writings before you in detail. You all know the wind that blows from a certain quarter against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and that it is the breath of the Spirit of contradiction. The Spirit carried in this wind can be felt in the following words, penned by that same Zimmermann, who for years spread abroad the lie that I was a renegade priest: “Through the defection of their General Secretary, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who took along with him most of the members, the Theosophical Society picked up again to some extent in the course of years, and now owns about twenty-five lodges, one-fifth of which are certainly somewhat dormant, and publishes at Dusseldorf, as its official organ, Das Theosophische Streben (The Theosophic Endeavour). The followers of Steiner, who named his theosophy ‘Anthroposophy’ after his exit, complained recently that he was becoming unproductive, that he had no new ‘visions’, that he always lectures upon the same things, that he would soon have to throw himself into something new, etc.” This paves the way for another article dealing in the same intelligent fashion with the “Threefold Social Organism”. You see what Spirit of truth backs up this Jesuit? A Jesuit does not merely represent his personal opinion, but the opinion of the Catholic Church. He speaks only as a member of the Catholic Church. What he says represents the opinion of the Catholic Church. We must judge such things from a moral point of view. We must ask whether anyone who deals with truth as this man does—a man, moreover, held in high esteem by a particular religious community, can be held in high esteem by the true spirit of humanity.

As long as questions of this kind are not considered with due earnestness, we have not arrived at the right understanding of the Cosmic New Year's Eve. At the present moment, it is essential to reach this right understanding. It is essential for us to extend our sympathies—alas, our sympathies often arise from egoistic sources—to the great human relations, and to feel for the whole of mankind that human sympathy which impels us to make a spiritual movement like this effectively fruitful for the evolution of mankind. May you experience, my dear friends, at this very time, that it is the Spirit of the Cosmos itself, which for decades has been seeking entrance. May you experience during the coming night, that this Spirit which seeks to enter humanity, shall here so be served that the souls of those, who will to feel with and who will to think with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, may feel their union with this new Spirit which wills to enter the world—the Spirit which alone can bring to the earthly world, the world that is destroying itself—the new upbuilding impulse out of Heaven. In this hour, a symbolic hour every year, demanding that we experience it as the decisive hour between past and future—in this hour may you unite your souls with the new Spirit; may you so experience in your souls the contact of the past year with the coming year, that the Cosmic Year which is passing away, may contact itself with the dawning Cosmic Year.

But the passing Cosmic Year will still send many an after-effect into the future; destructive forces into the spheres of Spirit, of Equity, of Economics. Therefore it is all the more needful, that as many men as possible shall be seized in the innermost depths of their souls by the New Year of the Spiritual Future, and shall develop a Will which may be the foundation of a new spiritual world, a world to be built into the future evolution of mankind. Those who care for the future of mankind are not those who would kill religious interest, who would do away with religious experience, but those only, those alone who can see how, through the intellectuality of our age, the old religious interest has faded away, the old religious life has been crippled. Those only care for the future, who see how a new interest must seize mankind, how new religious experience must spring up in mankind, so that man may bring into the Cosmos new germs for a future existence.

Meeting you today with New Year Greetings, I should like to express the wish that each one of you may realize in the depth of his soul how great and insistent are the demands of the present moment as regards the evolution of mankind, and that, as a result of this realization, each one in his own place may co-operate as far as he can, in bringing to fulfilment that of which mankind stands in such need. At this time of year, expressing as it does symbolically the meeting of past and future, I should like, by way of introduction to our New Year contemplation, which rightly is also a contemplation of the whole course of time, to recall some passages from essays which I wrote more than thirty years ago and which are shortly to be published. Although connected with personal experiences, these essays have a definite significance if we want to look into the whole spiritual condition of the present day. My purpose in writing them was, as you will notice, to rouse the conscience of the German people, to give expression to that which could be perceived even then, as fundamentally lacking in the spiritual life of the German nation. I will read to you some passages from one of these essays entitled “The Spiritual Mark of the Present Day”. These passages refer to what was taking place more than thirty years ago, to a past which was then the present. I wrote in the very midst of the spiritual life prevailing at that time, amid symptoms which showed themselves most markedly in the life of thought of the German nation. I wrote: “It is with a shrug of the shoulders that our generation recalls the period when a philosophic current ran through the whole spiritual life of the German people. The mighty impulse of the times, seizing men's minds at the end of last century (i.e., the eighteenth century) and the beginning of this one, and boldly facing the highest imaginable tasks, is now looked upon as a regrettable aberration. If anyone dares to raise an objection when the conversation turns upon Fichte's fantasies, or Hegel's insubstantial play of thoughts and words, he is regarded by his listeners as a mere amateur, who has as slight an idea of the spirit of modern scientific investigation, as he has of the thoroughness and seriousness of philosophic methods. Kant and Schopenhauer at best are tolerated by our contemporaries. It is apparently possible to trace back to Kant the somewhat scanty philosophic crumbs used by modern science as foundational; and Schopenhauer, besides his strictly scientific works, also wrote a few things in a light style, on subjects accessible to people with a limited spiritual horizon. An open mind for that striving towards the loftiest heights of the world of thought, an understanding for that soaring of the spirit which in the realms of science went parallel with our classic period of culture—this is lacking now. The serious side of this phenomenon only appears when we take into consideration that a persistent turning away from that spiritual goal implies for the German people the loss of their own Self, a breaking away from the Spirit of the Nation. For that striving sprang from a deep need in the German nature. It does not enter our mind to wish to deny the manifold mistakes and one-sided fallacies which Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken, and others, committed in their bold inroads into the kingdom of idealism. But the impulse which in all its grandeur inspired them should not be misunderstood. It is the impulse most fitting for a nation of thinkers. The German nation is not characterized by that living sense for immediate reality, or the outward aspect of Nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their wonderful and imperishable works of art. Among the Germans there is instead, an unceasing urge of the spirit toward the cause of things, toward the apparently hidden, deeper origins of the Nature which surrounds us. Just as the Greek spirit found expression in its wonderful world of plastic forms, so the German, more concentrated within himself, less open to Nature but on that account more with his own heart, cherishing intercourse with his own inner world, sought his conquests in the world of pure thought. The way, therefore, in which Fichte and his successors looked upon the world and life was truly German. This is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received; this is why, for a time, they held the whole life of the nation enthralled. This is why we must not break with their spiritual leading. Our solution of the difficulty should be to overcome mistakes, while continuing the natural course of development on the lines laid down at that time. Not what these spirits found or thought to find, is of lasting value, but how they faced the problems.”

At the time when this essay was written the German nation had to be shown these truths, which were threatening to disappear from their field of vision. We were living then in another age than the present, an age in which, had we willed it, it might still have been possible for certain circles to unite with the spirit, then at the beginning of its decline, and thus to prepare the way for an all-pervading and lasting development of the human impulse. Indeed, at that time it ought to have been possible to find such people, amongst those who called themselves leaders of the nation, amongst those who prepared the younger generation for later life. There were no experiments, then, of the kind now coming to the fore in Russia. At that time (in Germany) those who educated the young, still had the chance of turning back to the aims and intentions of the old spiritual life, causing it to rise again in the new form. But no one was willing to listen in the least to any voice urging that a real, spiritual striving should rise to life again amongst men. Every opinion that had taken firm hold amongst the lower or higher ranks of the nation's teachers during the preceding thirty years, was an attack directed against the aims and intentions of a spiritual world-conception.

I should recall that when I wrote this essay, I had already published my views on Goethe's World Conception, on Goethe's scientific ideas. I had pointed out two great dangers in the domain of thought, in the field of active scientific investigation. I coined at that time two expressions defining the two great foes of human spiritual progress. On the one hand I spoke of the “Dogma of Revelation”, and on the other hand of the “Dogma of mere Experience”. I wished to show that the one-sided cultivation of the dogma of revelation, as it had developed in the religious confessions, was just as pernicious as the continual hammering upon the so-called dogmas of experience, i.e., continually insisting only upon all that the external sense-world, the world of material facts, offers to scientists and sociologists. In the course of time the task arose of rendering these thoughts more concrete, of pointing out the real forces behind this or that phenomenon.

What, then, lies behind in everything brought to our notice when the dogma of revelation is mentioned? Today, in an all-embracing sense, all that lies behind what we term Luciferic influences in the course of mankind's evolution. And behind the dogma of experience, lies everything that we term, again in an all-embracing sense, the Ahrimanic influences in human evolution. In the present age, he who wishes to lead men only under the influence of the dogma of revelation, leads them in the Luciferic direction; he who wishes instead to lead men, as scientists would do, only according to the dogma of external sense-experience, leads them in the Ahrimanic direction. Is it not a fitting New Year's contemplation in these serious times of ours, to review the last thirty or forty years, and to point out how necessary it still is today to repeat the call of that time, to raise it anew, but far more strongly? The outward course of events during these last thirty or forty years has shown clearly the justification of that call; for he who without prejudice looks at what has happened, must say to himself: “There would not be today's misery and want, had that call become a reality in the hearts of the people of Central Europe at that time.” At that time it sounded in vain. Today the Holy Roman Congregation meets it with the Decree of the 18th July, 1919, and the chief clergy announce from their pulpits that Anthroposophy is not to be read in my books because the Pope forbids it. Information concerning it can be obtained from the writings of my opponents. This pronouncement takes place simultaneously with negotiations for the establishment of a Roman Catholic Nuntiate in Berlin under the auspices of a Berlin Government with socialistic leanings! Here, again, is something that shows the spiritual mark of the age. Would that today one could really appeal to the innermost heart-forces of those who are still capable of feeling something of the spiritual impulses in human evolution, so that they may wake up, so that they may see how things really stand. The all-important thing today is that man should be able to find himself. But to find our own Self requires confidence in our own strength of soul. Little is attained amongst men today, by appealing to this confidence in their own strength of soul. People want, on the one hand, the support of something which constrains them from within to think and to will what is right, or, on the other hand, the support of something which constrains them from without to think and to will what is right. In some way we always find these two extremes in men; they never wish to pull themselves together, to strive with active forces towards the balance between these two extremes.

Let us reconsider this spiritual mark of the present day, about to become the social and material mark. Let us reconsider it to some extent. We hear the old Marxist call rising in the East of Europe: “A social order must be established among men, where everyone can live according to his individual capacities and needs; a social order must be evolved where the individual capacities of each man can be taken into full consideration and where the justifiable needs of every single person can be satisfied.” Taken in the abstract, no objection whatever can be raised against this saying. But on the other hand, we hear a personality like Lenin saying: “Among people of today such a social order cannot be founded; it is only possible to establish a transitory social order; it is only possible to establish something which is injustice”—of course in the widest sense of the word. Injustice is indeed present to an absurd extent in everything that Lenin and his followers establish. For Lenin and his followers believe that only by passing through a transitory social order, can a new human race be produced, a race not yet in existence; only when the race is there, will it be possible to introduce the social order where everyone will be able to employ his capacities, where everyone will be able to live according to his needs. This, then, is what they are aiming at: the formation of a race of men not yet in existence, in order to realize an ideal which, as I have said, can be justified in the abstract.

Ought not enough people, when they hear of such a thing as this, be able to find themselves, and to grasp the whole seriousness of the present world-situation? Is it not time for this drowsiness to cease, when something of this kind appears before us pointing most significantly to the mark of the present day—this drowsiness which causes us to close our eyes a little, so that we do not grasp the whole significance of such a matter? Nothing will help us to reach a concrete insight into these things, except to abandon the paths of abstraction in the Spiritual life. And for this we must first really acquire the feeling that where there is only a flow of words and phrases about spirit and soul, there the talk is mere abstraction. We must be able to feel when spirit and soul are spoken of as reality. For example, speaking of human capacities: These arise as manifestations from out of man's inner being as the individual grows up. Through some of its leaders, mankind feels itself induced to develop accordingly these capacities and forces, which come to light in the growing human being. But in this domain our feelings are to be trusted only if we definitely perceive in the manifestation of these forces and capacities, a manifestation of the Divine; if we can say to ourselves: Man has come into this World of sense-realities out of a spirit-soul World of Being, and that which externalizes as human forces and capacities, and which we develop in ourselves and in others, comes from a spiritual world and is now placed in a physical human body. Now, consider the spiritual meaning of that which has been explained in this place for decades; it will show you that with the incorporation of human capacities and forces in the physical human body, Luciferic beings were given the possibility of approaching these human capacities and forces. No work whatsoever can be done in the sphere of human capacities and forces, be it in the form of self-activity or in the teaching of others, or in the furtherance of general culture, without coming into contact with the Luciferic forces. In that region which man has to go through before he enters physical existence through birth or conception, the Luciferic Power cannot directly approach the human capacities and forces. Embodiment in a physical human frame, is the means by which the Luciferic Powers are able to reach human capacities and forces. It is only if, without prejudice we look this fact in the face, that we assume a right attitude in life towards everything that surges up from human nature as individual capacities and forces. If we close our eyes to what is Luciferic, if we deny that it exists, then we succumb to it. Then the soul falls into that mood which desires above all to deliver itself up to some coercion from within, so that through all kinds of mystic or religious forces it can unburden itself of the necessity of calling upon its own free Self, or of seeking for the Divine in the world, within the development of its own free Self. Men do not want to think for themselves, they want some indefinite force from within to manifest itself, according to which they can argue logically. They do not want to experience truth; they only want to experience that inner force compelling them from within, manifesting itself in proof which does not appeal to experience, but appeals instead to a Spiritual Power which over-rules man, which compels him to think in this or in that way about Nature or about mankind himself. Men deliver themselves over to the Luciferic Powers, by calling up within themselves this inner compulsion, this inner power.

The means which can be used so that man shall appeal to this inner compulsion, so that he shall not rise to the free, upright position in the spiritual world, is to force him to think that there are no such three members of human nature as Body, Soul and Spirit; to forbid him, as actually happened in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, to think that man consists of Body, Soul and Spirit, and bid him to put away all thoughts concerning the Spirit. These are inner connections which may not be overlooked any longer. We must face them today clearly and without prejudice. In the year 869 A.D., it was decided to forbid the belief in the Spirit in man. It was in that year that the downward slope towards Lucifer began in European civilization. And today we have the full result. Long enough has mankind yielded to the inclination not to experience truth, but to allow the compulsion of argument, of impersonal argument, to work upon him. As a result, mankind has fallen into the other extreme. There has been no real comprehension of human capacities and forces, no one wanted to own that, as I have just explained, Luciferic forces live in human capacities and forces, when these are embodied in a physical human frame. That false point of view—the ruling one in humanity today, concerning individual capacities and forces in human nature—has been the outcome.

Human needs, needs arising first out of his purely physical nature, constitute the other pole of man. In his Letters on aesthetics, Schiller has characterized these needs very finely, contrasting them with man's abstract logical power. He calls them the basic needs (“Notdurft”), whereas he characterizes logical compulsion as the other power, a power straying into spiritual regions. During that great period of German evolution, a personality such as Schiller, was on the point of grasping rightly the polaric contrasts in man. The time was not yet ripe for saying more than what Schiller, Goethe, and others like-minded had said. The necessity of building further upon this beginning has been laid upon our present age. If we continue to build, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will arise. He who is only acquainted with the one-sided power of proof in the spiritual sphere, only learns to know in life the one-sided power of natural instincts in human needs. It is easy to imagine that when man with his capacities and powers enters the physical sense-world through conception or birth, and Lucifer hovers over him and from that which man himself ought to possess takes something on one side, the head-side of the man's being, there remains in man an inferior kind of power for the exercise of his independence in the sphere of his needs. Through that which Lucifer on the one hand takes for his own, Ahriman on the other hand attains the possibility of making his own that which works in the needs of human nature. The dogma of mere external sense-experience has paved the way for the complete Ahrimanization of mankind's sense-life of instinct during the last third of the nineteenth century. Modern man stands before a terrible fact today because he does not recognize that salvation lies in the state of balance between the two extremes, between capacities on the one side, and needs on the other side. The materialistic spirit in man makes him look on the body alone as that which produces capacities i.e., man looks merely on the Luciferic primal force of capacities. The capacities become Luciferic owing to their entrance into a human body. If man believes that capacities spring from the body, then man believes in Lucifer, and if man believes that needs spring from the human body, then man believes only in the Ahrimanic side of such needs.

And what experiment is being made in the East of Europe today under the guidance of the West? (This guidance is not only evident through the fact that Lenin and Trotsky are the spiritual disciples of the West, but also through the fact that Lenin was dispatched into Russia in a sealed railway carriage by Dr. Helphand, the German official who accompanied him. So that what is termed Bolshevism, is an article transported into Russia by a German Administration and the German military command.) What are they trying to attain in the civilization of Eastern Europe? An attempt is being made to do away with everything human, with everything embodied in a human body as human, and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman, with the civilization they represent. Were this to be realized in the East, then the Manufacturing Company of Lucifer and Ahriman would create a world excluding everything beneficial to the individual human being, and man himself would be dovetailed into this Luciferic-Ahrimanic civilization as part of a machine in the complete working of the machine. But the parts of a machine are lifeless and allow themselves to be fitted in, whereas human nature is inwardly alive, permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. It cannot fit into a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic organization, but will perish in it. Only an understanding of Spiritual Science can grasp what is really taking place today in this materialistic world which has but the haziest notions of spirit. It is only the insight of Spiritual Science and its living earnestness which can explain what the fact implies that, during the last thirty to forty years, the essential nature of the German people would not turn back to that German spirituality pointed out in my essay, but that in this German world of culture, we have at last come to this, that men of authority have felt it to be the right thing to send to Russia (in a sealed railway carriage), through a man who stood in their service, the inaugurators of Lucifer and Ahriman. In our days, it will not do simply to look around and then go to sleep peacefully, in the presence of what is actually taking place in the depths of the spirit of the present time. We ought to feel that we must say: “We have forsaken and trodden under foot that which in the age of Schiller and of Goethe was created within the Spiritual life of Germany. And we have the task of beginning where they left off and of building on further.” No better New Year's thought can enter our souls than the resolution to make this our starting point.

I told you the following some years ago: In the sixties and seventies of last century an educationist, Heinrich Deinhardt, lived in Vienna, the place where my essays were put together. This man's spirit led him from the standpoint of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics to take an active part in pedagogics, a science that was then under full sail, following the materialistic lead of his day. In some fine letters, printed at the time, explanatory of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics, Deinhardt wrote that man should be educated to recognize the compelling necessity of logic, and of the basic needs (“Notdurft”), which only live in instinct. Deinhardt was one of those who raised the warning cry: “We must prevent by means of education what is bound to happen otherwise.” He could not yet speak with the concepts of Spiritual Science, but he did point out in his own words the inevitable coming of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic culture if the Science of Education, the Art of Education were not determined by this balance. Heinrich Deinhardt had the misfortune to be knocked down in the street and to break his leg. Quite a simple operation might have put it right again, but the doctors found he was so undernourished that the injured parts would not heal. So this man, who could look so deeply into the events of his day, died owing to a slight accident. Yes, in Central Europe, men whose will was directed to bring forth something out of the spiritual, were left to starve! This example could be multiplied many times. Those who write like the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, whom I mentioned yesterday, will probably not die of hunger. Those will not die of hunger who wrote the following: “In No. 6 of the weekly paper, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Orgaeismus (The Threefold Social Organism) it is boasted that the ‘new impulse’ (a pet phrase of the Anthroposophists and of the Dreigliederung people) rests upon the fullness of Steiner's spiritual knowledge. The head of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart founded the ‘Free Waldorf School’ for the children of employees and managers, a school founded on the impulses of all the thoughts that had come from Dr. Steiner's Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In that school ‘Anthroposophy is to be the artistic method of education’.” Those who mock and tread into the dust what is being willed out of the spirit will surely not die of hunger, even in these hard days.

But it is indeed necessary to receive into our souls New Year impulses that prevent us from passing by sleepily and heedlessly, what is actually going on, impulses that make us accept sternly the stern intention of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In our own ranks, too, I see many who would like to doze over things that reveal themselves out of full compassion, out of compassion for that which is happening in our times and which, left to itself, must lead to downfall! There are persons lacking courage who join the Anthroposophical Society and then say: “Yes, Spiritual Science is something I like, but I do not want to have anything to do with social activity; it has no place in it.” Such members might take an example from our adversaries. The Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, follows everything we do. He concludes the article mentioned above, with the sentence, “The weekly paper, The Threefold Social Organism—e.g., No. 8, of course holds the opinion that the ‘Church is conspiring’ against the historical task of the self-determination of the individual.” In other articles, too, the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, shows how seriously he takes all we do.

It would be well if those who are in our Society would also take things seriously, in the right way. The spies who are on the outlook for any weak spot which they can expose in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and in all that proceeds from it, are not few in number. I think you know that I am not so foolish as to tell you what follows, out of mere vanity, and so I venture to refer to it. On the side of our adversaries the wish naturally arises to find a point of attack here or there. It is well, therefore, to read the following passage in Dr. Rittelmeyer's essay: ‘Steiner, War and Revolution’: “I happened to have a talk recently with a young Swedish scientist in economics, who had had the strict schooling of the economists of Cassel. He told me that he had read Steiner's book very carefully, from end to end, with the expectation of unmasking him as an amateur; but he had been unable to find any mistake.” In our circles we ought to consider such matters more seriously. The foundation on which we ought to build is the knowledge: Here something is willed, something that has nothing to do with the rambling talk of Theosophy, current elsewhere. Here we build upon the same strict insight into things as is demanded from any other accepted science. Were this really felt, then we should understand why the event took place which Father Zimmermann terms a defection. You know that it was no defection, but that we were thrown out because it was impossible to bring any earnestness into that society of mystic wishy-washy talk, no real earnestness was wanted there. They only wished to go on chattering in the same way they had chattered for years, particularly in connection with subjects about which all possible things can be said with no knowledge of the spiritual world. What our age most sorely needs is the greatest earnestness in the sphere of Spiritual life.

Today, New Year's day, with my visit drawing to an end, I wished to speak to you again of this deep earnestness. My most heartfelt desire is that into our ranks may come the New Year wish—it is a wish each one can shape for himself—that through the souls and hearts of our friends, eyes may in some degree be opened to that which is needed so sorely, to that which, out of the Spirit alone, is able to help humanity. No salvation is to be found in any external organization. Something new must be stamped upon human evolution. These facts must become known, and to feel that these facts must become known is indeed the most worthy New Year's thought that could rise in your hearts. This year, 1920, will hold in store many an important decision, if enough people can be found who are able to recognize the needs of mankind, as I have pointed them out today. 1920 will bring misery and suffering if such men cannot be found, if those only take the lead who wish to work on in the old way.

Today's lecture will be episodic, a kind of interspersion into our considerations, because I would like our English friends, who will soon be going home, to be able to take as much as possible with them. Therefore I will structure this lecture in a way to be as effective as possible. Today I would like, at first historically, not so much referring to the present—that can be done tomorrow perhaps—I would like to say something about imperialism, historically, but in a spiritual-scientific sense.

Imperialism is a much discussed phenomenon recently, and discussed by those who are more or less conscious of its relationship to the total phenomena of the present time. But when such things are discussed, what is not taken into account, or at least not enough, is that we live within the historical course of events, that we stand in a very definitive historical evolutionary epoch and that we can only understand this evolutionary epoch if we know where the phenomena which surround us, in which we live, come from.

Basically, what is most effective today and what will show itself to be an even more effective imperialism in the future will be its bearer—the Anglo-American people. As far as its name is concerned, it has shown itself to be something new: economic imperialism. But most important is the fact that everything said about this economic imperialism is untrue, everything, I would say, seems to be hanging in the air, which more or less consciously leads to untruthfulness. So in order to recognize how in these times realities are completely different from what is said about them, a more profound observation of the historical course of events is necessary.

I only need to mention one item of present-day phenomena in order to characterize the public's ability to judge. We have experienced how at first in various parts of Europe and finally even in Germany, Woodrow Wilson has been glorified. Our Swiss friends know very well that while Woodrow Wilson was being glorified I always spoke out against him in the sharpest terms here in Switzerland, for what Woodrow Wilson is today, he was of course also then when he was being glorified by the whole word. (It is already being reported—although I can't say if it's the complete truth—that in America they are thinking of declaring him unfit to govern, that there are doubts about his judgment.) The public's capacity for judgment, as it zips around the world today, is sufficiently characterized by such things.

And one must only remember a second thing. During the last four of five years, an enormous amount of pretty things have been talked about: the self-determination of peoples and so forth. All these things were not true, for what was behind them was something completely different, it was of course a question of power. And in order to understand what it's about, what is said, thought and judged, it is necessary to return to the realities. And when things such as imperialism are considered—“Imperial Federation League” is the official designation in England since the beginning of the twentieth century—we must realize that they are the recent products of an evolution and they go back to a remote past, and can only be explained by a true consideration of history.

We do not want to delve so deeply into the past as we could when studying the spiritual evolution of humanity, but we do want to go at least as far back as several centuries before the Christian era. We find imperialistic empires in Asia, and a subspecies of such empires in Egypt. Most characteristic of the Asiatic impulse are, for example, the historically known Persian empire and, especially, the Assyrian empire. But it is not sufficient to study this first phase of imperialism only in the last, historically known stage of the Assyrian empire, simply because the motivators dominating the Assyrian empire cannot be understood without reaching back to even earlier oriental conditions. Even in China, whose whole organization reaches so far back, the organization of recent times has changed so much that the true character of an oriental imperialism as it once existed is not recognized. However, the conditions which are known historically make it possible to see what the fundamentals are.

We cannot understand the old oriental imperialism without knowing the conscious relationship between people of a region, let's say an empire, and what we today would call the ruler or the rulers of that empire. Because of course our words for ruler or king and so forth no longer express the feelings about the ruler or the rulers. It is very difficult to understand the feelings of people in general of the third to fourth century before the Christian era because it is difficult nowadays to take account of how people felt in those ancient times about the relation of the physical world to the spiritual world. Today most people think, if they even think about a spiritual world, that it is somewhere in the distant beyond. And when the spiritual world is spoken about—and in the future it will again have to be spoken about as being present among us just as the sense world is—then what results is what has led for example to the Protestant mentality. But the essential nature of ancient times is that no distinction was made between the physical and spiritual worlds.

This is so much the case that when ancient times are referred to by people of today they can hardly imagine much consistency, for the way of thinking was so different then from what it is today. Rulers, a ruling caste, slaves, ruled people, that was reality—not something called a physical reality, but it was the reality, simultaneously the physical and the spiritual reality. And the ruler of an oriental empire—what was he? The ruler of the oriental empire was God. And for the people of those times there was no God beyond the clouds, no choir of spirits who surrounded the highest God—that view came later—but rather what we today call ministers or court jesters, somewhat disrespectfully, were beings of a divine nature. For it was obvious that because of the mystery schooling they had gone through, they had become something greater than ordinary people. They were looked up to, just as the Protestant mentality looks up to its God or certain more liberal circles look up to their invisible angels and such. Extra invisible angels or an extra super-sensible invisible God did not exist for the people of the ancient orient. Everything spiritual lived in man. In the common man lived a human soul. In those whom we would today call rulers, lived a divine soul, a God.

The concept of a really existing godly empire, which at the same time was a physical empire, is no longer taken into consideration. That a king has real divine power and dignity is considered absurd today, but was a reality in oriental imperialism.

As I mentioned, a subspecies was found in Egypt, for there we find a true transition to a later form. If we go back to the oldest form of imperialism, we find it based on the king being God who really physically appeared on earth, the son of heaven who physically appeared on earth, who was even the father of heaven. This is so paradoxical for the contemporary mind, that it seems unbelievable, but it is so. We can learn from Assyrian documents how conquests were justified. They were simply carried out. The justification was that they had to expand more and more the God's empire. When a territory was conquered and the inhabitants became subjects, then they had to worship the conqueror as their god. During those times no one thought of spreading a certain worldview. Why would it have been necessary? When the conquered people openly recognized the conqueror, followed him, then all was in order, they could believe whatever they wanted. Belief—personal opinion—wasn't touched in ancient times, nobody cared about it.

That was the first form in which imperialism appeared. The second form was when the ruler, the one who was to play a leading role, wasn't the god himself, but the god's envoy, or inspired by the god, interpenetrated with divinity.

The first imperialism is characterized by realities. When an oriental ruler of ancient times appeared before his people, it was in all his splendor, because as a god he was entitled to wear such clothes. It was the clothing of a god. That's what a god looked like. It meant nothing more than what the ruler wore was the fashion of the gods. And his paladins were not mere bureaucrats, but higher beings who accompanied him and did what they did with the power of higher beings.

Then came the time, as already mentioned, when the ruler and his paladins appeared as God's envoys, as interpenetrated with divinity, as representatives. That is very clear in Dionysus the Areopagite. Read his writings, where he describes the complete hierarchy, from the deacons, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, up to the church's whole hierarchy. How does he do this? Dionysus the Areopagite presents it as though in this earthly churchly hierarchy is mirrored what God is with his archangels and angles, super- sensibly of course. So above we have the heavenly hierarchy and below it's mirror image, the worldly hierarchy. The people of the worldly hierarchy, the deacons, archdeacons, wear certain clothes, and they perform their rituals; they are symbols. The first phase was characterized by realities, the second phase was characterized by signs, by symbols. But this has been more or less forgotten. Even Catholics understand little of the fact that the deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops are the representatives of the heavenly hierarchies. This has been mostly forgotten.

With the advancement of imperialism a division occurred, a real division. On one hand there were the leaders tending more towards being divine representatives, priestly, where the priests were kings; on the other hand the tendency towards the secular, although still by the grace of God. Basically these were the two forms: the churches and the empires.

During the first imperialism, when all was physical reality, something like this would have been unthinkable. But in the second phase of imperialism the division occurred. On one side more secular, but nevertheless representative of God, on the other side more church oriented, also representative of God. That system held until the middle ages and, I would even say, until the year 1806, but more as a shadow, retained in kings and paladins as God's representatives. The Roman Catholic Church's propagation tended more towards the priestly. But where this phenomenon of God's representative or envoy, which held through the entire middle ages, was most strongly maintained was in the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which finally disappeared in 1806. In “Holy” you have a whiff of what was divine during the ancient times on earth; “Roman” indicates the provenance, where it came from; “German Nation” was what it covered, the more secular element.

Therefore in the second phase of imperialism we no longer merely have the Church's anointed imperialism, but we have the tangled web of the divine and the secular anointed in the empires. That already began in the old Roman Empire during pre-Christian times and extended into the late Middle Ages. But this imperial Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation always had a double character. Remember that it goes back to Karl the Great. But Karl the Great was crowned by the Pope in Rome. Therewith royal dignity became a symbol, so that what existed here on the physical earth was no longer reality. The people of the Middle Ages did not worship Karl the Great and Otto I as gods, which was the case in more ancient times, but they saw in them godly representatives. And that had to be continually confirmed, for of course it became ever weaker in consciousness. But it still retained a symbolic reality, a reality of signs. These emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation went to Rome in order for the Pope to crown them. Istwan I was also crowned king of Hungary by the Pope in the year 1000. The anointment, and therefore the power, was bestowed on the world's rulers by the clergy.

It was also thought that there was justification for other peoples being incorporated into the empire. Even Dante thought that the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was justified in ruling the whole world. So the formula for imperialism is even to be found in Dante.

In fables and other lore where the events of history are crystallized in human consciousness, things are expressed from various viewpoints, not just one. We could say that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Europe the consciousness existed—not a clear one, more like a feeling—that once in ancient times in the Orient men lived on the physical earth who were themselves gods. They didn't think it was a superstition, oh no, rather they thought that such gods could no longer live on the earth because the earth had become so bad. That's been lost, what made men gods, the “Holy Grail” has been lost and now, in Central Europe, it can only be found in the way Percival found it: one seeks the way to find god within, whereas earlier god was a reality in the empire. Now the empire is merely a sum of symbols, of signs, and one must find the spirit in the symbols.

Of all the things which once existed, only remnants remain. Reality is deadened. Remnants remain, remnants of the most diverse kind. Generally, as long as things are real, definite, they later become ambiguous. And thus in Europe diversity grew from clear reality. As long as the Holy Roman Empire had meaning in human consciousness, the representative of the empire was powerful and competent enough to subdue the individual angel-symbols, the local princes, for that consciousness included the emperor's right to do so. But his right rested more or less on something ideal, which more and more lost its meaning, and the local princes remained. So we have in the Holy Roman Empire something which gradually had its inner substance squeezed out until only the exterior remained. The consciousness that earthly men were representatives of God was lost. And the expression for the fact that people no longer believed that certain individuals were representatives of God is Protestantism—protest against the idea of men as representatives of God.

If the principle of Protestantism had rigorously penetrated, no prince could have been crowned “by the Grace of God” again. But such things remained as remnants. These remnants remained until 1918, then they disappeared. These remnants, which had already lost all inner meaning, remained as outer appearances until then. The local German princes were the outer appearances; they only had meaning in those ancient times when they were symbols for an inspirational kingdom of heaven.

Other remnants remained. Not so long ago a pastoral letter was written by a Central-European bishop—perhaps he was an Archbishop. In that pastoral letter he more or less claimed that the catholic priest is more powerful than Jesus Christ for the simple reason that when the Catholic priest performs the transubstantiation at the altar, Jesus Christ must be present in the Sanctissimum, in the Host. The transubstantiation must really take place through the priest's power. It means that the action performed by the priest forces the Christ Jesus to be present on the altar. Therefore the more powerful is not the Christ Jesus, but he who performs the transubstantiation at the altar!

If we wish to understand such a thing which, as I said, appeared in a pastoral letter a few years ago, we must go back, not to the times of the second imperialism, but to the times of the first imperialism, many elements of which are retained in the Catholic Church and its institutions. Therein lies the remnant of the consciousness that those who rule on the earth are the gods, whereas the Christ Jesus is only the son of God. What was written in that pastoral letter is of course an impossibility for the Protestant mentality, just as for today it is almost impossible to believe that thousands of years ago people actually saw the ruler as God. But these are all real historical factors, real facts which played a role historically and are still present today.

These earlier realities play strongly into later events. Just look at how Mohammedanism [Islam] has spread. Certainly Mohammed never said: Mohammed is your God—as it would have been said thousands of years earlier by an oriental ruler. He limited himself to what corresponded more to the times: There is a God , and Mohammed is his prophet. In people's consciousness he was God's representative—the second phase of imperialism. The manner in which Islam spread, however, corresponded to the first phase. For Muslims have never been intolerant towards other beliefs the way some others were. The Muslims were content to defeat the others and make them their subjects, just as it was in older times when a profession of faith was not required, for it was a matter of indifference what they believed if they just recognized God.

And something also remained of the first phase of imperialism—strongly influenced by the second—in Russian despotism, in tsarism. The way in which he was recognized by his subjects goes back, at least partially, to the first phase of imperialism. It was not so much a question of what was in the consciousness of the Russian people, for the rulership of the tsars rested on the Germanic and the Mongolian elements rather than that of the Russian peasantry itself.

Now we come to the third phase of imperialism. It has been formulated since the beginning of the twentieth century, since Chamberlain and his people coined the expression “Imperial Federation League,” but the causes go back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when that great upheaval occurred in England as a result of which everywhere in the west that the Anglo-American people lived, the king, who earlier had been God, then an anointed one, became a kind of mere shadow—one cannot say a decoration exactly, but rather something more tolerated than taken seriously.

The English speaking peoples bring other preconditions to what we may call the people's will, the voting system, than, say, the French—the Latin peoples in general. The Latin peoples, especially the French, certainly carried out the revolution of the eighteenth century, but the French people today are more royal than any other. To be royal doesn't only mean to have a king at the top. Naturally a person whose head has been cut off cannot run around; but the French as a people are royal, imperialistic, without having a king. It has to do with the mood of soul. This “all are one” feeling, the national consciousness, is a real remnant of the Louis IV mentality.

But the English-speaking peoples brought other preconditions to what we may call the people's will. And little by little this became what the elected parliaments decided, and thus the third form of imperialism developed, which was formulated by Chamberlain and others. But today we want to consider this third imperialism psychologically.

The first imperialism had realities: One person was the God for the mentality of the other people. His paladins were the gods who surrounded him, sub-gods. The second form of imperialism: What was on the earth was the sign, the symbol. God acted within men. Third form of imperialism: Just as the previous evolution was from realities to signs and symbols, now the development is from symbols to platitudes.

This is an objective description of the facts, without being emotionally tinged. Since the seventeenth century what has been called the will of the people in the public life of the Anglo-American peoples in the law books—of course categorized according to classes—is no more than empty platitudes. Between what is said and reality there is not even the relation which existed between the symbol and reality. So the psychological path is this: from reality to symbol and then to platitudes—to words which have been squeezed out, dried out, empty words. This is the reality of the third imperialism: squeezed out, empty words. And nobody imagines that they are divine, at least not where they originated.

Just think about the basis of that imperialism, the ruling elements of which are empty platitudes: during the first imperialism the kings, in the second imperialism the anointed, now the empty platitudes. From majority decisions of course nothing real results, only a dominant empty platitude. The reality remains hidden. And now we come to an important factor upon which reality is based: the colonization system. Colonization played an important role in the development of this third imperialism. The “Imperial Federation League” summarizes the means of spreading imperialism to the colonies. But how do the colonies become part of the empire? Think back on real cases. Adventurers who no longer rightly fit into the empire, who are somewhat down at heel, go to the colonies, become rich, then spend their riches at home, but that doesn't make them respectable, they are still adventurers, bohemians. That's how the colonial empire is created. That is the reality behind the empty platitudes. But remnants remain. Just as symbols and empty platitudes remain as remnants of the original realities, or symbolic crowns on princes and tsars, also from the enterprises of the somewhat foul smelling colonists, realities remain. The adventurer's son is not so foul smelling, right? He already smells better. The grandson smells even better and a time comes when everything smells very good. The empty platitudes are now possessed by what smells good. The empty platitudes are now identified with the true reality. Now the state can spread its wings, it becomes the protector and everything has been made honest.

It is necessary to call things by their real names—although the names seldom describe the reality. It's necessary because only thus can we understand what tasks and what responsibilities confront humanity in these times. Only in this way is it possible to realize what a fable convenue so called history really is, meaning that history which is taught in the schools and universities. That history does not call things by their real names. On the contrary, its effect is that the names describe what is false.

What I have just described is something terrible, isn't it. But you see, it's a question of guiding the feelings towards responsibilities. Let's now consider the other side. Let's consider such an ancient empire. In people's minds it was an earthly reality; the priest-king came from the mysteries. The second was no longer earthly reality, it was symbolic. It is a long way from the godly jewelry the rulers and their paladins in the ancient oriental empires wore and the “Roter Adler” [Red Eagle] medals hung around people's necks long afterward. But that's how things evolved. It went from reality to nothing, not even a sign or symbol, but basically the expression of the empty platitude. Finally this empty platitude system, which has spread from the west to the rest of the world, has penetrated public affairs. I have even met court councilors—who anyway have little counseling to do—but what about the titular court councilors? Just an empty platitude hung on certain people and everything remains as before.

Whereas in the first phase the physical reality was thought to be spiritual, in the future this physical reality may no longer be thought of as spiritual. Nevertheless, the spiritual must be present here in the physical world. That means that spiritual reality must exist alongside physical reality. The human being must move around here within the physical reality, and recognize a spiritual reality, must speak of it as something real, super-sensible, invisible, but which exists, which must be established among us.

I have spoken about something quite terrible: about the platitude. But if the world had not become so platitude oriented, there would be no room for the introduction of a spiritual empire. Precisely because everything old has now become platitudes, a space has come into being in which the spiritual empire can enter. Especially in the west, in the Anglo-American world people will continue to speak in the usual terminology, things that come from the past. It will continue to roll on like a bowling ball. It will roll on in the words. You can find innumerable expressions especially in the west which have lost all meaning, but are still used. But not only in these expressions, but in everything described by the old words the empty platitude lives, in which there is no reality, for it has been squeezed out. That is where the spiritual, which has nothing of the old in it, can find room. The old must first become empty platitude, everything that continues to roll on in speech thrown overboard, and something completely new must enter, which can only propagate as a world of the spirit.

Only then can there be a kingdom of Christ on earth. For in that empire a reality must exist: “My kingdom is not of this world.” In the kingdom of this world, in which the kingdom of Christ will propagate, there will exist much that has not become empty platitude. But in the western world, everything originating in ancient times is destined to become platitude. Yes, in the west, in the Anglo-American world, all human tradition will become platitude. Therefore the responsibility exists to fill the empty vessel with spirit, about which can be said: “This kingdom is not of this world!” That is the great responsibility. It's not important how something came about, but what we do with what has come about. That is the situation.

Tomorrow we will speak about what can be done, for under the surface, especially in the western countries, the secret societies are most active, trying to insert the second phase of imperialism into the third. For in the Anglo-American people you have two imperialisms pushed together, the economic one of a Chamberlain and the symbolic imperialism of the secret societies, which play a very effective role, but which are kept secret from the people.

I have spoken to you about the historical origin of what today may be called imperialism, and you will have already noticed from what I said yesterday that it is essential to see how contemporary occurrences, which were once real factors in social life, are now merely leftovers from older times as far as reality is concerned. In olden times institutions and customs had their real meaning. To a certain extent they were realities. Realty has ended though. After passing through the stage of symbols, it has finally become a platitude.

In general we live in the age of platitudes. It is necessary, however, to realize that platitudes need a certain soil from which to grow, and on the other hand they are a preparation for something which is yet to come in human evolution. If the old realities had not transformed themselves into platitudes, that is, into something existing yet illusional, then the new reality could not come into being. The new could not come if for example a visible god appeared in human form as happened in the last years of the Roman empire. For the Roman emperors were, at least according to their pretensions, still gods. Nero, at least hypothetically, was a real god in human form. In the course of time such things have lost their meaning. They have passed through the stage of symbols and have become mere platitudes.

But the more things become platitudes, the more the terrain is prepared for a new reality—a spiritual life which is not derived from the sensible world, but from the super-sensible world; for a spiritual life which does not seek the divine-spiritual beings in human form, but as real, genuine beings amongst the visible people on earth. First must come the age of platitudes which must, however, be recognized as such. Then the development of a new spiritual life will be possible. In order to understand the contemporary world under such disagreeable conditions, one must direct one's attention toward the birth of a new spiritual life, fully conscious of the illusionary nature of what was formerly reality in human evolution.

It is only natural that people want to hold on to the old realities, even when they have become platitudes; for to realize that they have become platitudes causes a feeling of insecurity. They feel that there is no longer solid ground under their feet if such things have become platitudes. People love to deceive themselves, and when they recognize the deception as deception, they feel that they are adrift. They will no longer feel themselves to be adrift when they can really feel the solidity of the new spiritual life. And we live in the age when we will have to be participants in the fall of the platitude stage and will have to be participants in the rise of the [new] spiritual life. And this will be especially possible if all English-speaking peoples realize that the traditions they have preserved from olden times and of which they still speak have become platitudes, and how the reality beneath these platitudes is the economy, as I explained yesterday.

But a moment will come, a moment which is very important. At the moment when it is recognized that we are dealing with an economic life which only becomes “reputable” in the third or fourth generation and otherwise with platitudes, as I also explained yesterday. At that moment we will recognize the inanity of the human being who merely participates in physical life as though it were the only reality. This knowledge must dawn especially on the peoples of the west. The moment of realization must come when we can no longer defend all that we maintained till now. Reality for us is what we do for our stomachs and digestion. As long as we have not seen through the platitudes and recognized them for what they are, as long as we do not realize that the economy is the only reality, we will not be able to admit what it is necessary to admit. If we do realize all that, then human nature can do no other than to say: in order to be human we need a spiritual reality in addition to the physical reality of the economy.

That moment of truth must dawn. Human evolution can not advance further without this moment of truth. For the same reason that we go forward towards a new spiritual life, at present we must be immersed in the element of the platitude.

The peoples of the west have the greatest talent for this truth. All the prerequisites for the dawning of such truth is present in the peoples of the west, whereas the other European peoples have little disposition for such a truth to dawn on them with the necessary intensity. For them other conditions exist that prevent the illusions from being seen through so thoroughly, so radically, as they can be seen through by the English-speaking peoples. But once again we must keep the historical context in mind.

Consider for a moment that the various Central European tribes of Germanic origin were united since the time of Charlemagne's successors as the Holy Roman Empire, as I have already pointed out. That Holy Roman Empire was basically a network of pure symbols—all signs and symbols, which pointed to some kind of reality. It was not possible, however, to attain to full spiritual reality through the use of signs and symbols. The churches prevented it. Everything which the Middle Ages had to say about spiritual reality, and what the successors of the European confessions had to say about such a spiritual reality, had the character of the half-understood, the not-to-be-completely-understood. It had the character of colored light shining through the stained glass windows of the churches. The people recoiled when they approached the spiritual by means of the symbols; they recoiled in fear of a clear, sharp comprehension. On the contrary, they preferred to characterize the thing as being half unknown, which cannot be penetrated by knowledge.

It was also the case with social relationships. Studying the history of the Holy Roman Empire—and Swiss history is closely connected to it—we find that a lack of clarity was perpetuated from age to age. The lack of clarity in the social organism was perpetuated until finally in 1806 it became noticeable—even the Habsburgs realized it by then—that the Holy Roman Empire no longer made any sense. And the especially talented—that is negatively talented—Emperor Franz Joseph I abdicated the German crown. It lost the power to exist because no sense could be found behind the symbols. And the people of Central Europe were left with a striving in all directions, which contained but little concrete meaning.

Thus the founding of the Reich [empire] of 1870/71 with its inner contradictions. A German “empire” was created, but based on a false premise. The title “emperor” was invented. Perhaps in France under similar conditions the “empereur” would be understood, half-understood at least, because there was some substance left in the people; but in Germany a name existed which presumed that the people had a talent for mere names without meaning; that on one hand a talent for cultivating platitudes existed and on the other hand for the underlying reality of economic life. But that talent did not exist in Central Europe. And in order to understand what happened in Central Europe, history should not be studied based on abstract concepts, but on realities! We could ask the question: What happened in the German Reich between 1871 and 1914?

What people saw as happening from without was only an illusion. What was the reality? You see, with historical happenings something appears [draws on blackboard in red]; and beneath its surface something else appears [blue]. When the first thing disappears as an illusion, then the second thing, the reality, appears as its continuation.

One should not analyze, but look for the concrete reality. What developed in the German Reich during 1871 to 1914 was not apparent then, for the Reich itself was an illusion. The reality came later, it is what has been happening since November 1918; it is those who are presently in power. The fundamental character of the Wilhelmian age is Gustav Noske [Minister of War]. The fundamental character of what had been developing for decades only became apparent when the present rulers appeared. The German ex- emperor is defined by the so-called revolutionary rulers of the present. The state of affairs which existed beneath the surface in the previous decades, during which illusions were cherished, is the state of affairs which exists today in reality.

You can really study history when you seek involution in evolution, in that you look for what is happening beneath the surface. What was Russian tsarism in the 19th century in reality? What Russian tsarism was then has appeared in its reality today: Lenin and Trotsky, Bolshevism. That is the concrete reality of what was then an illusion. Tsarism was the lie that floated on the surface; but what tsarism really cultivated appeared in its true reality after tsarism itself was swept away. Lenin was nothing other than the tsar; after the tsar has been skinned what remains today is the reality: Lenin or Trotsky. And, continuing this analogy, if you were to skin people like Caprivi or Hohenlohe or Bethman Hollweg [German Chancellors from 1890 through 1917], Moske and Scheidemann [German politician in office from 1903 to 1918] and so on remain. These are the real figures; the others were mere illusions.

It is a question of not illustrating historical phenomena with abstract concepts, but of showing the historical realities. In history the definition of one fact will always be another fact, not an abstract concept. Therefore it is a question of studying realities. For we are living in an age when realities must be closely observed and revealed.

This phenomenon is particularly obvious if you study the constitution, the content of the secret societies which possess great power in the English-speaking countries, a power unsuspected by the general public. They are societies organized outwardly under very sympathetic rules, and have become ever more powerful during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

If you look back to England in 1720, you will find very few members of these secret societies. Members are usually merely tools, the really powerful people stand behind them. But there were very few members. But if we look at the statistics today, we find 488 Masonic lodges in London. Such lodges are excellent tools in the hands of the secret societies. In Great Britain there are 1,354 lodges, in the colonies and overseas 486, and then 836 lodges in the world of the so-called Royal Arch Chapter, which keeps even the external Masonic rituals secret.

It is a matter of observing the substantial content of what actually exists within these lodges, for that is what is used as tools by the groups in power. And it is also important to discern why these powerful circles have been so meaningful even until today. The real content goes back to the far past. Those who keep claiming that the contents of Freemasonry go back to the far past are not so very wrong, although the things presented as examples are often nebulous, perhaps even quackery. They go so far back that we can say that the time they started was during the first stage of imperialism when the god walked around in human form. At that time the things spoken and especially the things shown in these lodges today made some sense. Then they became symbolic. The sense is long gone. One can say that what goes on in the lodges today has almost no content. Only the symbols remain.

The symbols continued into the stage of platitudes, so that we have, especially in the English-speaking areas and the other areas dependent upon them, two layers of cultural fermentation side by side: the external, exoteric platitudes of public life, and in the secret societies the symbols, which are only kept as tradition without any attempt to reach back to their original meanings. Thereby the symbols have become platitudes in symbolic form, or symbols which are also platitudes in a different form. You have therefore the external exoteric platitudes of public life, expressed in normal human language and which are extensively used in parliaments and congresses. Then you have the use of symbols in the secret societies, whose members usually don't understand them—platitudes in symbolic form. It is important that alongside the external purely literal platitudes we also have the cultural ceremonial platitudes. For these ceremonial platitudes at least contain spiritual elements. And in the secret societies which possess a real ceremonial form, meaning those which go back to the original practices, it can happen that through their karma certain especially talented people do get to the bottom of the symbols. And sometimes a blind chicken finds a kernel of corn. Sometimes especially talented people discover the meaning of the rituals; then they are expelled from the secret society. But care is taken that they can no longer be dangerous for the secret society. For what is especially important for these societies is power, not insight. It is important for them to keep the secrets in their original form. And they posses a certain power in this traditional form. Why?

I have described for you the substantial content. But this content depends upon the people who are banded together in those societies. Just imagine how many people belong to the various lodges in the world. These people, when they enter the lodges, are confronted with the ceremonies, which are mannered as I described. But they are won for the lodges due to certain criteria. One of the most important criteria is the absolute indifference to the members' religious beliefs—although this criterion is sinned against in some cases. There are lodges, for example, which do not accept Jews. But they are ignorant of the basic principle, which is that people of all confessions are embraced, and individual beliefs are not touched. Also no attention is to be paid within the lodge to social class and other differences. In the correct lodges all are brothers, regardless of one being a lord and the other a worker—although this is also sinned against. Workers are not accepted in most lodges, only lords and others who are amenable to them. But that has nothing to do with the principle. Those who are within are totally united under the slogan: We are all brothers.

Then there are the degrees, which have nothing to do with the external social position of the members. The members are really united in a way which has nothing to do with their external social position. In our society people are divided firstly according to religion, whereas in the lodges the religions play no role. And secondly no one would claim that in the external social order men are all brothers. They are not brothers. In the lodges, however, those who belong to them are brothers.

Such things are really meaningful. It is not a matter of indifference under which viewpoints people come together in communities. When people of the same confession come together in a community, then in real life it is often a community dedicated to external power—dead power. But when they come together under the viewpoint that the faith they profess is a matter of indifference, it becomes a community with particularly strong spiritual power. That is why the Catholic Church, wanting to keep people under a more or less unified faith, must always reinforce its power by political means. It has always been more powerful the less it has insisted on its creed, and less powerful the more it has insisted on creed; the less the hierarchy, Rome, has demanded adherence to creed. For in society in general to make religion the central issue results in lack of power. A community can only be powerful when it attaches no importance to individual beliefs.

This is a particularly important reality in the age of platitudes. For side by side with the public platitudes stand to some extent the esoteric platitudes of the ceremonies, of the rituals. This is the real reason for present day social confusion. One can cite some strange examples for the platitudinous nature of the times. You know that in the middle of the nineteenth century there were two opposing parties in the English parliament—the liberal Whigs and the conservative Tories. Whigs and Tories were in opposition. What kind of names were they? In the first half of the nineteenth century these names were seriously meant. The liberals were called Whigs, and no embarrassment was involved: the others were called Tories, also without embarrassment. But when these names were adopted during the dawn of the English parliament, what did they signify? The name Whigs was a cussword. When a Scottish group organized against a certain church discipline, in England they were called Whigs. And the platitude spread so far that a cussword became the group's official title. So the honorable Liberals acquired a name which was no longer a cussword. And the Tories—that name originated in Ireland. In the 17th, 18th century the papists were called Tories. Later that name, a cussword for Irish papists, became the official designation for the English conservatives. All this happened in the realm of names, in the realm of designations, in the realm of platitudes. Reality played no role here. This is of course superficial, but wherever you look you will find such things, first in the English- speaking world, then in the rest of the world, to the extent it has been infected.

But what is it that brings so many men together in the lodges under such laudable viewpoints? It doesn't really matter that there are a small number of doubtful personages as well. The principles matter. It is very meaningful that all those people come together in ceremonial platitudes, which however keep them together on a real spiritual foundation.

It is true however, that when someone is a powerful minister, say, and needs an under-secretary of state, he naturally prefers a brother Mason to someone else. It is even justified, because he knows him better and can work better with him. This kind of cooperation is justified under the circumstances in which it arose, but must cease now.

But what does it mean? It is certainly remarkable that just in the age of platitudes which reign in public life a spiritual community appears with decidedly worthy principles. The spiritual community is quite secret, not so much as concerns its possessions, but rather its internal objectives. Why is this the case? Because we are living in the age of platitudes and platitudes encourage the falsification of realities. And what happens? What is basically already in existence? An independent economy which no longer coincides with the platitudes; a spiritual life driven underground and a rights life wrapped in a toga of platitudes, which has as much meaning for the external world as jurisprudence, as the English judge dressed in his judicial finery. Just to the extent this judicial finery corresponds to reality, jurisprudence corresponds to the reality behind the scenes. A triformation in the realm of the platitude, a triformation of the untruth, but proof for the necessity of the threefold society.

You see, to want the threefold society means to replace the lie and the platitude with the truth, but the truth as reality, whereas at the present time the period has begun in which reality is not truth, but platitude. Of course one can force platitudes into spiritual life as well as civil rights, the state; but that doesn't work well in the economy. Now comes something about which I always receive objections in many public lectures. After I explain how one can achieve insight into the spiritual world by following the indications in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” after every third lecture someone stands up and says: “Yes, but how can one know that what he sees inwardly is real? There is such a thing as auto-suggestion. This whole spiritual world could be only an auto-suggestion! There is even the suggestion that when someone even thinks about lemonade he has a lemonade taste in the mouth.” I always answer that it's a matter of standing in reality. Of course the taste of lemonade can be suggested, but your thirst cannot be quenched that way. If you go sufficiently far, you will reach reality. You can have platitudes in the realm of spirituality, even in the rights-state, but platitudes in the economy do not work because you can't eat them, or at least can't be filled by them.

So actually in the age of platitudes of all the realities the only one remaining is the economy. And in the moment that illusion is recognized as illusion, that the platitude is recognized as platitude, a strong feeling of shame will arise: We humans possess reason, but we only use this reason to insure the economic basis of physical life, something which animals do without possessing reason. If with our reason we do not achieve anything except to support the economy—food and the things necessary for physical existence, then we are prostituting our reason, then we are using our reason to accomplish something which the animal does quite well without the luxury of reason. In the moment that self- knowledge dawns, that is, when the platitudes are recognized for what they are, the feeling of shame arises; and then the reversal—the awareness of the necessity for renewal of spiritual/cultural life.

This must however be prepared in the correct way—that a sufficiently large number of people see through the contemporary situation. What good does it do if people only deceive themselves as to what is real. What good does it do to believe Lloyd George [British Prime Minster 1916-1922] when one sees through the fact that everything he says is necessarily platitude? What good does it do if the whole world worshiped Woodrow Wilson, when ones sees through the fact that Wilsonian politics were platitudes? What good does it do to dwell on European conditions today based on inherited principles from the past which are no longer valid?

Symbols should also be viewed in their historical context. It should be clear that outward appearances express remarkable things. The Habsburgs, for instance, came from Alsace and passed through Switzerland always moving east. They got as far east as they would go when they became the apostolic kings of Hungary. But in this journey from west to east, the remarkable thing is that the western realities faded away in the east.

The Hohenzollerns didn't take such a long journey—only from Nuremberg to Berlin, but also from west to east. These historical signs are also real symbols which we should pay attention to. And we should pay attention to the realities beneath the platitudes of today. That is why it is impossible to find reality in public opinion today. Whoever has a sense for reality arrives at some remarkable things. When you look into the origin of things in public life that everyone in the whole world is imitating, things like Whigs and Tories, you find that they were originally cusswords, and it was necessary to take them seriously because serious names for what really existed could not be found. And that's the situation with many things nowadays. In public life we try to enclose words in a kind of mystical shroud, and don't realize it. We don't realize that we are living in the age of platitudes.

For example I know of a very interesting codex consisting of a collection of platitudes. When you open this codex you find remarkable sentences. For example: What is justice? Justice is a people's will—and so on. Yes, my dear friends, the law is the will of a people! People—but today “people” is thought to be a mere sum of individuals. But this sum is supposed to have a will. That is the kind of explanation given in the codex of platitudes. One has the impression that someone wished to enjoy the luxury of translating into platitudes everything existing in public life today. And do you know the title of this codex of platitudes? The State, and its author is Woodrow Wilson. This codex appeared in the 1890s. Now it was not Woodrow Wilson's intention to enjoy the luxury of collecting all the platitudes in one book; nevertheless it was accomplished. So little had what people think and say to do with reality that in their opinion Woodrow Wilson had compiled the sum of today's political wisdom—but which was in reality a codex of platitudes. A few years ago the platitude bug bit a German so soundly that he translated this fat book into German. I assume that it will also be translated into other languages, but I don't know.

Without seeing through these things, without observing everywhere the realities in these things, we will not get far. One doesn't advance today with small thinking. It is necessary to motivate ourselves to think big. We will discuss this further tomorrow.

When you consider what has been said here during the past two days you will see that what belongs to the essence of imperialism is that in an imperialistic community something that was felt to be part of a mission—not necessarily justified, but understandable—later continued on as an automatism, so to speak. In the history of human development things are retained—simply due to indolence—which were once justified or explicable, but no longer are.

If a community is obliged to defend itself for a period of time, then it is surely justified to create certain professions for that purpose: police and military professions. But when the danger against which defense was necessary no longer exists, the professions continue to exist. The people involved must remain. They want to continue to exercise their professions and therefore we have something which is no longer justified by the circumstances. Something develops which, although perhaps originating due to the necessity for defense, takes on an aggressive character. It is so with all empires, except the original imperialism of the first human societies, of which I spoke yesterday, in which the people's mentality considered the ruler to be a god and thus justified in expanding his domain as far as possible. This justification was no longer there in all the subsequent empires. Let us now consider once again from definite viewpoints what is apparent in the historical evolution of mankind. We find that in the oldest times the will of the individual who was seen as divine was the indisputable power factor. In public life there was in reality nothing to discuss in such empires; but this impossibility of discussion was grounded in the fact that a god in human form walked the earth as the ruler. That was, if I may say so, a secure foundation for public affairs.

Gradually all that which was based on divine will and was thus secure passed over to the second stage. In that stage the things which can be observed in physical life, be they persons, be they the persons' insignias, be they the deeds of the governing or ruling persons, it was all symbols, signs. Whereas during the first phase of imperialism here in the physical world the spirit was considered directly present, during the second stage everything physical was thought of as a reflection, as an image, as a symbol for what is not actually present in the physical world, but only illustrated by the persons and deeds in the physical world.

Such times, when the second stage appeared, was when it first occurred to people that a possibility for discussion of public affairs was possible. What we today call rights can hardly be considered as existing during the first stage. And the only political institution worth mentioning was the phenomenon of divine power exercised by physical people. In social affairs the only thing that mattered was the concrete will of a physical person. To try to judge whether this will was justified or not makes no sense. It was just there. It had to be obeyed. To discuss whether the god in human form should or should not do this or that made no sense. In fact it was not done during those times when the conditions I have described really existed. But if one only saw an image of the spiritual world in physical institutions, if one spoke of what Saint Augustine called the “City of God”—that is, the state which exists here on earth, but which is really an image of heavenly facts and personalities, then one can hold the opinion that what the person does who is a divine image is right, is a true image: someone else could object and say that it is not a true image. That's when the possibility of discussion originated. The person of today, because he is accustomed to criticize everything, to discuss everything, thinks that to criticize and discuss was always present in human history. That is not true. Discussing and criticizing are attributes of the second stage, which I have described for you. Thus began the possibility to judge on one's own, that is, to add a predicate to a subject. In the oldest forms of human expression this personal judging was not at all present in respect to public affairs. During the second stage what we call today parliament for example was in preparation; for a parliament only makes sense when it is possible to discuss public affairs. Therefore, even the most primitive form of public discourse was a characteristic of the second stage. Today we live in the third stage, insofar as the characteristic form of the western countries more or less spreads over the world. This is the stage of platitudes. This stage of platitudes, as I characterized it to you yesterday, is the one in which the inner substance has also disappeared from discussion and therefore everyone can be right, or at least think that they are right, when it can't be proved that they are wrong, because basically within the world of platitudes everything can be affirmed. Nevertheless, previous stages are always retained within the next stages. Therefore the inner impulse to imperialism exists. People observe things very superficially. When the previous German Kaiser wrote in a book that was opened out to write in: “The king's will is sublime law”—what did it mean? It meant that he expressed himself in the age of platitudes in a manner that only had meaning for the first stage. In the first stage it was really the case that the ruler's will was highest law. The concept of rights, which includes the right of free speech, and involves lawyers and courts, is essentially a characteristic of the second stage, and can only be grasped in its reality from the viewpoint of the second stage. Whoever has followed how much discussion has taken place about the origin and character of rights will have noticed that there is something shimmering in the rights concept as such, because it is applicable to the symbolic stage, where the spiritual shimmers through the material, shines, so that when only the external signs, the legal aspects and words appear, one can argue and discuss what are rights and the legal system in public discourse.

In the age of the platitudes, however, understanding of what is necessary for rights in society is completely lost: that the spiritual kingdom shines through into the physical kingdom. And then one arrives at such definitions as I described yesterday using the example of Woodrow Wilson. I will now read to you a definition of the law that Woodrow Wilson gave so you can see how this definition consists of nothing but platitudes. He said: “The law is the will of the state in respect to those citizens who are bound by it.” So the state unfolds a will! One can well imagine that someone who is embedded so strongly in abstract idealism, not to mention materialism—for they are practically the same—can claim that the state is supposed to have a will. He would have to have lost all sense of reality to even conceive of such a thing let alone write it down. But it is in the book I spoke to you about yesterday—the codex of platitudes: The State, Elements of Historical and Practical Politics.

There are other interesting things in it. Only in parenthesis I would like to draw your attention to what Wilson says in this book about the German Empire after he describes how the efforts to found it were finally successful in 1870/71. He describes this with the following sentences: “The final incentive for achievement of complete national unity was brought about by the German-French war of 1870/71. Prussia's brilliant success in this struggle, fought in the interest of German patriotism against French impertinence, caused the cool restraint of the central states towards their powerful neighbor in the northern end; they united with the rest of Germany and the German Empire was founded in the royal palace at Versailles on January 18, 1871.” The same man wrote that who a short time later in Versailles united with those whose impertinence had once been the motivation for the founding of the German Empire. Much of present day public opinion derives from the fact that people are so terribly superficial and pay no attention to the facts. If you decide to decide according to objective information, then things look quite different from what is propounded in public and accepted by thousands upon thousands of people. It wouldn't have hurt one bit if when Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in glory, praised from all sides, these remarks had been held up to him. That is what must be striven for, to take the facts into account, which means also the truth.

So the second stage is when discussion arises, which is what makes the civil rights concept possible. The third stage is when economic life is the essential reality. And yesterday we showed how this [present] age of platitudes is absolutely necessary in the course of historical evolution in order that the platitude, which is empty, can open people's eyes to the fact that the only reality is economic life and how it is therefore so necessary to propagate spirituality, the new spirituality in the world.

People have quite a skimpy idea about this new spiritual life. And it is therefore understandable that it is burdened with the most ridiculous misunderstandings. For this new spirituality must penetrate into the depths of human life. And although those secret societies, about which I spoke yesterday, only traditionally preserve the old forms, the slogan “brothers,” meaning not to let social class or an individual's religion play a part in the lodges, in a certain sense does prepare for it in the right way.

We say today—I beg you to pay special attention to this, let's take something quite banal, quite common: “The tree is green.” This is a manner of speaking which is common to the second stage of human development. Perhaps you will understand me better if you imagine that we try to paint this opinion—that “the tree is green.” You cannot paint it! There will be some white surface and green will be added, but nothing about the tree has been painted. And when something of the tree is painted which isn't green all you do is disturb the effect even more. If you try to paint “The tree is green,” you are painting something dead. The way we combine subject and predicate in our speech is only useful for our view of the dead, of the non-living in the world. As we still have no idea of how everything in the world is alive, and how to express ourselves about what is alive, we form such judgments as “The tree is green,” which presupposes that a relationship exists between something and the color green, whereas the color green is itself the creative element, the force which acts and lives. The transformation of human thinking and feeling will have to take place within the innermost life of the soul. This will take a long time to accomplish, but when it does it will affect social conditions and how people relate to each other.

Today we are only at the beginning of all this. But it is necessary to know which paths lead to the light. I have said that it is meaningful when people get together and each one's subjective beliefs play no role. And consider it from this viewpoint—really think about it—the way in which anthroposophy is described. It is not described through definitions or ordinary judgments. We try to create images, to present things from the most varied sides, and it is senseless to try and nail down something meant in a spiritual-scientific sense with a mere yes or no opinion. People today always want to do that, but it isn't possible. It happens ever more frequently—because we are growing out of the second stage and into the third—that someone asks: What is good for me in order to counter this or that difficulty in life? Advice is given. Aha! The person concerned says, so in this or that situation in life one must do this or that. They generalize. But it has only a limited meaning, for judgments given from the spiritual world always have only an individual meaning, are only applicable to one case. This way of generalizing, which we have become accustomed to in the second stage, must not continue into the third stage. People today are very much inclined to carry things over from the past into the future. One can become disinclined towards the things which are pernicious for the soul by seeing clearly what is happening.

Yesterday I indicated to you that in many respects the Catholic Church harks back to the first stage. It contains something like a sham or a shadow of the first stage of human evolution, which sometimes solidifies into a kind of spiritual imperialism, as for example in the 11th century when the Monks of Cluny really ruled over Europe more than is thought. From their ranks the powerful, imperialistic Pope Gregory VII emerged. Therefore Roman Catholic dogma enables the priest to feel greater than Christ, because he can force him to be present at the altar. This clearly shows that the institution of the Catholic Church is a relic, a shadow-image of what existed in the very first imperialism.

You know that a great enmity existed between the Catholic Church and the secret societies which used Freemasonry in the west—a certain form of Freemasonry at least—as their instrument. It would go too far in this lecture to describe in detail how this enmity has gradually increased over time. But one thing can be said, how in these secret societies the opinion is very strong that the Catholic Church is a relic of the first stage of imperialism. The Holy Roman Empire used this framework to have Charlemagne and the Otto's crowned by the pope, thereby using the imperialism of the soul as the means of mundane anointment. They took what still remained from older times and poured it into the new. Thus the imperialism of the second stage was poured into the framework of the first imperialism.

Now we have arrived at the third stage, which shows itself to be economic imperialism, especially in the west. This economic imperialism is connected to a background culture of secret societies, which are sated with empty symbols. But while it has become clear that the social constitution of the Church is a shadow-image of what once existed and no longer has meaning, it is still not understood that in the second stage the statesmen of the west still suffer under a great illusion. Woodrow Wilson would no longer speak of the will of the Church, but he speaks of the will of the State as being self-evident. But the state only had the importance attributed to it during the second stage of human development. Whereas during the oldest, the first stage the Church was all-powerful, in the second stage the state contains everything that was attributed to the Church in the first stage. Thus the economic imperialism of Great Britain and even a certain idea of freedom has been poured into the state. And those who were educated in Great Britain see in the state something that can well have a will of its own.

But we must perceive that this concept of the state must take the same road the concept of the Church has traveled. It must be realized: If we retain this concept of the state for the entire social organism, a mere rights institution, and force everything else into this rights institution, we are propagating a shadow just as the Church has propagated a shadow—recognized as such by the secret societies. There is little awareness of this though. Think of all the public affairs that people are enthusiastic about which are pressed into the concept of the political state. There are nationalists, chauvinists and so forth; everything we call nation, national , chauvinism, it's all incorporated into the framework of the state. Nationalism is added and the concept of the “nation-state” is construed. Or we may have a certain opinion about, say socialism, even radical socialism: the framework of the state is used. Instead of nationalism, socialism is incorporated. But then we have no concept; it can only be a shadow-image, as the constitution of the Church has become. In some Protestant circles the idea has arisen that the Church is only the visible institution, that the essence of religion must take root in people's hearts. But this degree of human development has not yet arrived in respect to the political state, otherwise we wouldn't be trying to squeeze all kinds of nationalisms into the political boundaries which exist as the result of the war [First World War—trans.] All this neglects to take one thing into consideration—the fact that what occurs in the historical development of humanity is life and not mechanism. And a characteristic of life is that it comes and goes. The imperialistic approach is different however. According to this approach one does not think about the future. This is part of the present-day approach to public affairs, that people have no living thoughts, only dead ones. They think: Today we instituted something, it is good, therefore it must remain forever. The feminist movement thinks like this, as do the socialists and the nationalists. We have founded something, it begins with us, everything waited for us until we became clever enough. And now we have discovered the cleverest that exists and it will continue to exist forever. It's as though I have brought up a child until he is eighteen years old and I say: I have brought him up correctly, and he will stay as he is. But he will get older, and he will also die, as does everything in the course of human evolution. Now I come to what I mention before about what must accompany the principle of indifference to one's religious beliefs and fraternity. What must accompany them is the awareness that life on earth includes death and that we are aware that the institutions we create must of necessity also cease to exist, because the death principle already resides in them and they therefore have no wish to exist forever, do not consider being permanent. Of course under the influence of the thinking characteristic of the second stage this is not possible . But if the feeling of shame of which I spoke yesterday arises, when we realize that we are living in the kingdom of platitudes under which only economic imperialism glimmers—then will we call for the spirit, invisible but real. We will call for a knowledge of the spirit, one which speaks of an invisible kingdom, a kingdom which is not of this world in which the Christ-impulse can actually gain a foothold.

This can only happen when the social order is tripartite, threefold: The economy is auto- administered, the political state is no longer the absolute, all-inclusive entity, but is exclusively concerned with rights alone, and spiritual/cultural life is truly free, meaning that here in reality a free spiritual sector can be organized. The spiritual life of humanity can only be free if it is dependent only upon itself and when all the institutions responsible for cultivating the spirit, that is, cultural life, are dependent only upon themselves.

What do we have then, when we have this tripartite organism, this social organism? We have an economy in which the living physical earth is predominant. In this sector the economic forces of the economy itself are active. I doubt anyone will think that if the economy is organized as described in my book Towards Social Renewal—Basic Issues of the Social Question some kind of super-sensible forces will be present. When we eat, when we prepare our food, when we make our clothing, it is all reality. Esthetics may be symbolically present, but the actual clothing is the reality.

When we look at the second sector of the future social organism [the rights sector], we don't have a symbolism like the second stage, where the political state constituted the totality, but we have what is valid for one person being equally valid for the other. And the third sector will be neither symbol nor platitude, but a spiritual/cultural reality. The spirit will possess the possibility of really living within humanity. The inner social order can only be built through a transition to inner truthfulness. In the age of platitudes this will be especially difficult though. For during the age of platitudes people acquire a certain ingenious cleverness, which is, however, nothing more than a play on words of the old concepts. Just consider for a moment a characteristic example. Suddenly from the imperialism of platitudes comes the idea that it would be good if the queen of England also has the title “Empress of India.” One can invent the most beautiful reasons for this, but if it didn't happen, nothing would have changed. The Emperor of Austria, who now belongs to the deposed royalty, before he was chased out carried around along with his other titles a most unusual one: Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galizia, Lodomeria, Illyia and so on. Among all these titles was also “King of Jerusalem!” The Austrian Emperor also carried, until he was no longer emperor, the title “King of Jerusalem.” It came from the crusades. It would be impossible to give a better example of meaninglessness than this. And such meaninglessness plays a much greater role than you imagine. It is a question of whether we can arise to a recognition of the present-day platitudes. It is made difficult because those who live in platitudes are the verbal representatives of the old concepts that stagger around in their brains imitating thoughts. But one can only achieve real thinking again when the inner soul-life is filled with substance and that can only come from knowledge of the spiritual world, of spiritual life. Only by being relieved by the spirit can one become a complete person, after having been constipated with platitudes. What I described yesterday as a feeling of shame will result in the call for the spirit. And the propagation of the spirit will only be possible if the spiritual/cultural sector is allowed to develop independently. Otherwise we will always have to take advantage of loopholes, as was the case with the Waldorf School because the Württemberg Province education law had such a loophole which made it possible to establish a Waldorf school only according to spiritual laws, according to spiritual principles, something which in practically no other place on earth would be possible. But one can only organize the things concerning the spiritual life from the spirit itself if the other two sectors do not interfere, if everything is taken directly from the spiritual sector itself.

At present the tendency is the reverse. But this tendency does not reckon with the fact that with every new generation a new spiritual/cultural life appears on earth. It's immaterial whether a dictatorship or a republic is established, if it is not understood that everything which appears is subject to life and must be continuously transformed, must pass through death and be formed anew, pass through metamorphoses, then all that will be accomplished is that every new generation will be revolutionary. Because only what is considered good for the present will be established. A fundamental concept for the western areas which are so mired in platitudes must be to see the social organism as something living. And one sees it as living only when it is considered in its threefold nature. It is just those whose favorable economic position allows them to spread an [economic] imperialism over practically the whole world who have the terrible responsibility of recognizing that the cultivation of a true spiritual life must be poured into this imperialism. It is ironic that an economic empire which spread over the whole world was founded on the British Isles and then when they were seeking mystical spirituality turned to those whom they had economically conquered and exploited. [India—Tr.] The obligation exists to allow one's own spiritual substance to flow into the social organism. That is the awareness which our British friends should take with them, that now, in this worldwide important historic moment, in all the world's economic institutions where English is spoken, the responsibility exists to introduce true spirituality into the exterior economic empire. It's an either/or situation: Either efforts remain exclusively oriented towards the economy—in which case the fall of earthly civilization is the inevitable result—or spirit will be poured into this economic empire, in which case what was intended for earthly evolution will be achieved. I would like to say: Every morning we should bear this in mind very seriously and all activities should be organized according to this impulse. The bell tolls with extreme urgency at present—with terrible urgency. In a certain sense we have reached the climax of platitudes. In an age when all content has been squeezed out of platitudes, content which came to humanity previously but which no longer has any meaning, we must absorb real substantial content into our psychological and social life. We must be clear about the fact that this either/or must be decided by each individual for him or her self and that each must participate in this decision with his most inner force of soul. Otherwise he does not participate in the affairs of humanity.

But the attraction for illusion is especially strong in the age of platitudes. We wish so to sweep away the seriousness of life. We avoid looking at the truth inherent in our evolution. How could people let themselves be deceived by Wilsonian ideas if they really had the intense desire for truthful clarity? It must come. The desire for truth must grow in humanity. Above all, the desire for the liberation of spiritual/cultural life must grow along with the knowledge that nobody has the right to call himself a Christian who has not grasped the saying: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

This means that the kingdom of Christ must become an invisible kingdom, a truly invisible empire, an empire of which one speaks as of invisible things. Only when spiritual science gains in importance will people speak of this empire. Not some church, not some state, not some economic empire can create this empire. Only the will of the individual who lives in a liberated spiritual/cultural life can create this empire.

It is difficult to believe that in the lands in which people are downtrodden much can be done to free spiritual life. Therefore it must be done in those lands where the people are not downtrodden politically, economically and, obviously, not spiritually downtrodden. Above all it must be realized that we have not arrived at the day when we say: Until now things have gone downhill, they will go uphill again! No, if people do not act for this objective out of the spirit, things will not go uphill again, but will continue downhill. Humanity does not live today from what it has produced—for to produce again a spiritual impulse is necessary—humanity lives today from reserves, from old reserves, and they are being used up. And it is childish and naïve to think that a low point is reached some day and things will get better then, even with our hands in our laps. That's not how it is. And I would like to see that the words spoken here kindle a fire in the hearts of those who belong to the anthroposophical movement. I would hope that the specter which perhaps haunts those who find their way to this anthroposophical movement be overcome by the spirit meant here. It is certainly true that someone who finds his way to such a movement often seeks something for himself, for his soul. Of course he can have that, but only in order to stand with his soul in the service of the whole. He should advance, certainly, for himself, but only so mankind can advance through him. I cannot say that often enough. It should be added to those things I said should be thought about every morning. If we had really taken the inner impulse of this movement seriously, we would have been much farther along. But perhaps what is done in our circles does not help advance towards the future, but is often a hindrance. We should ask ourselves why this is so. It is very important. And above all we should not think that the sharpest powers of opposition are not active from all sides against what strives for the well-being of humanity. I have already indicated to you what is being done in the world in opposition to our movement, what hostility is activated against us. I feel myself obliged to make these things known to you, so that you should never say to yourself: We have already refuted this or that. We have refuted nothing, because these opponents are not interested in the truth. They prefer to ignore as much as possible the facts and simply aim slanderous accusations from all corners.

I would like to read part of a letter to you which arrived recently from Oslo. “One of our anthroposophical friends works in a so-called people's college in Oslo together with a certain Schirmer. This Mr. Schirmer is in a certain sense quite a proficient teacher, but is also a fanatical racist and a sworn anti-Semite. At a people's meeting where three of us gave lectures about the Threefold Society, he talked against us, or rather against Dr. Steiner's Towards Social Renewal, although without much success. The guy has a certain influence in teachers' circles and he works in his own way in the sense of the social triformation in the school insofar as he is for freedom, but on the other hand he works against the social triformation and Dr. Steiner for the simple reason that he suspects that Dr. Steiner is a Jew. That is perhaps not so bad. We must expect and overcome more serious opposition. But now he has received confirmation of his suspicion. He turned to an ‘authority,’ namely the editor of the political anthropological monthly, Berlin-Steglitz. This purely anti-Semitic magazine wrote to him that Dr. Steiner is a Jew through and through. He is associated with the Zionists. And the editor added that they, the anti-Semites, have had their eye on you [Dr Steiner] for a long time. Mr. Schirmer also says that a persecution of the Jews is beginning now in Germany, and that all the Jews on the anti-Semites' blacklist should be simply shot down or, as they say, rendered harmless.” and so on.

You see, this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism as such, that's only on the face of it. They choose slogans in these situations, with which they try to accomplish as much as possible with people who listen to slogans. But such things clearly indicate what most people don't want to see, what they want to ignore more and more. It is today much more serious that you think, and we should not ignore the seriousness of the times, but should realize that we are only at the beginning of these things which are opposed to everything that is intended to advance human progress. And that we should never, without neglecting our responsibilities, divert our attention from what is a radical evil within humanity, what manifests as a radical evil within humanity. The worst that can happen today is paying attention to mere slogans and platitudes, and believing that outdated concepts somehow have roots in human reality today—if we do not initiate a new reality from the sources of the spirit itself.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to tell you today, first of all to all of you, but especially to those whose visit has pleased us greatly—especially to our English friends, so that when they return to their own country, where it will be so important, they will have something on which to base their activities. You will have seen that I have not spoken in favor or against anyone, nor have I flattered anyone. I only speak here in order to say the truth. I have known theosophists who when they speak to members of a foreign nation begin to talk about what an honor it is to be able to spread the teachings about the spiritual life in a nation which has accumulated so much glory. Such things cannot be said to you here. But I believe that you have come here to hear the truth and I think that I have best served you by really trying to tell the unvarnished truth. You will have learned during your trip that telling the truth nowadays is not a comfortable thing, for the truth calls forth opposition now more than ever. Do not be afraid of opposition, for they are one and the same: to have enemies and to tell the truth. And we will understand each other best when our mutual understanding is based on the desire to hear the unvarnished truth. Before I leave for Germany, this is what I wanted to say to you today, and especially to our English friends.

From the reflections that were made here before my departure, and even from the, I would like to say, basic text of the public lectures, it can be seen that the science of initiation is, so to speak, “read” from the meaning of human developmental history, how one must intervene, absolutely must intervene in outer life, in all that is to be known and undertaken in outer life. If we are not able to fully absorb ourselves in this truth today, then we are asleep to the real demands of the time. This sleep with regard to the real demands of the time is indeed the case with most people of the present. We must be clear about the fact that the present poses questions to humanity that cannot be answered otherwise than from the science of initiation. It is not merely a matter of the fact that a Science of Initiation has always existed in the evolution of humanity, that at all times there have been initiates, as it were, into the events and the forces of existence. the point is that there are also such initiates today into the reasons for events and into the forces of existence; but only very few people have a proper idea of how this matter stands in more detail. And actually, people of the present would not want that at all. They actually shrink back from what can be called the necessity of the intervention of initiated science into the consciousness of the time. One can only get an idea of the seriousness of the situation by observing the differentiation of this matter throughout the civilized world. Because things are quite different in the East, they are quite different in the West. And anyone today who believes that they can get by with absolute judgments that are supposed to apply to everything is not living in reality, but is actually living in an abstract world. But it is necessary that things be looked at again and again from different points of view, so that at least some people may be impelled to realize the seriousness of the times.

If we first look at the West, preferably at the world of the English-speaking population, then today public opinion and what flows from public opinion for external events, for events within this English-speaking population is not merely dependent on what - I want to express myself quite decidedly today - the uninitiated dream and hold up as ideals in life. Particularly in the English-speaking population, there is a huge contrast between what appears in public consciousness as ideas and what those who are truly initiated into the events of world history mean behind the scenes of world history.

For if we take the general consciousness as it expresses itself in these parts of the civilized world, in the best endeavors, in the best public publications, we can say that there is a kind of ideal of a certain humanity, of humanity working towards a certain humanity, towards uniting human endeavors under the aspect of humanity, of the establishment of institutions that place themselves in the service of humanity. We want to disregard all the murky, lying waters that abound; we want to see what is best in public life that comes from the uninitiated. This is a certain striving to bring people together from the point of view of humanity. Behind this external striving stands the knowledge of the initiates, the knowledge of the leading initiates. And without the public knowing this, without the public having the opportunity to gain sufficient knowledge of the facts, the judgments and the guiding forces of certain initiated circles flow into public opinion and into the course of events that depends on it, into external action.

Here and there some society or other may arise with fine programs and beautiful ideals. People may be dripping with idealism. But they live with it without knowing it, not only in what they talk about, but there are ways and means of allowing all these things to be penetrated by what one wants to penetrate from a certain side, from the side of the initiates. And so it came about that in the last third of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century – we will stop at these things for the time being and not go back further – well-meaning people who were uninitiated but dreamed of all kinds of beautiful ideals joined together to in societies, but that behind this hustle and bustle are initiates, those initiates who in the eighties - as I said, we don't want to go back further - of the 19th century spoke of the fact that a world war had to come, which above all had to give the southern and eastern European states a completely different face.

If you are able to follow what has been taught and spoken within the circles of initiates in this field, then you know that the things that have poured over the civilized world in the last five years as terrible, dreadful things have been predicted with great certainty. All these things were no secret to the initiates of the English-speaking population, and the following discrepancy runs through all the discussions: on the one hand, beautiful exoteric ideals, the ideal of humanity with the real belief in this ideal of humanity in the most diverse forms on the part of the uninitiated uninitiated; on the other hand, the doctrine, the conscious, strictly held doctrine that everything that is Romanesque, everything that is Central European culture, must disappear from modern civilization, and that what the culture of the English-speaking population is must predominate and achieve world domination.

When these things are said now, they carry much more weight than if they had been said twenty years ago, for the simple reason that twenty years ago one could say to the people who said it: Well, you hear the grass growing. Today one can point out that a large part of what has been said within the circles of the initiated has actually been realized.

I speak as cautiously as possible so as not to deviate in any way from the presentation of the purely factual. But this presentation of the purely factual is something that is extremely uncomfortable for the majority of people in the present day. They would like to cast it off, they do not want to let it approach them. In the present time, there is something so very soul-satisfying about cultivating nationalism in this or that way, about speaking of the League of Nations, about the re-establishment of ancient sacred national institutions, and so on. The fact that we are currently in the midst of a terrible human crisis is something that people today absolutely do not want to know.

Now, with a few words, we have pointed out the discrepancy between what the uninitiated in the West know and what, unbeknownst to them, is throbbing in their decisions. One can only really know how one is integrated as a human being into what is happening if one makes an effort to get to know what is there in the world, if one does not let oneself be driven and pushed, but if one tries to find ways and means that really make freedom of will possible.

And if we look towards the East: throughout the whole of the East there is also this dichotomy between the initiated and the uninitiated. What do the uninitiated say? — These uninitiated people in the East speak in a way similar to Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore is a wonderful idealist of the East, a person who has extraordinarily far-reaching ideals. Everything he expresses outwardly is beautiful. But everything that comes from Tagore is the speech of an uninitiated person. Those who are initiated in the Orient speak differently, or rather, according to the old custom of the Orient: they do not speak at all. They have other ways of bringing what they actually want into effect, into social effect. They want to ensure that world domination is not sought from any particular side, because they are clear about it – they believe they are clear about it – that if there is still any kind of domination on earth, it can only be that of English-American humanity. But they do not want that. Therefore, they actually want to make civilization disappear from the earth. They are, after all, very familiar with the spiritual world and are convinced that humanity will be better off if it withdraws from subsequent earthly incarnations. They therefore want to work to ensure that people avoid the following incarnations. For these initiates of the Orient, the results of Leninism will have nothing frightening about them, because these initiates of the Orient say to themselves: If these institutions of Leninism spread more and more over the earth, it is the surest way to destroy earthly civilization. But this will be to the advantage of precisely those people who, through their previous incarnation, have provided themselves with the opportunity to continue living without the earth.

When such things are spoken of to Europeans, they consider them to be paradoxical. Within the circles of Oriental initiates, these things are spoken of in the same way that a European speaks without understanding of the fact that pea soup tastes different from rice soup; for them, these are realities that need not lie outside the realm of everyday discussion. If we consider the state of the present-day civilized world and really want to understand it, we must not forget that these things, from East and West, have an effect on our present civilization. And in the present time, one can only work for human progress with a complete sense of these influences on the course of human evolution. The outer life as it presents itself, is it an imprint of what people believe exoterically, what people think, who allow themselves to be controlled only by the science of the uninitiated?

For anyone who seriously wants to study this question, I recommend simply choosing a period of eight days in May or June of the year 1914 and reading newspaper articles and books from May or June 1914, and ask himself how much spirit of reality he finds in them, that is, how much knowledge he finds that what sprouted within civilized humanity in August then broke out in this civilized humanity. The uninitiated had never dreamed of such things! Nor do the uninitiated today dream of what is actually going on. But the events of external life are not a reflection of the knowledge of the uninitiated. There is a great discrepancy between what people think and what really happens in life. This discrepancy should be brought home to oneself and the question should be answered appropriately: How much do the uninitiated really know today about life, about what dominates life?

People talk about life. They create theories and ideals and programs, but without knowing life. And when something arises that is shaped out of life, people do not recognize it, they consider it to be a theory or an absurdity or something of the sort. The influences of the West and the East have a completely different meaning for life. This different meaning plays a blatant role in our lives for those who can observe such things. If what is considered theory, program, or social belief in the West were to rule life, nothing would come of it, absolutely nothing. That there is a Western civilization, that Western life can develop institutions at all, does not stem from the fact that Western life has such ideas as Spencer or Darwin or others, more socially minded people have; because in reality nothing can be done with all these exoteric theories and views. That life goes on, that life does not stand still, is due solely to the fact that old traditional instincts live in the English-speaking population and that life is guided by these instincts, not by theories. The theories are only a decoration, through which one speaks fine words about life. What governs life are the instincts that are driven from the unconscious of the soul to the surface. This is something that must be observed and recognized in all seriousness.

And if we go to the East, let us start this East at the Rhine, because very soon life from the Rhine eastwards will become more and more similar to the East. Let us take a look at what is present in the East. First consider it historically: through Germany, through Russia, even through the Near East. If you look at it historically in Germany, you will find something extraordinarily strange. You will find that these Germans had minds like Goethe, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, like Herder, but that in reality they know nothing about it, that they have had such minds. Within Germany, civilization was the property of a small intellectual aristocracy. This civilization never took root in the broader circles. Goethe remained an unknown figure to broader German circles, even after 1862. I say 1862 because before that, it was very difficult to find Goethe's works in Germany. They were not yet free, and the Cottas made sure that they could not be easily found. Since then they have been free to print. They are read, but they have never penetrated into the real spiritual life of something like a German nation. Therefore, it already begins with the Germans having an instinctive insecurity to the highest degree. Those intensely intervening spiritual powers, which radiate from a Herder, a Goethe, a Fichte, these certain life instincts are confronted by an insecurity of instinct that can be called in the highest degree such, an insecurity of instinct for the reason that in these areas the instincts have not remained conservative. In the West they have remained more conservative. Here they have not remained conservative, but they have not been renewed either, they have not been imbued with what the spiritual substance could have given them.

This is even more noticeable in the actual European East. Just think of the role played by the so-called Orthodox religion in this European East, how it has influenced public institutions, how it has lived an external life and how it has meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to souls. The preservation of this Eastern Orthodoxy, which has long since exhausted its content, means that human souls have been pushed into the uncertainty of life. Anyone who has met Russians in Western Europe was, of course, deeply touched by the peculiar relationship that these people had, on the one hand, to the general human condition and, on the other, to this Orthodox religion. Like souls who fled from the Orthodox religion many centuries ago, who still wore the trappings and memories of this Orthodox religion and who believed that this Orthodox religion could still be something for them, so these people, who could not even imagine how much they had fled from this Orthodox religion, appear to one. This is what characterizes the Russian soul. And so the uncertainty of instinct, of not being inwardly held by instincts, has been poured out on the European East. The peculiarly soft nature that has been poured out on the Russian people is ultimately connected to this uncertainty of instinct.

The whole of Asian humanity can become prey to the European conquerors today, or in the next few decades, because those who are initiated there do not care at all that the general humanity will become prey to the conquerors. For the members of this general humanity will all the more likely acquire a taste for withdrawing from earthly life and leaving the earth for the next incarnation.

We are caught up in these forces. And today it only makes sense to talk about life if one's words are imbued with the awareness that it is precisely the case in life today that one must assume that those forces must be released from human souls that do not go in one direction or the other, but that go towards a real renewal of science and initiation. Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again how the modern human being must steer a course between extreme intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.

Our life passes in this conflict between an ever more and more intensifying and overwhelming intellectualism and an emotionalism that seeks the impulses of existence by plunging into the wildest, most animalistic drives of human life. Intellectualism is that aspect of spiritual life that has developed out of what has grown since the 15th century. But this intellectual life is shadowy, this intellectual life is thin, this intellectual life is full of empty phrases. Because this intellectual life is thin and shadowy, the forces that work in this intellectual life are determined not by the truly spiritual, but by the instincts, the drives, the animal in humanity. Today, humanity does not have the strength to use its shadowy intellectual ideas to impel the instincts and thereby spiritualize them. And so, in every moment of his life, the modern man is fundamentally divided with regard to his soul.

Just suppose you are judgmental of your fellow human beings. In that case, you are being intellectualistic. Whenever a person today criticizes his fellow human beings in the present, he becomes intellectualistic. If he is to work together with them in a social community, he becomes emotional; then he becomes so that he lets himself be controlled by animal instincts. Everything that we seek in our life's work, we gradually immerse in the animalistic-instinctive; everything that we seek in our life's judgments, even if it extends to our fellow human beings, we immerse in the intellectualistic. People of the present are not at all aware of this dichotomy in their souls. They do not even notice how they are quite different when they judge their fellow human beings, and then when they are supposed to act together with their fellow human beings.

But the intellectual life is going overboard. The intellectual life strives beyond all realities. The intellectual life is one that, as such, does not really attach any particular importance to earthly conditions. With the intellectual life, it is the case that one works out beautiful moral principles in the midst of a social order in which people are servants, in which they are enslaved. I have mentioned this here several times in the past. Today, I would also like to remind you once again of the inquiry that was launched in England in the mid-19th century into the conditions of coal mine workers, which revealed, among many other problems, that children as young as nine, 11, and 13 were sent down the coal shafts before sunrise were sent down into the coal shafts before sunrise every week, and then were brought up after sunset, so that the poor children never saw sunlight except on Sundays, and so had to develop underground, under conditions that I will spare you the description of; because there too, strange things would be told. But with the coals that were brought to light in this way, people then entertained themselves in mirrored rooms about charity, about universal love of one's fellow man without distinction of race, nation, class, and so on.

This is the extreme of intellectual life. Nowhere do the doors to reality open. One floats with one's intellect beyond humanity. A spirit of reality is only that which, in everything one thinks, knows how what one thinks is connected with what is happening in the world outside. It is the task of spiritual science to awaken this sense of reality in humanity again. It is from such a background that what I recently said in Basel must be publicly repeated more often today: over the centuries, the religious denominations have established a monopoly on everything that can be said about soul and spirit (spirit was abolished in the year 869, after all). People who researched nature externally were not allowed to seek the spirit in nature. And it must be said that, from this point of view, the extremely clever Jesuits, for example, have created the most perfect picture of a world view; when natural scientists become naturalists, there is nothing of spirit in their natural science! If someone takes what a Jesuit writes about nature seriously, then of course he becomes a materialist under the present-day spirit of the age. Today one must distinguish between what is theoretically correct and what is really essential. Theoretically correct is that the Jesuits advocate a spiritual world view. What is really essential is that the Jesuits spread materialism! — It was theoretically correct that Newton, in addition to his mechanistic world view, always doffed his hat when he uttered the word “God”. What is really essential is that the mechanistic materialism of a later time emerged from Newton's mechanistic world view. For it is not what one means theoretically that is decisive, but what lies in the laws of reality. And the intellectualistic world view never provides laws of the world. This intellectualistic world view ultimately leads to complete Luciferianism. It actually Luciferianizes the world.

Alongside this intellectualism, we have emotionalism in the present day, life from the instincts, from the animalistic, in the way I have described it. This instinctual life, this animalistic life, actually dominates public life at the moment when man is inclined to live, when he no longer needs only to judge. One can judge that it is shameful, for example, to treat the people in the mines in such and such a way. One can judge that. But one has mining shares! By cutting the coupons, it is oneself who tortures people in this way, one just does not notice it. This is more than a symbol of life, because that is how our life goes. People think on the one hand and act on the other. But they do not realize the huge discrepancy between the one and the other.

This situation is largely due to people's complacency towards all opportunities that provide us with insights into life. Today, people want to be a “good person” in life without striving to really get to know this life. But you can't really live today without getting to know life.

This world war arose from the fact that the people who were, and in some cases still are, the so-called “rulers” were very far removed from life. Some are still in their places, namely.

But what could more clearly show the complete lack of understanding of people for life, on which so much depends, has arrived in the last decades than those of our culture, of our civilization so clearly speaking “memoirs”, which are now piling up. Every week one, initially from the defeated powers, the others will follow, publishes his memoirs. This shows quite clearly how right was the judgment of the one who said: One would not believe with how little understanding the world is ruled. But the consequences of such assumptions are not readily drawn by the people of the present. For these people of the present, for example, do not want to see that there can be no social feeling and social knowledge without a real knowledge of the world. It is still possible to establish zoology without knowledge of the world, because animals are organized by their physical organization for a specific activity, for a specific functioning. What is characteristic of man is precisely that his organization is open to what he is to take up from knowledge of the world. And so there can be no social knowledge without it being based on knowledge of the world. You can never build a real social science without knowing that everything that man has to strive for through his inner being is a result of the whole evolution, which you can find in my “Occult Science in Outline , up to the present development of the earth, and that everything that the man of the present day absorbs through the social community is a germ for that which is to happen further with the development of the earth.

One cannot understand social life without understanding the world in general. It is impossible for people today to intervene in public life with programs or ideas or ideals without laying a spiritual foundation for this intervention; for what is lacking everywhere is a soul that is moved by what really matters.

We are experiencing strange things. The outstanding German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky has now also written a book: “How the World War Came About”. He begins by discussing the question of guilt. On the first pages, Kautsky makes a remarkable confession. I would like to preface the following. I would like to say that Kautsky is one of those who, in the last few decades, have used every means at their disposal to hammer party doctrine and party discipline into the proletariat, to hammer the doctrine into people's heads that it is not individuals who are responsible for world events, but, for example, capitalism. And so you will not find the word 'capitalists' everywhere, but the word 'capitalism'. With such party doctrines one can agitate, one can found parties, one can find effective hammers for the minds of men, so that such doctrines become creeds. As soon as one is compelled to intervene, I will not say in the work at all, but only to judge reality, the whole doctrine goes out of the window! Now, when Kautsky writes about the guilty parties, what does he do? He would have to leave his whole book unwritten if he wanted to continue his old litanies of capitalism. So what does he do? On the first page, he makes a confession, a strange confession, which I will only quote to you with a few words from his book: “You cannot present capitalism as the only culprit. For capitalism is nothing but an abstraction, which is derived from the observation of numerous individual phenomena and which is an indispensable tool in the quest to explore these in their lawful contexts. But you can't fight an abstraction, except theoretically; but not practically. In practice, we can only fight individual phenomena... certain institutions and persons as the bearers of certain social functions.

Now the socialist theorist is only faced with the fact that he is not even supposed to intervene constructively in social life, but only to judge social life in one respect, and now capitalism is suddenly an abstraction. He only just comes up with it! At the moment when the same Karl Kautsky would take it as an occasion to discuss the realistic idea of threefolding, capitalism would again march up in military organization, not as an abstraction but as something highly real! One does not even notice the difference between what is derived from a real observation of life as a social concept and what is derived from general abstract thinking or even abstract feeling.

Insight is what the modern man must seek as a means of protection against the illusionism into which he must fall through the extreme intellectualism. So today I approached you from a certain side to draw your attention to important things of the present. I will continue to develop and expand these things tomorrow and the day after.

In order to make the transition from yesterday's cultural-historical consideration to the perspectives I will be moving on to tomorrow, today I will insert a kind of episode that may seem a little far-fetched to you, but which must be included, even if it is a rather difficult consideration.

Two forces intervene in human life that appear mysterious within that life and demand to be understood, for they actually fall outside the usual course of life. One is the fact that man is capable of illusion, that man can indulge in illusions. The other is that man can fall prey to evil. The effect of illusion and the effect of evil in life are certainly among the greatest riddles of this life.

Now, on various occasions, I have already taken the opportunity to point out the mystery that exists in relation to these two facts of life. The mystery that exists here is only such that one's thinking falls out of the usual channels. And all that one has to think about in relation to illusion and in relation to evil in life is related to the problem, to the riddle of illness and death, which, after all, are actually only not felt by man - like all these riddles - in their full depth because man has become accustomed to having illusions, evil, illness and death in life. But these things should be found incomprehensible by anyone who assumes a materialistic view of life. In particular, the materialistically minded person should ask himself again and again: How is it possible to reconcile that deviation from the usual course of natural laws in life, that deviation that appears in illness and death? For the laws of nature, which are supposed to work through the organisms, undoubtedly express themselves in the normal, healthy course of life. But illness and death intervene abnormally in the course of life.

In order to develop health in the whole world-view of civilized humanity, which has become sick, one will gradually have to realize that illness and death, evil and illusion, can only be understood from the point of view of a spiritual world-view. Man, as he stands as an expression of the facts of the world as he knows them, must be clear about the fact that his development is not possible if only those natural facts that he can immediately grasp play a role in this development, if he has no part in anything other than what today's science is talking about. For just consider the following from the point of view of common sense. Imagine: the vital, the life forces in you become more alive than they are in the so-called normal state, more alive, for example, in fever, more alive than you are able to control them. In all these cases, in which you do not come up, do not gain the upper hand over the natural forces at work in you, consciousness ceases, or at least consciousness enters into an abnormal state.

Anyone who looks at life impartially must say to themselves: having life and having consciousness are two entirely different things. Having consciousness depends on one's having sovereignty over life. When life becomes overgrown, when life becomes feverish and one loses control over this life, then it is impossible to continue to have consciousness in the right way. But it follows directly from this that what arouses life in the organism and what are the life forces in the organism cannot be the forces of consciousness at the same time. If we survey the development of humanity as it has taken place in the cosmos, you know that this earth consciousness, which we usually have in mind when we speak of human consciousness, and which we also want to consider first today, only arose in the course of time; that this earth consciousness was preceded by other, less bright states of consciousness. I have often pointed out to you how this, our earthly planet, was preceded by a planetary embodiment, which we call the lunar embodiment of the earth. In those days, when the human being was connected with this planetary moon condition, man had only a kind of dream consciousness. But he was also - you only need to read about it in my “Occult Science in Outline” - much, much more than today permeated by vital forces.

And if we go further back to even earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth, we find more and more life processes in the human being. The human being lives the life of the whole cosmos. But we find no consciousness behind the consciousness of the moon other than that of our dreamless sleep, that is, from an earthly point of view, no consciousness at all.

Through these states, in which man was, as it were, more alive, but in which he could not have earthly consciousness because of this liveliness, he developed through to this earthly consciousness. And we have already spoken about what this earthly consciousness depends on. It depends on the fact that, as today's physiology does not yet sufficiently take into account, in our head, in our mind, processes take place that, if they extended over the whole body, would have to bring us death continuously, every moment. Our nerve-sense processes are processes that are entirely equivalent to what happens in our organism when it is a corpse. Only as long as we are alive is this continuous dying of our nervous-sensory organism paralyzed, compensated for by the other life processes in our organism. We have to be awakened to life from our trunk and limb organism at every moment, so to speak. For if our organization were to follow only the forces of our head, we would continually die or be suited to dying.

You see, it is necessary that the process of dying, the process of destruction, plays a part in human life. Without this process of destruction playing a part in the human organization, the human being would not be able to develop towards brightness of consciousness. These things must be recognized as necessities of cosmic evolution. And basically it is foolish for people to think: God is almighty, He could have arranged things differently. — That would be more or less the same as saying: God is almighty, He can also make a triangle with four corners. What is at issue here is a law of absolute necessity. The development of consciousness is not possible without the integration of the principle of death into the human organization. But now, insofar as we live in the earthly organization, insofar as we are earthly beings, we are completely integrated into this earthly organization, into this earthly existence. In a sense, the laws of earthly existence permeate our organism. Here it is necessary to distinguish between those cosmic laws that are the actual laws of the earth and those cosmic laws that cannot be regarded as earthly laws in the true sense. It is a rather difficult subject that is touched upon here. Let us imagine, schematically, that we are dealing with the earth, the sun, and many other things in the so-called universe; everything that lives and works in it is connected with everything else. But something has to be left out if it is to be possible to say that everything that lives and works in it is connected with everything else. We have to leave out everything for which our moon is the center.

We actually live cosmically in two spheres of the world, which do indeed interact with each other, but which are essentially different from each other. What belongs to the sun and the earth in terms of the active forces is connected, and everything that belongs to the active forces of the moon has, so to speak, been inserted into that. I should actually have to draw it like this: Earth (E), Sun (S), and many other things.

I draw the apparent movement of the earth and the sun (1). I would then have to draw the moon. If this is the sphere of the moon (2) and this is the sphere of the sun (1), I would now have to push the two into each other (3), so that they coincide spatially but are two entities in terms of their inner forces, not directly united with each other.

And we humans live in this duality. Everything that belongs to the moon is a remnant, a relic - you can read more about this in my “Geheimwissenschaft” - of the old lunar state, does not belong to what the earth has become in its normal progress. This piece, which belongs to the moon, has remained behind like a foreign body, has embedded itself, and we partake of both.

For anyone who truly wants to understand the nature of the world, it is essential to be aware of the independence of the earth-sun and moon. Because something extraordinarily important is connected with this, something so important that not only does present-day science have no idea about it, but it most likely considers it the greatest folly when it hears about it.

Every human being, as he undergoes embryonic development, does not undergo this development merely by following the forces that are unleashed in the mother's body through fertilization. If you want to be made to believe something like that, it's the same as saying: Here I have a magnetic needle that points in a certain direction, so it has the forces within itself. — That wouldn't occur to any physicist. Every physicist says: the earth is also a large magnet, and it attracts one end of the compass needle, and the other end attracts the other point. It is quite possible to talk about the fact that what is closed in itself is dependent in its activity, in its effectiveness, in its position on the larger whole. Only when the human being develops in the mother's womb, one would like to throw everything into this mother's womb that is organizing, while the cosmic forces are at work, from the cosmos, the forces shape the human being. And so it is that the human head organization, everything that is connected with his nerve-sense apparatus, is connected with the lunar forces, and the rest of the organization with the solar forces. And so we human beings become a contradictory being in life. We become a lunar being as a head human being, and a solar being as the rest of the human being. But here the matter becomes quite complicated. If you do not look closely here, you will immediately introduce a tangle of misunderstandings into the matter.

In so far as man is a being with a head, he is a being with a moon, that is to say, the forces of the moon are organized into his head. In so far as he is the rest of the organization, he is a being with a sun, that is to say, the forces of the sun are organized into the rest of his being.

But this means that the head, when the human being is awake and facing the world, is particularly receptive to everything that comes from the sun. The human being absorbs sunlight through the eye when it falls on objects. The head, the nerve-sense apparatus, is a moon creation; but what it receives is precisely the solar element. And in the rest of his organization, the human being is a solar being, that is, he is organized as a solar being. But what, in so far as he develops on earth, has an effect on him, is all lunar.

So you can say: Man, as a being with a head, is a moon vessel that absorbs the currents of the sun. Man, as the rest of the organization, is a sun being that absorbs the currents of the moon forces.

You see from this: if you do not look closely, if you do not grasp things exactly, but seek convenient concepts, then you will not get by. For someone may come and say: Man is a lunar being as a head being, as a being of the head. — The other says: That is not true, he is a solar being, because the solar processes take place in him. Both are correct. One must only become acquainted with the way in which these things interact. I have often said that reality is not so easy for us to grasp that a few pinned-down concepts would suffice to grasp this reality; rather, it is the case that one must make a little effort to form only those concepts that approximately correspond to this reality. In man himself, the lunar and solar natures interact in two ways. And all that takes place as life processes cannot be understood if man is not understood in this ambivalent connection with the cosmos.

One of the most important matters of the present should be for today - if she feels right - tormented humanity the realization: How did we lose the old, known in the atavistic clairvoyance of humanity concepts, and how are we only at the beginning of Copernicanism, of Galileism! - The ancient Egyptians, so man should say, he knew the man as a member of the whole cosmos. But for this Egyptian, this cosmos was much more highly organized than man himself. Today, man looks out into the cosmos and sees a great machine that he calculates with his mathematical formulas. For him, the planets move around the fixed stars just as if one wanted to calculate that the arms and legs of a human being move according to mathematical laws! In all that is in the cosmos and in which man is included, in all that lives organization - soul and spirit. And without considering the soul and spirituality of the cosmos, one cannot understand anything about human life, which is included in this soul and this spirituality of the cosmos.

So, I would say, we live in the lunar sphere. But with us in this lunar sphere lives everything that is Luciferic. And in a roundabout way, through our head organization, it is precisely the Luciferic that enables us to make this head organization suitable for the solar aspect of our earthly existence. And the Luciferic permeates our head organization. But it is as foreign to the earthly as the moon itself with its sphere. Just as little as our nervous-sensory apparatus is organized out of the same forces as our heart, lungs and stomach are organized out of, just as little is it organized out of our earthly-spiritual-soul what our Luciferic forces are. These are poured into us with the moonlight.

Few people know much about the influence of the moon on earthly life, except what poets sing of moonlit nights of magic and love. We know of the affinity of those flights of fancy with the moonlight that plays into the love life, when it is the higher love life, the romantic love life. But this is only the most shadowy part of what comes from the moon. Not only the imaginative element that plays out between lovers on moonlit, magical nights plays into our ordinary existence from this lunar sphere, but deeper forces play in from this sphere, forces that detach themselves from everyday life, from that which binds people to the earth, just as lovemaking in the moonlit nights of enchantment usually detaches itself from philistine everyday life. And the extreme, the way it plays out, as if coming from this completely alien sphere to the earthly, is the power of illusion that man can develop. If this sphere of the moon's power would not come into us, we would not be capable of illusion as human beings.

But then we would also not be able to detach ourselves from the vital, from the organizational life of our organism, and we would not be able to ascend to that brightness of consciousness that is necessary for us as human beings. In order to ascend to this brightness of consciousness, it is necessary that we are able to live in images that are completely detached from the everyday organism. But then we ourselves must hold them together with the everyday organism. Then it is within our power to hold together what plays through our head with this everyday organism, not to let the illusions tear themselves away from reality, but to relate them to reality in the right way. In order for us to be able to develop concepts that are free of sensuality in the world at all, we must also be capable of illusion. It is simply a necessity that the human being be capable of illusion. And this ability to illusion is also connected with the possibility for man not to be in a feverish or unconscious state all the time, that is, to ascend to clear consciousness. If he lets go the reins, if he does not remain master of the illusion but the illusion becomes master over him, then this is only a necessary accompaniment to the fact that we must be able to illusion.

Thus I have first shown you the capacity for illusion in man from the cosmic-humanistic point of view, according to its origin, and have pointed you to a point in the world view where that which we call natural necessity and that which we call inner human activity converge, while both fall apart for the mechanistic view commonly held today.

But now the other sphere. You may have noticed that I have made a small retouch, and since you are probably extremely attentive, you will have mentally reproached me for making a kind of retouch. I said first: the earth-sun sphere and the moon sphere are interwoven. — Afterwards I spoke of the sun sphere. I was also right in a certain sense. For that which has an effect on the nerve-sense organization, also from the earth, is always a solar effect. Even the illuminated surfaces of objects are only sunlight reflected back. And so everything that plays into our lives, even if it comes from the earth, insofar as it plays into our conscious lives, is a solar effect. But not everything. I could only omit it so far. It is correct that everything you process in your consciousness at first is connected with the sun. But the fact that you have a weight when you stand on the scales is an effect of the earth. But in truth, the solar sphere, that is, what I have so far been allowed to describe as a unified sphere, is in turn differentiated within itself. The earth is a certain inclusion in this earth-sun sphere. And this earth, by being a kind of inclusion in the earth-sun sphere, has an effect on what comes to us from the sun. It does not allow us to be pure sun beings. Again, as far as this point is concerned, one must not see the cosmos merely as a mechanism, but must consider it in its soulfulness and spiritualization.

Man, being part of the terrestrial solar sphere, follows in his subconscious forces more the actual forces of the earth. In his conscious activities, he follows what the sun sends to the earth. But when we examine what is heavy, that which is connected with everything that gives us a certain heaviness when we stand on the scales, it is not just the gravitation that Newton described, but at the same time it is everything that we experience as playing into our moral life. With the sun, it is really as the poet says: It shines on the good and the bad alike. It is indifferent to it. But if we examine the earth from a spiritual scientific point of view, we find that it is not indifferent. The earth is the expression of certain forces that want to stand out from our entire planetary system. Like the moon, which has crept in, the earth wants to 'slip away'. It wants out; it wants to become independent. We human beings would lack something very definite if we did not live under the influence of these earth forces that want to become independent: we would not have the sense of independence. If you were able to rush with the elements without being pulled down by the heaviness of the earth, you would never come to independence. Only by being constantly drawn to the earth – if I may use this expression, but as the expression of a fact, not a theory – does independence develop. And that is what this enclosure in the earth-sun sphere is for, to give us independence.

You may now object again, as you probably already have in your mind: Isn't it the same with animals? No, it is not the same. For the animal's head is attached to a horizontal backbone; the human head, with its full weight, is attached to the rest of the organism. That makes the difference. That is why man has this sense of independence, why man is harnessed in a completely different way into the forces of the earth and the sun than the animal.

We can only approach questions such as the ones we are dealing with here by asking, in effect, the alternative: What would become of us humans if we were left only to the influence of the earth, to the influence of the moon? What would become of us humans if we were left only to the influence of the sun? If we were left only to the influence of the sun, we would be a kind of angel, but stupid. Not that I want to say that angels are stupid. Angels are clever enough; but we would be a kind of angel, but not clever like angels, but stupid. Because we lack a sense of independence. We would only be links in the organization of the cosmos. That we are independent, we owe to our earthly existence. But if we were only under the influence of the earth, if the sun did not affect us, what would we be? Beasts, predators, beings that develop the wildest instincts.

Here you have one of the points where you can really look deeply into the constitution of the universe, because you have to say to yourself: that which is at work in the universe cannot be effective from just one side. For if it were effective from just one side, it would have to be at one radical extreme. If we were only under the influence of the earth, this earthly influence would develop the wildest instincts in us. The flames of our wild instincts would flare up. But if the influence of the earth did not work, we would never become independent beings. It must be there, otherwise we would never become independent beings. We must have the possibility of being wild animals in order to become independent beings. But so that we do not become wild animals, the influence of the earth must be counteracted by the influence of the sun, must paralyze it. That is what happens. And as this is happening, you can see the origin of evil. It simply arises from the fact that we are harnessed into earthly existence. So that on the one hand we are indeed exposed to a radical extreme, the earthly extreme, which, if it were the only influence acting on us, would make us evil beings, would fill us only with illusions.

The solar principle works from the cosmos into both. The solar principle makes it possible for us to develop in such a way that we do not fall prey to illusion. And the solar principle makes it possible for us to develop in such a way that we do not fall prey to evil. Under the illusion lies the possibility of becoming intelligent human beings. If it were not for that which makes us capable of illusion, we would never become intelligent human beings. Expressed cosmically: If we were not creatures of the moon, we would not be capable of illusion on the one hand, nor of intelligence on the other. If we were not subject to the earth and its forces, we would not be exposed to the possibility of evil on the one hand; but at the same time we would be condemned not to develop independence in life.

You see how man must have the possibility, in order to be intelligent, to have illusions. He had illusions for a long time. Then his will came, which was only born into his soul's constitution over time, and he could make the illusion the expression of his own being, he could become a liar. For the lie, objectively speaking, apart from man, is the same as the illusion. Only that which does not correspond to reality is arbitrarily set in opposition to reality by man in the case of the lie.

Thus, that which works into man from the lunar sphere is at the same time the creator, the creator being of his intelligence, and at the same time the creator being of his mendacity. In ancient times, people understood this and formed proverbs out of truths. We Germans, when we see the moon like this, say that it can be added to to make a - the moon waxes. If we see the moon like this, we say that it can be added to a – the moon is waxing. – If we go back to French, which is the legacy of the Romance languages, we have to say of the waning moon: La lune décroît, from décroître. Here the moon does not say what it is doing; it says the opposite. This moon has only just begun to tell the truth for the Germans. Hence the Latin saying: The moon is a liar. But this saying also has its esoteric side; for the forces that come from the moon are at the same time the forces of the human lying nature, and the saying: The moon is a liar has a very, very deep background, as you have now seen. It was only when civilization arose in the 15th century that the moon began to tell the truth in terms of its appearance for certain languages, just as materialism generally tells the truth in terms of its appearance. But in terms of its inner being, the moon is now truly a liar.

I am telling you this merely for mnemonic purposes, so that you remember this profound, cosmic-human truth. And you see, the best thing we humans have, our independence, is inwardly connected with evil. The best thing we humans have, our intelligence, is inwardly connected with the ability to create illusions, with the possibility of error. And we humans must also be capable of development. We must have the opportunity not to stand still. We could not be capable of development if we were not called upon to create something new on the basis of what has been destroyed. This means that we must carry within us illness and the possibility of death so that we can develop within us the forces for further development.

These extraordinarily important truths have been completely covered up, completely buried, by the worldviews of recent centuries. For today, when science extends to anything other than mathematics and mechanics, it is only called that which takes place on earth. From outside the earth, only mathematically and mechanically tangible laws have an effect. Humanity will first have to understand again that completely different forces are at work in this universe, in which the moon goes its way, in which the stars go their way, than mere mechanically and mathematically calculable impulses. And when you consider that the most mundane thing in us is an effect of the cosmos, that the most mundane thing cannot be understood without man considering himself as an effect of the cosmos, how then do you want to pour fruitful thoughts into that which is to permeate human life as a world view? Today man is isolated from the world. He has no inkling of his connection with the world. And he would like to found a social existence and does not even know with whom, because he has no idea what he is.

Yes, until the questions enter into the human soul: How little we know about the world under the influence of the last few centuries, how much we need to know! — no salvation will come into all social endeavors. Wherever it is possible to say mechanical-mathematical somewhere, people of the present still dare to construct connections. They know that all kinds of things are associated with the periods of sunspots, such as plagues and the like on Earth. There are some places where people want to link earthly existence to cosmic events. That everything that takes place in earthly existence is a result of the cosmos, people today would like to deny that, they would not want to think about that. The things that take place on earth among people can never be understood if they are not understood cosmically. And man can never find effective ideas for his work on earth if he does not imbue these effective ideas with the consciousness of his belonging to the cosmos.

Today, one has a bitter feeling when one only looks at what is actually happening historically. If you have a wall here and see all kinds of shadowy figures scurrying across it, you will investigate where these shadowy figures come from. If you see the events of the last five to six years passing over the earth's surface, you do not investigate, even though these are also only the projections, the shadows, of what is happening in the cosmos as a whole. And the big questions that are playing out today between the different areas of the earth can only be understood if the understanding is imbued with cosmic ideality.

Today I read an article in which it is hoped that the British government will find the right impetus to create order between what is happening in Russia and what is happening in the Western countries. They want to develop something in the middle, in the devastated Germany. These hopes will not be fulfilled, for everything that speaks out of such a spirit, that waits for the insights of those who create out of the old, leads to nothing.

The only thing that is fruitful for the future today is that which creates out of something completely new. Only when humanity wakes up to see this will it be the beginning of the salvation of much damage in the development of humanity.

What I presented here yesterday seems to be something very remote. Nevertheless, anyone who really wants to form ideas about what is spiritually and socially necessary in our time must also familiarize themselves with such ideas. Our thinking and feeling, our whole human nature must be imbued with feelings that arise from such ideas. I will briefly summarize what, so to speak, formed the main focus of yesterday's discussions. It is that which we already knew from other, more abstract points of view, namely that the human being has essentially a twofold organization; we could also say a threefold one, but today we want to consider the third, the middle link, less.

First there is the organization of the head, the nerve-sense organization, and then there is the organization of the rest of the human being. For the convenience-seeking thoughts of the present day, such a thing is difficult to grasp because people today want to know everything neatly, almost spatially, divided up. When one speaks of the head organization and the organization of the rest of the human being, people prefer to imagine: the head up to the neck and then the rest of the human being. Of course, this is not how things are meant. What is meant is that in a certain respect the whole person is the head, only that being the head, being the head, is most clearly expressed in the head. And the whole person is also a trunk and limbs person, only that being a trunk and limbs is most clearly expressed in the trunk and the limbs. The senses are, as it were, distributed throughout the whole human being; but inasmuch as they are distributed throughout the whole human being, we count them as belonging to the organization of the head, because those senses that are localized in the head are the most highly developed senses. |

From these indications you will understand how I actually mean the cited structure of the human being. But now we have seen that not only is there a necessity for this structure that comes from inner forces and processes in the human being, but that in fact the human being is integrated into the cosmos in a different way as a head-human being and in a different way as a trunk-and-limb-human being. Our head is, so to speak, the most advanced; but it actually belongs – and this is shown not only by occult knowledge but also by embryology when it is really considered rationally – our head organization does not belong to the earthly and solar sphere, but to the lunar sphere. The forces that are inwardly active in our head organization are lunar forces. And in the rest of our organization, the forces of the earth and sun are active.

The whole evolution of humanity on earth is connected with this essence of man. And now the time has come to see how to take a step forward, which depends on how we can set our human organization in motion. In human evolution on earth, what has taken place in the life of the human spirit and soul, let us say up to the Mystery of Golgotha, is of primary importance. That is the great turning-point in the whole of human evolution on earth. And if we exclude from all that has developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Jewish evolution, we can say that what has developed up to that point bears a thoroughly unified character.

The ancient pagan culture, which, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”, starts from the mysteries of antiquity in the most diverse ways, has a unifying character in a certain respect. What is this unifying character? This unifying character consists in the fact that there is an original wisdom of humanity, that an original revelation has actually taken place all over the earth. Why could this primal revelation take place? It could take place because in the early days of the development of the earth, the human head, if I may put it that way, had not yet progressed as far as it has in our time or as it had already done by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the sense I explained to you yesterday, it was still alive. He was still imbued with the possibility of having dreams that were not connected with what is given only by earthly experience. He was able to evoke in himself what man had in ancient dream experiences, when consciousness was still more dimmed than it is in our time.

All this was used by the revealers of ancient times to guide humanity, so to speak, to the point of development at which it was to be at the dawn of the Mystery of Golgotha. What was revealed there and could be received by humanity through the organization just characterized to you, was such that, compared to what today's humanity knows, there was a comprehensive body of wisdom in primeval times that decreased more and more. We would not be satisfied with this body of wisdom today, because in many cases it was only the content of old atavistic clairvoyant dream images. Today we want to have correct, clear ideas, but we have not yet come very far in these clear, bright ideas.

An ancient wisdom had been poured out over mankind. From this wisdom much was said about the beings that rule nature, about the forces that rule nature, but very little about man himself. Man had not yet come to his earthly consciousness. He was still, as it were, entirely led by the hand of higher powers. He could become wise, but self-awareness had not yet dawned. The Apollonian saying: “Know thyself” is like a yearning placed in humanity, like something that was called out into the future by the leading minds of Greece. A wisdom was there that dealt with nature, but also with the nature of the cosmos. The ancient Hebrew revelation was placed into this life of humanity. If you consider the ancient Hebrew revelation, it has a certain peculiarity. It differs completely from the pagan wisdom revelations that spread around it. It disdained, so to speak, to contain the wisdom of nature and the universe. Basically, it contained only one thing about nature and the universe: God created it with man, and man has to serve God in the world. The whole ancient Hebrew revelation is geared towards the goal of showing man how he can serve his God Yahweh. What is appealed to in this ancient Hebrew revelation? — That which is not appealed to is found in the ancient pagan revelation: the organization of the head, which could still evoke memories of the ancient moon time. This could not be appealed to in the Hebrew revelation. It had to be appealed to in the rest of the human organization. But remember what I said yesterday: This remaining organization of the human being can understand and absorb precisely because it is solar, that which comes from the moon. What comes from the moon is that which, in the extreme, leads to illusions, to that which can reveal itself within the human being. But that is the content of the ancient Hebrew revelation. At first it is only about the human being. In this ancient Hebrew revelation, the human being is at the center.

But in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, man had not yet been led to self-awareness, to self-knowledge. A path had to be sought that was actually a detour. And that was through Jewish nationality. Therefore, the Jewish religion is not primarily a religion of humanity. It does not address the individual human being, but the entire Hebrew nation. It is a national religion. It speaks of the human being, but only indirectly, through the people.

Two things were in existence when the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in the evolution of the Earth: the dying embers of ancient pagan wisdom and humanity's consciousness in the form of the consciousness of a people. Into this was placed the Mystery of Golgotha. It could only be grasped with what was already there. One must distinguish between the fact of the Mystery and the means of comprehending and feeling it. The heathen could only grasp it with the remnants of their world-wisdom. The Jews could only grasp it with what had been revealed. And so it was grasped at first. The remnant of the old wisdom showed itself in the Gnostic view of the event of Golgotha. That which was due to Jewish revelation became more and more the content of the Catholic understanding, the Roman Catholic understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And now, in order to grasp anything at all of the Mystery of Golgotha, the detour had to be made through these two world currents.

The following became evident, however. The old pagan wisdom, because it was a dying ember, because its origin lay far back, increasingly lost the ability to be grasped by people. People became far too lazy to pass on the gnosticized wisdom about the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the thinnest remnants of the old pagan world view remained. This is one current.

The Jewish proclamation was fresher and more intense. But it had no worldly wisdom. It spoke only of man and of commandments for man. It placed man at the center of the world view. It was passed on in the churches of the Occident. The last remnants of pagan wisdom, the origin of which was no longer recognized, remained as concepts for what is now scientific experience. With the last remnants of ancient pagan wisdom, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus grasped the new world experiences that were available. It is no wonder that this gradually became very unsatisfactory. All that had been achieved was the application of the last abstract remnants of ancient pagan wisdom to the knowledge gained through the new means of natural science. And there was no bridge from what was known about man from Jewish revelation to this wisdom. And so it went on, and so it continued to be lived in until our days. On the one hand, we have a science that works only with the very last remnants of the ancient pagan wisdom and that cannot of itself find a way to understand the human being. This lack of understanding culminated in the 19th century in the decision to dispense with any attempt to understand the human being as such and to comprehend only that which appears when one regards the human being as the final consequence of the animal series. The ideal of this science, working with the last remnants of paganism, was not to understand man, but to understand the highest animal and call that man.

That which followed from Jewish revelation gradually lost the possibility of saying anything about nature from what it had to say about man. Try to take on the theology as it has developed, and see if you can find anything in it that could give a satisfactory explanation for today's consciousness of even the simplest natural processes. Of course, moral considerations can be linked from this tradition to natural processes. But today's sense of time is not satisfied with the moral consideration that God allowed an earthquake to occur in Messina to punish people, and theology has gradually become incapable of bridging the gap between what the gods work and what occurs and breaks out in nature. In many respects it is therefore a mere phrase, while our natural science has material upon material before it in a grandiose way, which contains infinite secrets but does not know what to do with them because it lacks the concepts to connect the things with each other. It was out of this conflict that the whole of modern consciousness developed, that something like agnosticism developed, for example, for which it became the hallmark of an enlightened mind when he could say to himself: Man is incapable of knowing anything about the essence of things. He is simply not organized to know anything about the essence of things.

What is deeply present in people as a longing must fight against such a view. It fights in what man wants to know about the world, it fights in the external social order. And one must realize how to make progress because in certain things our ideas are still in the distant past. What did Jewish revelation bring forth? The most characteristic of what it has produced is national Jewish politics. This national Jewish politics, after it had exerted its influence on Romanism, has taken its path into the most recent times. And the most influential nations of the present day, what do they strive for in the political field? — To pursue national politics! But that is ancient Hebrew politics. In our public life we have not yet advanced as far as Christianity. We are still in the Old Testament. And it is the task of the present time to advance as far as Christianity in the sphere of public life. It will not advance unless it is supported on the other side by scientific progress in the field of Christianity. But for this it is necessary to really get to know man.

Take, for example, my “Occult Science”. There is much talk about cosmic evolution, about the evolution of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, that people who are very clever today are either frightened or made to smile or annoyed. If you take a closer look at my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), you will find that what is given there as knowledge of the world is at the same time knowledge of man. For man is actually everywhere in all knowledge of the world. What was developed by man in Saturn time and then further developed, how the other beings have joined, that is considered. You cannot separate knowledge of the world and knowledge of man.

But in the present day, this is a Christian demand from the point of view of the field of knowledge. It is also a Christian demand from the social point of view that we learn to disregard all other human contexts and to aim solely at the human being itself. From the point of view of the phrase, these things have been fantasized about for a long time, but from the point of view of reality, little has been done so far. From the standpoint of reality, the national connections in which the human being is largely and completely submerged today still exist as overwhelming forces in the political life of the world. What must take the place of these national connections is a relationship built on the perception of what the human being is, from person to person across the whole civilized earth. But to establish such a relationship requires a certain inner strength of spirit, a certain inner strength of the human soul. And if we ask ourselves: Has the human being actually become stronger in soul in the so-called blessed 19th century? — then, wherever we look, if we are sincere and honest, we find everywhere: in terms of the intensity of our concepts and ideals, the human being has not become stronger, but weaker. Those who know me will know how such a statement is meant.

I may insert a personal remark here. It is now decades since I was in Vienna in a conversation with a man who has since made a great name for himself as a historian. We were talking about the development of Germany. The man was of the abstract view, which he expressed at the time as follows: Well, this German development, it is there and it will continue in the way it is there. — I said: That is an abstraction, it is not something that is taken from reality. It seems to me something like someone saying: Here is a plant, it has already borne fruit, now new flowers will come, then again fruits, then again flowers, and it will continue to grow like this. When the plant has reached the stage of blossoming and fruit formation, one cannot say: it will continue as it is. Something new, a new plant, can indeed arise from the seed that came from the blossom; but one must not imagine that the old plant emerges again from the blossom in a new form and that it continues as it was. I said: That which is the substance, the essence of the German being, has reached its bloom and fruit in the time of Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Hegel. That is a high point. It cannot simply be continued. Since then we have been in decadence, since then we have been in a descending movement. I expressed these ideas at the time. As you can imagine, I received little understanding; for people had already entered the period when such ideas were too intense to be grasped by the human soul, and I had to think how it was quite different until the middle of the 19th century. For example, in the development of the Germans there was a man, Gervinus, who wrote a history of literature. One can have much against him; in the whole writing of this history of literature there is an enormous radicalism. It ends with the death of Goethe, and it denies the following generations the ability to continue to write in the old style, as if new blossoms were growing out of the leaves of the plant. At that time, people were still radical enough to say: with Goethe it is over; if you want to develop further, you have to look for new approaches! Gervinus could not give them, but he concluded the old, he made a line under it.

Of course, many beautiful things have been written in German since then, but they are epigonistic. They do not contain the essence that flows in Herder, Goethe, Schiller, not the philosophical essence, the Hegel-Schelling essence, the Fichte essence. The only thing is that Hamerling, in terms of his maturity, has introduced a new tone into his “Homunculus”, but it has become a satire.

Even then, the demands were already there to grasp something new, to develop a real sense for a new approach to the whole new civilization. This call for a new approach should resound throughout the world today. For it is only from this that any hope of salvation for the future development of humanity can be hoped for. Everything that does not connect with the feelings of the individual human being must be eradicated. You can see an outward sign of this in the way old ideas are being dragged out again today. In order to say something in the present, old ideas are being drawn upon. In one of the present leading spirits of Central Europe, one finds an outlook that is truly spoken out of this decadent sense of time, and which shows what humanity cannot hold on to today. This man asks: How do we come to a moral life again? He sees

In the last five years, the decrepitude of the old morality has become apparent, and lies have triumphed among all nations. The old Hebrew policy of Yahweh has gripped all nations to such an extent that one might think that there was a Judaism in Palestine at that time, and now all nations would like to pursue a policy for themselves that is similar to the one the Jews pursued in Palestine. They would all like to become like that, they would all like to pursue world politics to the exclusion of the achievements of Christianity. The content is missing. Therefore, one resorts to things that actually have no content. Instead of looking for new sources of morality from spiritual, new, fruitful views, one asks: Where are the sources of a new morality? - and gives the following answer: Power is an indispensable means to create good. Therefore, if you do not already possess it, you should strive for the power that is necessary to achieve the good in each case. - You want to have a good thing in the world and are given the good advice: seek the power to achieve the good. - The second reason for the new ethic is: with the power you have, you can create the good. Therefore, one should use power everywhere to achieve the good.

But first you have to have the good, you have to recognize the good first! To speak in this way is the opposite of what must spread through the spiritual science meant here in modern human civilization. Because it is not about basing something on power. You can only found something on power if you combine groups of people. If one person is to face another, you cannot found anything on power, but only on that which develops in the person so that he has value. Man must work to develop a value by which he accomplishes things for man, and at the same time he must develop a receptivity to recognize such human value.

That is the only possible basis for any morality of the future: developing human value and the ability to recognize human value. To put it in other words, this means: All morality must be built on real trust! — Because one did not want to penetrate to such views, one could not understand the moral demands contained in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. There is a reasoned justification for a so-called individualistic morality, and it is built on the idea that if what can be developed is developed in each individual human being, there is no need for legislation, but rather one can wait and see what people will do in their mutual dealings. And I had to say to many people at the time: Just look, when we walk down the street, one person going this way and the other that, do we need legislation to make us step aside for each other? That one goes to the left and the other to the right is done out of the demands of existence, which one reasonably recognizes. — Thus one acts morally when all the things that lie within the human being are truly developed. Without this there is no morality of the future.

But this is the only morality that will really be built upon a newly grasped Christianity. It must be built upon this: Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me. The Christ has come into the human race so that every single human being may recognize the value of his fellow man. And when people treat each other in the world in this way, the foundation for a new morality is laid. But only from our present point of view is the Mystery of Golgotha newly understood. This Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. It must be understood by each world-age in a new form. Not the teachings that are there are the decisive ones; they must change from age to age. The decisive thing is that the Mystery of Golgotha has happened once. For the creeds of the present day, it is becoming more and more apparent that they are becoming increasingly indifferent to the Mystery of Golgotha. They do not attach any importance to it being understood in terms of contemporary consciousness; they only attach importance to their teachings being propagated. But these teachings will be incapable of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha. And so today we already have a branch of theology that no longer speaks of the Christ at all, but only of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the “simple man” who walked in Palestine, a kind of Socrates. And then one cannot understand why those who speak of this Christ speak of him as the center of human development. Such are the serious issues facing the present age. And it is precisely this seriousness that must be recognized. But it will be necessary to work in harmony on the one hand with the scientific field and on the other with the social field. After all, things do converge. I believe that today the orthodox university graduate will be surprised if, for example, he is asked to accept that botany must become “Christian”. But it must become Christian, that is to say, the spirit that has seized humanity through the mind must also work its way into botany. And a few socialist-minded people, but only a few, only individual parts of this socialist-minded mass, talk about the fact that Christian sentiment - one then speaks of original Christian sentiment - must take hold in the mutual behavior of people. Nevertheless, no special value is placed on permeating social ideas with the Christian principle.

There is, of course, also a third variant; but the point is that we learn, on the one hand, to find the Christ in the world and, on the other hand, to ignite within us the ability to understand this Christ. What must work together in the great as well as in the particular in social life is the development of a certain human value and the development of the ability to recognize this human value trustingly and to act accordingly in the relationship between people!

In the 19th century, when people had the least understanding of how a new spirit was needed to grasp anew the mystery of Golgotha, they spoke of practical Christianity because they had become as impractical as possible with regard to Christianity. Now that the events of the past few years in the development of humanity have passed by, it would certainly be necessary for as many people as possible to realize how a new spiritual revelation actually wants to enter into human development and how it must be grasped by people. As long as we continue to pledge our entire spiritual life to external powers, to state powers or whatever else the world has, there will be no possibility for this spiritual life to really take in the spiritual revelation that wants to enter humanity. For this it is necessary that spiritual life really be put on its own feet, as is demanded in our threefold social order, that it develop out of its own impulses. Out of these own impulses, science will be imbued with spiritual methods, and the spiritual methods developed for science will ignite the power to morally permeate social life with what is spiritual. We must learn to actualize and actualize spiritual things in our social work and in the social life of people. But to do that, we must go beyond what we have to call empty words today. We live a spiritual life in empty words, in phrases. Today you can experience someone saying beautiful things that you may like in terms of content; if you get closer to them, you will find their soul empty of spiritual content. Why? Because nowadays you can pick up empty phrases anywhere. You don't need to be connected to the buzz of empty words in human life. There is no other way to find the connection with the spirit again than to first seek the guide, so that the human soul can truly reach the spirit on its own, but this guide cannot be found in any other way than by seeking him with the conviction that man can become what can become in the world today only by not remaining with what is present in him in the way of inheritance, of blood forces, but by developing something in himself that goes beyond what is merely inherited, beyond what is merely taken from the outer world. Today we are born into a world with certain predispositions; these predispositions are developed in school, but in such a way that only the traditions that have been handed down are used as a stimulus for this development. We must come to know that there is a hidden germ in every human being that is not there through mere inheritance, nor through what is included in education today as a stimulus. We must have the faith that there is something in every human being today that can only be awakened through spiritual forces and through the conviction of the existence of spiritual forces within him. From what is being educated and lived by today, only the consciousness of Yahweh can be experienced. Christ consciousness can only be awakened when one has faith not only in the development of the human being, but in the transformation of the human being, when one has faith that something will come of the human being that is not inherent in him simply because he has inherited a body from his ancestors, but that is seated within him because he has gone through earlier earthly lives in earlier human world cycles. At that time, however, the principle of inheritance predominated and shone forth in the human being, which came over from repeated previous earthly lives. Now the inherited qualities have become weak, and those characteristics in man become ever stronger, which come over from the earlier incarnations not with the blood, but with the soul.

This can be taken over into consciousness. And when it lives in the consciousness of one person, that person encounters another with quite different feelings than people usually have today.

Thus, although it is a very extensive subject and I may have stumbled over my words, I have tried to explain something of what must enter into our human development as an elementary necessity. When this demand arises in life, it still encounters the most serious prejudices in life today. It is fought against. And I have had to tell you about some of the fighting against what is being striven for with the anthroposophically oriented world view that is meant here, in recent times. I would like to mention just two more things in this direction today. Recently I read to you the letter of our friend Dr. Stein, which refreshingly showed how we had to confront a churchman whose helper, when he was shown Bible passages that sounded somewhat anthroposophical, even ventured the confession: “Then Christ is wrong - in his opinion!” So it is not he, the churchman, who is wrong, but Christ! When I came to Stuttgart, I was informed that all kinds of judgments had been registered from our circles about how it was so harsh to confront an old gentleman, who had even read my writings, in such a way. One must show consideration for, first of all, secondly, thirdly... Unfortunately, this is still widespread in our ranks, that precisely when it comes to taking a serious stand on any point, those people who would most like to keep our movement in a sectarian light will stab us in the back. That is one thing I must mention.

The other thing is that I have to familiarize you with the accusation that has now been made in the German press, the murky sources of which – and I am explicitly mentioning this here – I know very well, and where it is fairly unimportant what because the people who spread such things are not concerned with awakening belief in the things they spread, but only with fabricating something that can disparage an inconvenient personality or current trend. So, despite the not very enlightened hall, I will read these “unenlightened” remarks, which are now circulating in part of the press:

"The theosophist Steiner as a stooge of the Entente. - The “Mannheimer Generalanzeiger” reports from Berlin: Theosoph Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences a following of several million men and women” - - I expressly note: this sentence, which will be extraordinarily evidential for anyone who somehow looks into the affairs of the present, and in the time to come, when such attacks will intensify considerably, one will see why such attacks said, among other false things, “founded the League for the Threefold Social Organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a strange and repulsive political agitation. The learns the following from Dresden: “From reliable information, it is unequivocally clear,” - I ask you to take note of the tone — “that the League for Tripartite Division is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for the purpose of extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the veracity of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proven by the passage of a letter in which it says: “Accusations of theft are to be refrained from, since untruthfulness is easier to prove here. Likewise, one should not make accusations that are too incredible, such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, the fact that every sentence, every word – forgive me for using the expression in this context – is a “first-told” lie, that is quite obvious. But these things are fabricated in the present. They prove that what comes from the school of thought represented here is taken seriously enough to consider these malicious means necessary at all. You can be sure: small sectarian movements, that is, those that are supposed to be small in number, are not bombarded with such things. One would only wish – and I also expressed this in the article sent the day before yesterday for our next but one “Dreigliederungs” issue – that the number of naive people would become smaller and smaller, who still believe that by refuting such things, they are helping the people who are working today out of the murky sources that are at issue here. They are not interested in refutations; for they are not concerned with even touching the truth, but they fight with every means against all that is to move in as a new spirit in humanity. They follow the forces by which they are possessed.

I had to give you this example for the reason that a sense of the seriousness that should actually prevail among all those who find themselves somehow seriously inclined towards what is stated here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should be evoked little by little. One would really like to find words that our current worn-out language hardly has to awaken this seriousness in souls. But the souls are often paralyzed. Nothing that is necessary will penetrate them, if time is not to lead into complete decadence. You cannot continue to manage in the old way. Nor should we call 'ideals' what we take from the old currents. We should become more and more aware that a complete new beginning in human development is necessary.