The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The last lectures here described a path which, if followed in the right way, leads to a perception of the Universe and its organisation. As you have seen, this path compels a continuous search for the harmony existing between the process taking place in Man and the processes observed in the Universe. Tomorrow and the day after I shall have to treat our subject in such a way that the friends who have come to attend the General Meeting may be able to receive something from the two lectures at which they are present. To-morrow I shall go over again some of what has been said in order then to connect with it something fresh.

In perusing my Occult Science—an Outline, you will have seen that in the description it gives of the evolution of the known Universe a point is made of keeping everywhere in view the relationship of that evolution to the evolution of Man himself. Beginning with the Saturn period which was followed by the Sun and Moon periods preceding the Earth period, you will remember that the Saturn period was characterised by the laying of the first foundations of the human senses. And along this line of thought the book proceeds. Everywhere universal conditions are considered in a way that at the same time also describes the evolution of Man. In short, Man is not considered as standing in the Universe as modern science sees him—the outer Universe on the one hand, and Man on the other—two entities that do not rightly belong to each other. Here, on the contrary, the two are regarded as merged into each other, and the evolution of both is followed together. This conception must, of necessity, be applied also to the present attributes, forces and motions of the Universe. We cannot consider first the Universe abstractly in its purely spatial aspect, as is done in the Galileo-Copernican system, and then Man as existing beside it; we must allow both to merge into one another in our study.

This is only possible, when we have acquired an understanding of Man himself. I have already shown you how little modern natural science is in a position really to explain Man. What does science do, for instance, in that sphere where it is greatest, judging by modern methods of thought? It states in a grand manner that Man has evolved physically from other lower forms. It then shows how, during the embryonic period, Man passes again rapidly through these forms in recapitulation. This means that Man is looked upon as the highest of the animals. Science contemplates the animal kingdom and then builds up Man from what is found there; in other words, it examines everything non-human, and then says: ‘Here we come to a standstill; here Man begins’. Natural science does not feel called upon to study Man as Man, and consequently any real understanding of his nature is out of the question.

It is in truth very necessary today for people who claim to be experts in this domain of nature, to examine Goethe's investigations in natural science, particularly his Theory of Colours. Here a very different method of investigation is used from that to which we today are accustomed. At the very commencement mention is made of subjective, and of physiological colours, and the phenomena of the living experience of the human eye in connection with its environment are then carefully investigated. It is shown, for example, how these experiences or impressions do not merely last as long as the eye is exposed to its surroundings, but that an after-effect remains. You all know a very simple phenomenon connected with this. You gaze at a red surface, and then quickly turning to a white surface you will see the red in the green after-colour. This shows that the eye is, in a certain sense, still under the influence of the original impression. There is here no need to examine into the reason why the second colour seen should be green, we will only keep to the more general fact that the eye retains the after-effect of its experience.

We have here to do with an experience on the periphery of the human body, for the eye is on the periphery. When we contemplate this experience, we find that for a certain limited time the eye retains the after-effect of the impression; after that the experience ceases, and the eye can then expose itself to new impressions without interference from the last one.

Let us now consider quite objectively a phenomenon connected not with any single localised organ of the human organism, but with the whole human being. Provided our observations are unprejudiced, we cannot fail to recognise that this experience made by the whole human being is related to the experience with the localised eye. We expose ourselves to an impression, to an experience, with our whole being. In so doing, we absorb this experience just as the eye absorbs the impression of the colour to which it is exposed; and we find that after the lapse of months, or even years, the after-effect comes forth in the form of a thought-picture. The whole phenomenon is somewhat different, but you will not fail to recognise the relation of this memory picture to that after-picture of an experience which the eye retains for a short limited time.

This is the kind of question that man must face, for he can only gain some knowledge of the world when he learns to ask questions in the correct way. Let us therefore ask ourselves: What is the connection between these two phenomena—between the after-picture of the eye and the memory picture that rises up within us in relation with a certain experience? As soon as we put our question in this form and require a definite answer, we realise that the whole method of the present-day natural-scientific thought completely fails to supply the answer; and it fails because of its ignorance of one great fact—the fact of the universal significance of metamorphosis. This metamorphosis is something that is not completed in Man within the limits of one life, but only plays itself out in consecutive lives on Earth.

You will remember that in order to gain a true insight into the nature of Man, we divided him into three parts: head, rhythmic man and limbs. We may, for the present purpose, consider the last two as one, and we then have the head-organisation on the one hand and all that makes up the remaining parts on the other. As we try to comprehend this head-organisation, we must be able to understand how it is related to the whole evolution of Man. The head is a later metamorphosis, a transformation, of the rest of Man, considered in terms of its forces. Were you to imagine yourself without your head—and of course also without whatever is present in the rest of the organism but really belongs to the head—you would, in the first place, think of the remaining portion of your organism as substantial. But here we are not concerned with substance; it is the inter-relation of the forces of this substance which undergoes a complete transformation in the period between death and a new birth and becomes in the next incarnation the head-organisation. In other words, that which you now include in the lower part (the rhythmic man and the limbs) is an earlier metamorphosis of what is going to be head-organisation. But if you wish to understand how this metamorphosis proceeds, you will have to consider the following.

Take any one organ—liver or kidney—of your lower man, and compare it with your head-organisation. You will at once become aware of a fundamental, essential difference; namely, that all the activities of the lower parts of the body as distinct from the upper or head, are directed inwards, as instanced by the kidneys, whose whole activity is exercised interiorly. The activity of the kidneys is an activity of secretion. In comparing this organ with a characteristic organ of the head—the eye, for instance—you find the construction of the latter to be the exact opposite. It is directed entirely outwards, and the results of the changing impressions are transmitted inwardly to the reason, to the head. In any particular organ of the head you have the polar opposite of an organ belonging to the other part of the body. We might depict this fact diagrammatically.

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Take the drawing on the left as the first metamorphosis, and the drawing on the right as the second; then you will have to imagine the first as the first life, and the second as the second life, and between the two is the life between death and a new birth. We have first an inner organ which is directed inward. Owing to the transformation taking place between two physical lives, the whole position and direction of this organ is entirely reversed—it now opens outwards. So that an organ which develops its activity inwardly in one incarnation, develops it outwardly in the succeeding life. You can now imagine that something has happened between the two incarnations that may be compared with putting on a glove, taking it off and turning it inside out; upon wearing the glove again, the surface which was previously turned inward comes outside, and vice versa. Thus it must be noted that this metamorphosis does not merely transform the organs, but turns them inside out; inner becomes outer. We can now say that the organs of the body (taking ‘body’ as the opposite to ‘head’) have been transformed. So that one or other of our abdominal organs, for instance, has now become our eyes in this incarnation. It has been reversed in its active forces, has become an eye, and has attained the ability to generate after-effects following upon impressions from without. Now this faculty must owe its origin to something.

Let us consider the eye and the mission of its life-activity, in an unbiased way. These after-effects only prove to us that the eye is a living thing. They prove that the eye, for a little while, retains impressions; and why? I will use as a simile something simpler. Suppose you touch silk; your organ of touch retains an after-effect of the smoothness of silk. If later on you again touch silk, you recognise it by what the first impression left behind with you. It is the same with the eye. The after-effect is somehow connected with recognition. The inner life which produces this after-effect, plays a part in the recognition. But the outer object, when recognised, remains outside. If I see any one of you now, and tomorrow meet you again and recognise you, you are physically present before me.

Now compare this with the inner organ of which the eye is a transformation in respect to its activity and forces. In this organ must reside something which in a certain sense corresponds to the eye's capacity for retaining pictures of impressions, something akin to the inner life of the eye; but it must be directed inward. And this must also have some connection with recognition. But to recognise an experience means to remember it. So when we look for the fundamental metamorphosis of the eye's activity in a former life, we must enquire into the activity of that organ which acts for the memory.

It is impossible to explain these things in simple language such as is often desired at the present day, but we can direct our thoughts along a certain line which, if followed up, will lead us to this conception—namely that all our sense-organs which are directed outward have their correspondences in the inner organs, and that these latter are also the organs of memory. With the eye we see that which recurs as an impression from the outer world, while with those organs within the human body which correspond to the previous metamorphosis of the eye, we remember the pictures transmitted through the eye. We hear sound with the ear, and with the inner organ corresponding to the ear we remember that sound. Thereby the whole man as he directs or opens his organs inward, becomes an organ of memory. We confront the outer world, taking it into ourselves in the form of impressions. Materialistic natural science claims that we receive an impression, for instance, with the aid of the eye. The impression is transmitted to the optic nerve. But here the activity apparently ceases; as regards the process of cognition, the whole remaining organism is like the fifth wheel of a wagon! But this is far from being the truth. All that we perceive passes over into the rest of the organism. The nerves have no direct relation with memory. On the contrary the entire human body, the whole man, becomes a memory instrument, only specialised according to the particular organ that directs its activity inwards. Materialism is experiencing a tragic paradox—it fails to comprehend matter, because it sticks fast to its abstractions! It becomes more and more abstract, the spiritual is more and more filtered away; therefore it cannot penetrate to the essence of material phenomena, for it does not recognise the spiritual within the material. For instance materialism does not realise that our internal organs have very much more to do with our memory than has the brain, which merely prepares the idea or images so that they can be absorbed by the other organs of the whole body. In this connection our science is a perpetuation of a one-sided asceticism, which consists in unwillingness to understand the spirituality of the material world and a desire to overcome it. Our science has learnt sufficient asceticism to deprive itself of the capacity for understanding the world, when it claims that the eyes and other sense-organs receive the various impressions, pass them on to the nervous system and then to something else, which remains undefined. But this undefined “something” is the entire remaining organism! Here it is that memories originate through the transmutation of the organs.

This was very well known in the days when no spurious asceticism oppressed human perception. Therefore we find that the ancients, when speaking of ‘hypochondria’ for example, did not speak of it in the same way as does modern man and even the psycho-analyst when he maintains that hypochondria is merely psychic, is something rooted in the soul. No, hypochondria means a hardening of the abdominal and lower parts. The ancients knew well enough that this hardening of the abdominal system has as its result what we call hypochondria, and the English language which gives evidence of a less advanced stage than other European tongues, still contains a remnant of memory of this correspondence between the material and the spiritual. I can, at the moment, only remind you of one instance of this. In English, depression is called “spleen”. The word is the same as the name of the physical organ that has very much to do with this depression. For this condition of soul cannot be explained out of the nervous system, the explanation for it is to be found in the spleen. We might find a good many such correspondences, for the genius of language has preserved much; and even if words have become somewhat transformed for the purpose of applying them to the soul, yet they point to an insight Man once possessed in ancient times and that stood him in good stead.

To repeat—you, as entire Man, observe the surrounding world, and this world reacts upon your organs, which adapt themselves to these experiences according to their nature. In a medical school, when anatomy is being studied, the liver is just called liver, be it the liver of a man of 50 or of 25, of a musician or of one who understands as much of music as a cow does of Sunday after regaling itself upon grass for a week! It is simply liver. The fact is that a great difference exists between the liver of a musician and that of a non-musician, for the liver is very closely connected with all that may be summed up as the musical conceptions that live and resound in Man. It is of no use to look at the liver with the eye of an ascetic and see it as an inferior organ; for that apparently humble organ is the seat of all that lives in and expresses itself through the beautiful sequence of melody; it is closely concerned e.g. with the act of listening to a symphony. We must clearly understand that the liver also possesses etheric organs; it is these latter which, in the first place, have to do with music. But the outer physical liver is, in a certain sense, an externalisation of the etheric liver, and its form is like the form of the latter. In this way you see, you prepare your organs; and if it depended entirely upon yourself, the instruments of your senses, would, in the next incarnation, be a replica of the experiences you had made in the world in the present incarnation. But this is true only in measure, for in the interval between death and a new birth Beings of the higher Hierarchies come to our aid, and they do not always decide that injuries produced upon our organs by lack of knowledge or of self-control should be carried by us as our fate. We receive help between death and re-birth, and are therefore, in respect of this portion of our constitution, not dependent upon ourselves alone.

From all this you will see that a relation really exists between the head organisation and the rest of the body with its organs. The body becomes head, and we lose the head at death in so far as its formative forces are concerned. Therefore it is so essentially bony in its structure and is preserved longer on Earth than the rest of the organism, which fact is only the outer sign that it is lost to us for our following re-incarnation, in respect to all that we have to experience between death and re-birth. The ancient atavistic wisdom perceived these things plainly, and especially when that great relation between Man and Macrocosm was investigated, which we find expressed in the ancient description of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The genius of language has also here preserved a great deal. As I pointed out yesterday, physical Man adheres internally to the day-cycle. He demands breakfast every day, and not only on Sunday. Breakfast, dinner and supper are required every day, and not only breakfast on Sunday, dinner on Wednesday and supper on Saturday. Man is bound to the 24 hour cycle in respect to his metabolism—or the transmutation of matter from the outer world. This day-cycle in the interior of Man corresponds to the daily motion of the Earth upon its axis. These things were closely perceived by the ancient wisdom. Man did not feel that he was a creature apart from the Earth, for he knew that he conformed to its motions; he knew also the nature of that to which he conformed. Those who have an understanding for ancient works of art—though the examples still preserved today offer but little opportunity for studying these things—will be aware of a living sense, on the part of the ancients, of the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. It is proved by the position certain figures take up in their pictures, and the positions that certain others are beginning to assume etc.; in these, cosmic movements are constantly imitated.

But we shall find something of even greater significance in another consideration.

In almost all the peoples inhabiting this Earth, you find a recognised distinction or comparison existing between the week and the day. You have, on the one hand, the cycle of the transmutation of substances—or metabolism, which expresses itself in the taking of meals at regular intervals.. Man has however never reckoned according to this cycle alone; he has added to the day-cycle a week-cycle. He first distinguished this rising and setting of the Sun—corresponding to a day; then he added Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, a cycle seven times that of the other, after which he came back once again to Sunday. (In a certain sense, after completing seven such cycles, we return also again to the starting-point.) We experience this in the contrast between day and week. But Man wished to express a great deal more by this contrast. He wished first to show the connection of the daily cycle with the motion of the Sun.

But there is a cycle seven times as great, which, whilst returning again to the Sun, includes all the planets—Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is the weekly cycle. This was intended to signify that, having one cycle corresponding to a day, and one seven times greater that included the planets, not only does the Earth revolve upon its axis (or the Sun go round), but the whole system has in itself also a movement. The movement can be seen in various other examples. If you take the course of the year's cycle, then you have in the year, as you know, 52 weeks, so that 7 weeks is about the seventh part—in point of number—of the year. This means, we imagine the week-cycle extended or stretched over the year, taking the beginning and end of the year as corresponding to the beginning and end of the week. And this necessitates the thought that all phenomena resulting from the weekly cycle must take place at a different speed from those events having their origin in the daily cycle.

And where are we to look for the origin of the feeling which impels us to reckon, now with the day-cycle, and now with the week-cycle? It arises from the sensation within us of the contrast between the human head-development, and that of the rest of the organism. We see the human head-organisation represented by a process to which I have already drawn your attention—the formation within about a year's cycle of the first teeth.

If you consider the first and second dentition you will see that the second takes place after a cycle that is seven times as long as the cycle of the first dentition. We may say that as the one year-cycle in respect to the first dentition stands to the cycle of human evolution that works up to the second dentition, so does the day stand to the week. The ancients felt this to be true, because they rightly understood another thing. They understood that the first dentition was primarily the result of heredity. You only need look at the embryo to realise that its development proceeds out of the head organisation; it annexes, as it were, the remainder of the organism later. You will then understand that the idea of the ancients was quite correct when they saw a connection of the formation of the first teeth with the head and of the second teeth with the whole human organism. And today we must arrive at the same result if we consider these phenomena objectively. The first teeth are connected with the forces of the human head, the second with the forces that work from out of the rest of the organism and penetrate into the head.

Through looking at the matter in this way, we have indicated an important difference between the head and the rest of the human body. The difference is one which can, in the first place, be considered as connected with time, for that which takes place in the human head has a seven times greater rapidity than that which takes place in the rest of the human organism. Let us translate this into rational language. Let us say, today you have eaten your usual number of meals in the proper sequence. Your organism demands a repetition of them tomorrow. Not so the head. This acts according to another measure of time; it must wait seven days before the food taken into the rest of the organism has proceeded far enough to enable the head to assimilate it. Supposing this to be Sunday, your head would have to wait until next Sunday before it would be in a position to benefit by the fruit of to-day's Sunday dinner. In the head organisation, a repetition takes place after a period of seven days, of what has been accomplished seven days before in the organism. All this the ancients knew intuitively and expressed by saying: a week is necessary to transmute what is physical and bodily into soul and spirit.

You will now see that metamorphosis also brings about a repetition in the succeeding incarnation in ‘single’ time of that which previously required a seven times longer period to accomplish. We are thus concerned with a metamorphosis which is spatial through the fact that our remaining organism—our body—is not merely transformed, but turned inside out, and is at the same time temporal, in that our head organisation has remained behind to the extent of a period seven times as long.

It will be clear to you now that this human organisation is not, after all, quite so simple as our modern, comfort-loving science would like to believe. We must make up our mind to regard Man's organisation as much more complicated; for if we do not understand Man rightly, we are also prevented from realising the cosmic movements in which he takes part. The descriptions of the Universe circulated since the beginning of modern times are mere abstractions, for they are described without a knowledge of Man.

This is the reform that is necessary, above all, in Astronomy—a reform demanding the re-inclusion of Man in the scheme of things, when cosmic movements are being studied. Such studies will then naturally be somewhat more difficult.

Goethe felt intuitively the metamorphosis of the skull from the vertebrae, when, in a Venetian Jewish burial ground, he found a sheep's skull which had fallen apart into its various small sections; these enabled him to study the transformation of the vertebrae, and he then pursued his discovery in detail. Modern science has also touched upon this line of research. You will find some interesting observations relating to the matter, and some hypotheses built up upon it, by the comparative anatomist Karl Gegenbaur; but in reality Gegenbaur created obstacles for the Goethean intuitional research, for he failed to find sufficient reason to declare himself in favour of the parallel between the vertebrae and the single sections of the skull. Why did he fail? Because so long as people think only of a transformation and disregard the reversal inside out, so long will they gain only an approximate idea of the similarity of the two kinds of bones. For in reality the bones of the skull result from those forces which act upon Man between death and rebirth, and they are therefore bound to be essentially different in appearance from merely transformed bone. They are turned inside out; it is this reversal which is the important point.

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Imagine we have here (diagram) the upper or head-man. All influences or impressions proceed inward from without. Here below would be the rest of the human body. Here everything works from within outwards, but so as to remain within the organism. Let me put it in another way. With his head man stands in relation to his outer environment, while with his lower organism he is related to the processes taking place within himself. The abstract mystic says: “Look within to find the reality of the outer world.” But this is merely abstract thought, it does not accord with the actual path. The reality of the outer world is not found through inner contemplation of all that acts upon us from outside; we must go deeper and consider ourselves as a duality, and allow the world to take form in quite a different part of our being. That is why abstract mysticism yields so little fruit, and why it is necessary to think here too of an inner process.

I do not expect any of you to allow your dinner to stand before you untouched, depending upon the attractive appearance of it to appease your hunger! Life could not be supported in this way. No! We must induce that process which runs its course in the 24-hour cycle, and which, if we consider the whole man, including the upper or head organisation, only finishes its course after seven days. But that which is assimilated spiritually—for it has really to be assimilated and not merely contemplated!—also requires for this process a period seven times as long. Therefore it becomes necessary first intellectually to assimilate all we absorb. But to see it reborn again within us, we must wait seven years. Only then has it developed into that which it was intended to be. That is why after the founding of the Anthroposophical Society in 1901 we had to wait patiently, seven, and even fourteen years for the result!

I would like to bring forward again, in a rather different form, a few remarks made in the course of our studies. You know that the fact of the intimate relation between man and the Universe was much better known to methods of perception used by the ancients than to ours of the present day. If we were to go back to the period of the Egypto-Chaldean culture, we should find that man did not look upon himself as a separate being who perambulates the Earth, but as a being belonging to the whole Universe. He knew of course to begin with that in a certain sense he was dependent upon the Earth. That can easily be observed; even our own materialistic age admits that Man, as far as his physical metabolism is concerned, depends upon the Earth's products, which he assimilates. But in those ancient times, by means of course of atavistic perception, Man knew himself to be dependent also in his soul on the one hand on the elements of fire, water and air, and on the other hand on the movements of the planets. These he related to his soul-nature in the same way as he related the products of the Earth to his physical metabolism. And the part of the Universe that is outside or beyond the planetary system, all that is in the starry heavens—this he connected with his spirit.

Thus in those past ages, when materialism was out of the question, man knew himself to be living in the bosom of the Universe. You may now ask: Yes, but how is it that the man of those times made such big mistakes in connection with the movements of the heavenly bodies, while today, in this materialistic age, he has made such magnificent progress in relation to the real truth of these movements? Well, we have spoken of these things for a considerable time and we have pointed out that the movements man believes in today are asserted by science merely on the basis of certain prejudices. Upon this subject I shall have more to say tomorrow, but for the moment we may remind ourselves that present-day man has entirely lost consciousness of the fact that that which belongs to the whole man can no more be discovered in the physical world than in the visible stellar world. For it is absolutely impossible to gain a true perception even of the visible starry heavens, unless man combines with the outer physical life the super-physical in his considerations—that super-physical part of his life through which he passes between death and re-birth. Yesterday we drew attention to the metamorphosis that takes place in man in this change from earthly to super-earthly life and showed how the organs which we consider as belonging to the lower man (and of which we said yesterday that they open inwards), transform themselves—as regards their forces, though obviously not in their substance—during the period between death and a new birth, and become what is considered to be the more noble head-organism. This latter is in reality nothing more than the metamorphosis—as regards the structure of its forces—of the so-called ‘lower’ man of the last Earth-life.

If we really think this matter over, we can see—in spirit—how between death and re-birth, man has a certain content within him of his experiences, as he has also here between birth and death. But the content is essentially different in each case. We may make this difference clear by saying: between birth and death, man has, as the circumference for his experiences, the circumference in Space, and also that which takes place in Time. He has these—Space and Time—as a circumference for his experiences.

You know in how small a degree man really experiences the processes of his inner organism. He is not conscious of them. All the organisation within the skin is known to man only indirectly and incompletely. The knowledge gained through anatomy and physiology is not real knowledge, for we do not by means of this investigation look into the actual interior of man; it is an illusion to believe that we do. Spiritual Science alone gradually reveals all that is within man. But how do we find conditions in this respect during the interval between death and a new birth? We have to put it in this way. In a certain sense we look then from the periphery upon the centre. And we know just as little of the periphery as we do here of our centre or interior. But on the other hand we have during this period a direct perception of the secrets and mysteries of Man himself. That which is hidden within us—within our skin—that we observe between death and a new birth as our experiences.

Now you will perhaps say that this world which we view during the time between death and re-birth must be a very small one indeed. But spatial dimensions do not count at all. It is the fullness or poverty of the content that matters, not the size. If we combine all we observe in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and add thereto the starry heavens, it would not compare in richness with the mysteries within Man himself. The real process is approximately as follows. We lose the structural forces of the head when we pass over in death. They have completed their office. But then the spiritual world takes up the structural forces of the remaining (lower) organism, which from being inner experience belong now to the periphery, and transforms them in such a way that when the time is ripe, from out of the spiritual world the human head is determined in the womb of the mother.

We must be absolutely clear upon this point. The very first beginning of the corporeal man within the mother, is a result of the whole process we have been describing. Conception is merely the opportunity given for a certain cosmic activity to penetrate the human body, and that which is formed first in the process of man's formation is indeed an image of the whole Cosmos. He who wishes to study the human embryo from its first stage onwards, must consider it as an image of the Cosmos.

These matters are today almost entirely overlooked. For of what do we generally think when we speak of the origin of a human being in the physical sense? Of heredity! We observe how the child-organism is formed within the parent-organism, and we are ignorant of how the cosmic forces which surround us are active within the parent-organism; we are ignorant of the fact that the whole Macrocosm projects its force into the human being in order to make possible the genesis of a new human being.

Of course, the great fault of our present-day world-philosophy is that we never take the Macrocosm into consideration, and therefore never become conscious of where lie the forces whose effect we observe. I must once again remind you of the following. The modern physicist or chemist says that there are molecules which are composed of atoms, that the atoms possess forces by means of which they act upon each other. Now this is a conception which simply does not accord with reality. The truth is, that the minutest molecule is acted upon by the whole starry heavens. Suppose here is a planet, here another, here another, and so on. Then there are the fixed stars, which transmit their forces into the molecule. All these lines of force intersect each other in various ways. The Planets also transmit their forces in the same way, and we come to realise that the molecule is nothing but a focus of macrocosmic forces. It is the ardent desire of modern science to bring microscopy far enough to enable the atoms to be seen within the molecule. This way of looking at the subject must cease. Instead of wishing to examine the structure of the molecule microscopically, we must turn our gaze outwards to the starry heavens, we must look at the constellations and see copper in one, tin in another! Out there in the Macrocosm we have to behold the structure of the molecule that is only reflected in the molecule. Instead of passing into the infinitely little, we must turn our gaze outwards to the infinitely great, for it is there we have to look for the reality of what lives in the little.

In this way does the materialistic conception of things also affect other domains of thought. Someone who considers himself capable of giving an opinion on the progress of human knowledge may say: the nineteenth century materialism is now overcome! No! It is not overcome so long as men still think atomically, so long as they fail to search in the great for the form and configuration of the small. Neither is the materialism relative to humanity overcome, so long as we continue to ignore the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm.

And at this point we are confronted with a new—I might say a monstrous—evidence of materialism, to which I have previously drawn attention. It is in so-called Theosophy that its traces are often to be found, where a tendency is present to look at things in the following way. Here we have matter; then ether, thinner than matter but otherwise similar to physical matter; then comes the astral—again thinner or finer than the etheric; and after that quite a number of other beautiful things, all thinner and thinner and thinner. Call it Kama-manas, or what you will, it is not spiritual, but remains materialistic! The truth is that in order to arrive at a real understanding of the world, we must conceive of heavy, ponderable matter as ceasing at the ether; for we must clearly understand that this ether is essentially a very different thing from that substance of which we speak as filling space. When speaking of this latter substance, we think of space as filled with matter. But this we cannot do when we speak of ether, for then we must conceive space as being empty of matter. When ordinary matter strikes some other object, the object is repelled or pushed away. When ether approaches an object, it attracts it and draws it within itself. The activity of ether is the exact opposite to that of matter. Ether acts as an absorbent. Were this otherwise, you would present the same appearance back and front, for even in this diversity of the physical appearance of man we have the result, on the one hand of the pressure of ponderable matter, and on the other of the absorbing action of ether. Your nose is forced outwards, as it were, from your organism through the pressure of matter, while the eye sockets are drawn inward through the action of ether. It is therefore simply a pressing and absorbing substance acting within you which differentiates the exterior appearance of your front and back. These are things which are not usually taken into consideration.

Further, when we come to speak of the astral, we must not think of three-dimensional physical matter extending in a three-fold way in space, nor must we think of the absorbent ether, but of a third factor, one that forms the adjustment or connection between the other two. And should we then go on and attempt to form some approximate idea of that part of our being termed the Ego—the ‘I am’—we would have to include a fourth factor, which acts as mediator between, on the one hand, the absorbent-repelling action of ether and physical matter, and on the other hand, the astral substance. These are the things that must be taken into consideration.

You cannot logically ask: If the ether has merely a sucking, absorbing action, how then is it possible for us to perceive it? The fact is, ether stands, figuratively speaking, in the same relation in respect to ponderable matter—I am speaking now in a picture—as the relation we find in another plane if we have a bottle of soda-water. We cannot see the water in the bottle, but the pearly bubbles we can see, although these are ‘thinner’ than the water. And so it is in the case of the ether, which is a ‘hollow’ in physical matter and therefore the essential antithesis of physical matter; it also can be perceived.

From the foregoing you will now see that it is necessary, when speaking of the life between death and re-birth, to realise that this life is actually lived beyond space—beyond the space of which we are cognisant on the Earth-plane; and we shall have to endeavour to gain a conception of this ‘beyond’ of space. You can best do so by trying first to imagine ‘filled’ space. Take for instance, a table; it fills or occupies space. Then you pass from ‘filled’ space to ‘empty’ space, and perhaps you would say that you cannot go beyond this. But as I have previously pointed out to you, this would be about as sensible as to say: ‘I have a full purse out of which I continue to take money till nothing is left; this “nothing” cannot be less than it is’. But it can be less if you get into debt, when you would have less than nothing in your purse! Similarly empty space can be less than empty by being filled with ether, when it becomes a negative entity.

And that which adjusts or connects the two, that which mediates also in you between pressure and suction, is the astral. No relation would exist between the front and back of a human body did not the astral activity within form the connection between the absorbent and the pressing elements. You will say: I do not observe this connecting element. But try to follow the digestive process, and you will find the connecting link very clearly manifested. The astral is active there, and its activity is based upon the contrast between the front and back nature of the human being, even as the connection between the higher (head) man and lower (limb) man by way of the astral is based upon the Ego. We must therefore consider man, as he stands before us, in a quite concrete manner and make clear to ourselves that while he has existence upon this plane between birth and death he imprints his astral part and his Ego in the absorbent and pressure-producing elements, but his being only manifests here on Earth as the mediator between the front and the back, and between the upper and the lower parts of the body.

Now, what is this mediator or connecting link? It is that which we experience within us when we feel our equilibrium. We do not jerk the head forward and backward; we stand and walk erect. We accommodate our posture to the demands of the laws of equilibrium. We cannot see this, but we experience it inwardly. When we pass through the gate of death we consciously adjust ourselves to this condition, of which here we take no heed. If we possessed eyes only, it would then be dark around us, and if we had ears only, stillness would envelop us. But we have also the sense of equilibrium, and the sense of motion, and so we become able after all to ‘experience’ there. We take part in that which on Earth is implied in the words ‘equilibrium’ and ‘movement’. We adapt ourselves to the movements of the external world, we find our way into them.

You see, here, in the life between birth and death, the only way we experience the activity of the Earth's revolution upon its axis is in our daily metabolic process. We must take our daily meals, and this together with the succeeding digestive processes takes place within the limits of 24 hours, uniform with one revolution of the Earth. These two things belong together, the one is proof of the other. When we die, the revolution of the Earth becomes something real, as real as are the visible objects here. Then we live with this terrestrial motion; we begin to experience this motion consciously.

There are also other motions connected with the starry heavens, all of which we experience after death. Correctly considered, the description of our experiences already includes this experience, for we do not expand into the Cosmos like a jelly-fish, but we take part in the life of the Cosmos—and as beings taking part in cosmic life we experience at the same time the inner being of man. Between birth and death we say: My heart is within my breast, and in it converge the streams or motions of the blood-circulation. At a certain stage of development between death and re-birth we say: In my inner being is the Sun—and by this expression we mean the actual Sun, which the physicist claims to be a ball of gas, but which is in reality something quite different. We experience the actual Sun in the same manner as we experience here the heart. Here the Sun is visible to the eye, whereas during the time between death and re-birth the evolution of the heart on its path to the pineal gland, as it undergoes on the way a wonderful metamorphosis, is the cause of sublime experiences. The complete system of our blood-circulation we experience consciously in its transformation; we have this system within existence between death and re-birth proceeds, these forces undergo transmutation, so that, when once again we arrive at the gates of a new Earth-life, they have become the forces of us—not, of course, the substance, but the forces. As our new nervous-system. Look at the plates and illustrations scattered through modern books on anatomy or physiology and examine the circulatory system of the blood in one incarnation. This in the next incarnation becomes the life of the nerves. (We must not depict in diagrammatic form the head, breast (rhythmic) and limb systems as existing side by side, for they interpenetrate each other.) Note the wonderful structure of the human eye; there we find blood-vessels, choroid and retina (omentum). The last two are transformations of each other. What today is retina, was in the last incarnation choroid, and what is choroid today will be retina in the next incarnation. Of course this must not be taken too literally, but such is the approximate course of events. So you will understand that we cannot gain an essential conception of man if we merely study him as he appears between birth and death or even along the lines by which he develops through the forces of physical heredity. For thereby we understand man at most as far as the circulatory system; that would be the last process we would understand. The nervous system of the present life is a result of a former life, and can never be understood if studied in connection with the present life alone.

Now my dear friends, I beg of you not to object to what I have explained, by saying that animals have also a nervous system although they have no earlier lives. Such an objection would indeed be very short-sighted; for though in man the forces of his nervous system are the transformation of the blood-circulation of the former life, that does not imply that the same is valid in the case of animals. It would be just as logical to go to a barber and ask him to sell you a razor for the dinner-table—a razor being a knife, and knives forming part of the dinner service! Razors however do not! Nothing carries within itself its immediate purpose, neither does a physical organ. The human organ is entirely different from the animal organ. It depends upon the use to be made of an organ. We should not compare the human nervous system with that of an animal, but rather observe the fact that human nerves have become similar—during the course of their evolution—to animal nerves, just as the razor has become similar to the table-knife. This again demonstrates that when man follows the ordinary materialistic line of investigation, he can arrive at no true conclusion. Yet that is just the path which is being followed today.

It is this kind of investigation that prevents us from arriving at a conception of man as a product of the spiritual world. Our religious creeds, as they have gradually developed, have pandered too much to human egoism. It may almost be said that their one and only aim is to convince their followers of a continuation of life after death, because the egoism of humanity demands it. Yet it is equally important to prove to men the continuation in this life of a pre-natal life, so that they may comprehend—‘Here upon this earth I have to be a continuation of what I was between death and my present birth. I have to continue a spiritual life here on this plane.’ This indeed is not likely to please egoism so much; but it is something that must of necessity again imbue our civilisation, so that humanity can be liberated from its anti-social instincts. Try to imagine what it will mean when we can look upon a human countenance and say: ‘That is not of this world. The spiritual world has been at work upon it between the last death and this birth.’ For a time will come when we shall see within the material the imprint of the spiritual work between death and re-birth. It will indeed be a very different kind of culture which will guide humanity then; and it will bring in its train very different convictions and tendencies of thought, which will not permit the contemplation of the Cosmos as a vast machine set in motion by the mutual attraction between the stars—apart from the fact that this abstraction has already reached its zenith. Abstraction is deeply rooted in our ordinary conception of the planetary system, and it produces today some very strange results. For example, a great deal of popular literature is permeated with glorification of an idea which originates from Einstein. This idea is said to have shaken the theory of gravitation. Imagine that, far away from all celestial bodies—so that an interference by a field of gravity may be obviated—there is a box. Inside it is a man who holds a stone in one hand, and some down in the other. He lets both out of the box and see—they begin to fall—and fall until they reach the ground. Yes, says Einstein, men will no doubt say that the stone and the down both fall to the ground. But it need not be so; for up above a rope may be fastened and by some means or other the box is drawn up. The stone and the down—owing to the absence of any celestial body—do not fall, but remain where they are. When the bottom of the box reaches them, it takes them up with it.

This kind of discussion concerning an extreme abstraction, can be found today in the modern theory of relativity which Albert Einstein has propounded. Just think how far humanity has deviated from actuality! We can talk of relativity—well and good, but just imagine what would happen were this picture taken in earnest! A box, some inconceivable distance away from any celestial body that might attract (by gravitation) the stone and the down; and inside this box a man (air is only found of course in the neighbourhood of heavenly bodies, but the man is quite happy and content; as for his stone and his down, they of course need no air!), and now the box is suspended from outside and is then lifted up!

All this is a further development of the theory of Newton who postulated that ‘push’ or impetus which is imparted to a globe in the direction of a tangent, so that it is able with centrifugal force to escape the centripetal force. Such things as these actually form the contents of scientific discussions today, and are considered great achievements, whereas they are nothing more than a testimony to the fact that we have arrived at the most extreme abstraction, and that materialism has produced a state of complete ignorance in humanity as to what matter really is, and caused man to live in a series of mental pictures far removed from all reality.

But, my dear friends, these things are not in the least observed today, and we find our newspapers proclaiming that a new discovery has been made: the theory of gravitation has been replaced by the theory of inertia. The stone and down are not attracted; they remain in their original place—perhaps only because we can manage to imagine such a thing—while the box is raised! One can in truth say that so much nonsense masquerades as genius today that it becomes difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Can we wonder that in these times when in many other departments of thought too as well as that just described, men's ideas have grown quite crooked—can we wonder that we have at last been brought to the conditions of the last five or six years! These are things of which we need again and again to be reminded.

I have had to recall them to you today, and tomorrow I will add something further concerning the structure of the Universe.

The task underlying our present studies is, in the widest sense, to try to understand the Universe through the relations existing between it and Man. I am far from wishing to convey the idea to those who have had certain glimpses into the Universe during the foregoing lectures that the truth of these matters can be found in any quick and easy way such as one hears of in ordinary Astronomy when it tells of the celestial motions. I would, however, like the friends who have come to the General Meeting not merely to hear something that comes right in the middle of a consecutive series, but in these few lectures held during the General Meeting, also to have a self-contained picture. I will therefore continue our studies of yesterday, giving indications of how the conception of the nature of Man leads to the conception of the Universe, its being and its movements. Of course, this subject is so vast that it is impossible to exhaust it for the friends who are now present. It will be continued later. For the benefit of those here for the first time to-night, I should like to put before them at any rate a few of the salient features of the subject embodied in previous lectures.

From other lectures you all know of the relation existing in human life between waking and sleeping. You know that in the abstract the relation is something like this: In the waking condition, the physical, etheric and astral bodies, together with the Ego-being, are in a certain inner connection; whereas during sleep, we have on the one side, the physical and etheric bodies united, and on the other—separated from them at any rate in comparison with the waking state—we have the astral body and the Ego. This, as you know, is merely an abstract assertion, for I have often emphasised that as regards all that belongs to the limb-nature—which is continued into the inner organisation, and is also the real bearer of metabolism—all this part of man, connected as it is at the same time with the human will, is really in a perpetual state of sleep. We must be absolutely clear that this state of sleep continues in regard to our inner organism, when we ourselves are awake. We can therefore say that the ‘Limb-man’ as carrier of the ‘Will-man’, is in a permanent state of sleep. The Circulation or ‘Rhythmic-man’, which may be described as in the middle between the Head-organisation and the Limb-man (the latter extending into the interior of man) persists in a continuous dream state. This is at the same time the outer instrument for our world of feeling. The world of feeling is rooted wholly within man's rhythmic organisation and while the metabolic man, together with its outward extension—the limbs—is the vehicle of the will, the rhythmic man is the vehicle of the life of feeling, and is related to our consciousness in the same way as our dream state to our waking life. Between waking and falling asleep, we are only really awake in our life of ideation and thought.

In this way we have set before us the fact that man, in his life between birth and death, is in an intermittent waking state in respect to his life of thought, in a dream state regarding his emotions and feelings, of which the rhythmic man is the vehicle; and he is in a state of continuous sleep as regards his limbs and metabolic system. We must realise at this point that really to comprehend human nature, it is necessary to fix our attention upon the fact of the extension of the limb-nature into the interior of man. All the processes that are ultimately connected with the abdominal region, everything connected with assimilation, digestion, as also with the secretion of milk in females, and so forth, all these processes are a continuation of the limb nature, directed inwards. So that in speaking of the will-nature or metabolic-nature, we do not mean only the outer limbs, but the continuation inwards too of this limb activity. In respect to all this, intimately connected as it is with the will-nature, man is continuously asleep.

This complicates the abstract idea we gain in the first place of the departure of the Ego and astral body; and it also necessitates a corresponding comprehension of another important fact.

When the materialistic physiologist of today speaks of the will, saying for instance, that it manifests in the movement of the limbs, he has in mind that some kind of telephonic signal is sent from the central organ, the brain, proceeds through the so-called motor-nerves, and thus moves the right leg, for instance. This however is quite unproven—in fact, a quite erroneous hypothesis! For spiritual observation shows the following: If a man's right leg is raised or moved by the will, a direct influence of the Ego-being of man takes place, acting upon that limb, so that it is really raised by the Ego-being itself; only, the process takes place in a state like that of sleep. Consciousness knows nothing of it. The nerve merely informs us that we have a limb, it tells us of the presence of such a limb. This nerve as such has no part in the activity of the Ego upon that limb. A direct correspondence exists between the limb and the will, which latter is associated in man with the Ego-being, and in the animal with the astral body. All that Physiology has to say in respect, for instance, of the speed of transmission of the so-called will, needs to be revised; it should be impressed upon us that here we have to do rather with the velocity of transmission in respect of the perception of that particular limb. Naturally anyone initiated into modern physiology can challenge this assertion in a dozen ways. I am well acquainted with these objections. But we have to try to rise a really logical thought process in this matter, and we shall find that what I say here corresponds with actual facts of observation, while what is said in physiological textbooks does not.

Sometimes indeed these things are so obvious as to be evident to all. Thus at a meeting of scientists in Italy—I think it was in the 80's of the last century—a most interesting discussion took place concerning the contradictions which came to light between the usual theory of the motor-nerves and the movement of a limb. As however the tendency to take notice of the spiritual aspect of things is absent in the physiology of today, even during a discussion such as this little was arrived at, except that contradictions existed in the hypothetical explanation of a certain fact. It would be extremely interesting if our learned friends, and there are such among us, were to investigate and test the physiological and biological literature of the last 40 years. They would make extremely interesting discoveries, were they to take up these subjects. They would find facts everywhere, which merely need handling in the proper way to confirm the findings of Spiritual Science. It would form one of the most interesting problems of the Institutes of Scientific Research which ought now to be erected, to proceed in the following way: International literature on the subject should first be carefully studied. We must take the international literature, for in English, and particularly in American literature, most interesting facts are substantiated, although these investigators do not know what to make of them. If you look into the discovered facts and substantiate them, there is but one step more needed in the sequence of investigation—given the right kind of vision in response to which the thing will, as it were, come out and show itself—and magnificent results would be arrived at today. Once we have advanced sufficiently to possess such an Institute, furnished with adequate apparatus and the necessary material, the facts will be found all around us, waiting as it were. Today people fail to notice the universal urge towards an Institute such as I have in mind, for the series of tests and experiments commenced are always discontinued just at the most critical moments, simply because people are ignorant of the ultimate direction of such experiments. Really important foundations would be laid by such an Institute, foundations for practical work. People do not dream at the present time of the technique that would result if these things were actually done, first as experiments and then building up from them further. It is only the possibility of putting it into practical effect that is lacking.

This is only by the way. To return to our subject, we have to do with a portion of man which sleeps even while he is awake. I now wish to bring to your notice a fact which has played an important part in all the older conceptions of the Universe. I refer to the assertion that the starting-point of the lower limbs is under the rulership of the Moon, while the region of the larynx, which we may consider as the meeting-point of the higher limbs, is associated with Mars. The man of today who is deeply involved in the modern conception of the Macrocosm, cannot of course make anything of such assertions; and the nonsense which hazy mystics and theosophists of today say or write about these things should not be awarded any special value, for these facts lie far deeper than, for instance, the repeated statements of materialistic theosophy that we have first coarse physical matter, and then other rather ‘finer’, then the astral still ‘finer’ and so forth. Those and similar things that pass for theosophy are in reality no spiritual teaching at all, but a spiritual untruth, for they are nothing more than a perpetuation of materialism.

Statements, however, that have come down to us as remnants of the ancient wisdom, have power to lead us to a state of real veneration and deep humility before that ancient knowledge of man, as soon as we begin to understand its meaning. These indications of an ancient wisdom persisted, not only till far into the Middle Ages, but even into the eighteenth century (where they may be found in the literature of the period), and perhaps into the nineteenth century, though here they have become merely copies, so to speak, and are no longer the direct result of an original primeval consciousness. And when these things are found introduced into quite modern literature, then they are still more certain to be copies. Up to the earlier part of the eighteenth century, however, we can still find traces of a certain consciousness of these things, and here again an association was thought of as between the nature of the Moon and this region of the human organism.

What I have just said—that man in relation to his will-metabolic nature is in a constant state of sleep—is most forcibly expressed in the lower limbs. In other words, through the metamorphosis which the arms and hands have undergone, man wrests from unconsciousness that which is really the sleep-nature of the limb-man. If to some degree we sharpen our sensitiveness for these things, we shall perceive what a really remarkable difference exists between the movement of a leg and the movement of an arm. The movements of the arms are free, and in a sense follow the feelings. The movement of the legs is not as free—I mean in respect to the laws by which we produce their movements. This, of course, is something which is not always noticed, nor sufficiently appreciated, as exemplified by the fact that the greater portion of the public attending our performances of Eurythmy are merely passive observers, and fail to notice that the leg movements are less articulated and the movements of the arms and hands more so. The reason for this is that, to understand the movements of the arms, a certain co-operation of the soul on the part of the observer is necessary. In our cinema age, people do not want to give this co-operation. While watching the movements of a dance where only the legs are in movement, and the arms at most are subject to arbitrary movements, there is little need either to think or feel in union with the dancer. This is by the way.

As we have seen, the most intensely unconscious process is in connection with the movements of the lower limbs. There, man is in a sense, fast asleep. How the will works into the legs or into the abdominal region, is entirely missed by man, owing to this state of sleep. In respect to this process, man's own nature sends back to him what is a reflection only of the process. Of course we follow the movement of our legs, but this observation does not make us conscious of the processes taking place in the nervous system as the will acts upon it; only the reflection of this becomes manifest to us. The nature of our lower man turns one side away, as it were, and only the other side is turned towards us. It is exactly the same with the Moon. She revolves round the Earth, and is altogether a most courteous lady, who never turns her back upon us, but shows us always the same side. She does not show us first one side, and then the other, while proceeding along her journey round the Earth. Nobody has ever seen her back. On account of this we never receive anything from the Moon which may be termed her own, but always a reflected light. In this fact we have an absolute inner parallel between the Moon-nature and the whole inner being of man. As we look up to the Moon, we understand her only as regards her outer formal side, but we should try to feel her inner relationship with the lower physical organisation of man. The deeper we go into these matters, the more we find this to hold good. It was the simple, instinctive observations of the Ancients which enabled them to realise these inner relations between human nature and the celestial bodies ...

Now let us take the other fact—that the arms, in their connection with the upper portion of the middle or rhythmic man, come awake in a sense in man; the movements of the arms can be taken as equivalent at least to the dream-state. We feel that the activity of the arms is related in a much nearer sense to human consciousness than is the activity of the lower limbs. Hence we find that a man who has elementary feelings, generally accompanies his speech, which is in close relation to the middle man, with a gesture of the arms, by way of emphasis or as a help in explaining his meaning. Speech is closely related to the upper part of the rhythmic-man. I do not suppose there are many speakers who use movements of the legs as a help for speech, or many audiences who would consider such movements attractive!

So if we feel in the right way this necessity or tendency in man's nature, we can also feel the real relationship between the hands and arms, which belong to the upper portion of the limb-man, and the middle-man or rhythmic-man, who has as his spiritual counterpart, the feeling nature. Quite naturally we try to support our speech, which is often in danger of becoming too abstract, by gestures of our arms and hands. We endeavour to project our emotional nature into our speech.

Today, in many circles—I will not name them—it is considered a sign of intellectual clarity to abstain as much as possible from using gesture in speech. We may however, look at the matter from another standpoint and say: If a person acquires the habit of putting his hands in his trouser pockets while speaking, it may not only mark him as a man of linguistic ability, but also perhaps as being somewhat blasé. That is another aspect of the matter. I am not speaking in favour of either of these points of view, but you will see how the nature of the arms clearly indicates their connection not only with the metabolic limb man, but also with the middle, the rhythmic or circulation man. This was understood and felt by the Ancients when they connected the combination of speech and arm-movement with the sphere of Mars. This planet is not so intimately connected with the Earth as is the Moon, nor is that which underlies the foundation of speech and the arm-organisation so intimately connected with the earthly man as is that which underlies the abdominal and leg-organisation. In a certain sense we can say: what in its activity corresponds to the lower limbs, works very strongly upon the unconscious man. What corresponds to the arms and hands, however, works very powerfully upon the semiconscious man. It is indeed a fact that no one with wholly unskilled hands, no one wholly unable to perform any dexterous movements with the fingers, can be a very subtle thinker. He would in a sense seek a coarse thought-mesh rather than fine links of thought. If he has coarse, clumsy hands, he is much more qualified for materialism than one whose hand movements are more adroit. This has nothing to do with having an abstract conception of the Universe, but with the true inclination to a spiritual view of the Universe, which always demands to be comprehended in finely-meshed thoughts.

All these matters are taken fully into consideration in a comprehensive educational science. You would probably be very pleased if you came to our Waldorf School and visited the classroom where, from ten o'clock, instruction is given in handicrafts. You would see the boys as well as the girls industriously absorbed in knitting or crochet. These things are the outcome of the whole spirit of the Waldorf School, for it is not a question of writing sundry abstract programmes, but of taking in earnest that for the whole training of human knowledge, one should as a teacher know the great difference it makes to the thinking whether I understand how to move my fingers dexterously, whether I am able in ordinary circumstances to cross the middle finger over the first, like a caduceus, or not. The movements of our fingers are to a great extent the teachers of the elasticity of our thinking. These things must be followed with understanding and discernment. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in crossing the middle finger over the first with elasticity, making a serpent and the caduceus, but it is not so easy to do the same with the second and third toes. In this we see what great distinctions there are in the whole organisation of man. It is very important to bear this in mind, for the construction of the foot is intimately connected with our whole human earthly nature. By the organisation of our hands we raise ourselves above the earthly nature. We raise ourselves to the super-earthly. This was felt by the ancient wisdom, for it said that the lower man belonged to the Moon, but that the part of man which raised itself above the earthly nature belonged to Mars. Primeval Wisdom felt the organisation in the whole Universe in the same way as we feel the organisation there is in man. Materialism, however, has brought it about that we do not understand man any more. Again and again I must emphasise that the tragedy of materialism is that it turns its attention to matter, and all the time understands nothing at all of matter but simply loses connection with material existence. For this reason materialism can only cause social harm; for the socialistic materialists, the Marxists, are, as regards reality, just talkers. This they have learnt from the middle classes which have indulged in materialistic chatter for centuries; but they have not applied it to the social institution, and have remained satisfied with half-truths. A spiritual philosophy of life will once more reveal the nature of man, not in the abstract, but as possessing a concrete soul and spirit, which can work into each individual member of the human organisation.

One cannot advance in these things without constantly turning to the other side of life; for this development which our organisation manifests is two-fold, in so far as the upper man is a metamorphosis of the lower man from the last Earth-life. There is a point of time between death and rebirth when a complete reversal takes place, when the inner is turned to the outer, when what is presented as the connection between the organisation of the liver and that of the spleen is changed in the whole structure of its forces into, what becomes our hearing organisation when we are reborn. The whole of the lower man appears transformed. We have today in our lower man a certain relationship between the spleen and the liver. They slide into one another as it were. What is now the spleen slips right through the liver, and comes out, in a certain respect, on the other side, appearing again in the hearing organisation. So too with the other organs. People say that proofs should be found for repeated Earth-lives. Well, the methods by which such proofs can be found have first to be created. Anyone who is able to observe the human head in the right way, possessing a sense for such observation, comes to a way of understanding the transformation of the lower man into the human head; but he cannot understand it without filling in the intermediate stages of the experiences between death and rebirth.

In this connection very remarkable things are experienced. It may perhaps astonish some of you when I say that an artist who has become well acquainted with our conception of the Universe, said: “All that Anthroposophy says is very beautiful, but there is no proof. De Rochas, for instance, has given proofs, for he has shown how in certain conditions of hypnosis, reminiscences of former earth-lives may arise.” It seemed to he very remarkable that an artist of all people should have said such a thing. I might have assured him that it is as though I were to say to him: “My dear friend, your pictures tell me nothing; show me first the original of them, then I will believe that they are good”, or something of the kind. That of course, would be nonsense. As soon as he leaves his own domain, however, he has no power to understand how out of what he has before him, out of the true form of the human head, one can arrive at what is expressed in this human head. The picture must speak through itself, not through the mere likeness to the original. The human head speaks for itself. It corresponds to reality. It is the transformed lower man and points us back to the former Earth-life. One must however first provide what will make it possible to understand the reality aright.

The physical is thus seen to be a direct expression of the Spiritual. It is possible to understand the physical man as an expression of the Spiritual which is experienced between death and re-birth. The physical world explains itself and brings the spiritual world into this explanation. But we must first know this, saying to ourselves: The phenomena of nature are only a half, as long as we have them as mere sense-phenomena. We must first know this. Then we can find the bridge and understand the event that gave Earth its true meaning—the event of Golgotha: then we can understand how a purely spiritual event can at the same time enter right into physical life. If a man is not prepared to see the relation of the physical to the spiritual aright, he will never be able to grasp the fact that the Event of Golgotha is both a spiritual Event and an Event of the physical plane. When in the eighth General Ecumenical Council, in the year 869, the Spirit was eliminated, it was made impossible to understand the Event of Golgotha. The interesting point is that while the Western Churches started from Christianity, they took great care that the essence of Christianity should not be understood. For the nature and essence of Christianity must be grasped by the Spirit. The Western creeds set themselves against the Spirit, and one of the principal reasons why Anthroposophy is prohibited from the Roman Catholic side is that in Anthroposophy we have to relinquish the erroneous statement that ‘man consists of soul and body’ and return to the truth that ‘man consists of body, soul and Spirit’. The prohibition indicates the interest taken on that side to prevent man from coming to the knowledge of the Spirit, and so arriving at the true significance of the Event of Golgotha. Thus the whole knowledge which, as we see, throws so much light on the understanding of Man, has been entirely lost.

How then is an educational science to be constructed for the humanity of today, when the vision of the true nature of Man has been lost? To be an educationalist means to solve those sublime riddles which the child propounds to us, as it gradually brings forth that which has been laid into it between death and re-birth. The creeds however, reckon only with the post-mortem life—in order to humour human egotism; they have not reckoned that human life on Earth should be regarded as a continuation of the heavenly life. To demand of man that he should prove himself worthy of the claim made on him before he entered earthly life through birth, requires a certain selflessness of view, whereas the creeds have chiefly reckoned with egotism up to the present. Here, in Anthroposophy, whatever is of the nature of creed or faith gains, as it were, a moral colouring. Here purely theoretical knowledge is made to flow out into the higher ethical view and conception of the Universe. This should be understood by the friends of Anthroposophy. They should understand that in a sense, a moral inclination to spirituality is the preliminary condition for a knowledge of spiritual beings. In our present difficult time, it is specially necessary that attention should be paid to this moral side of the nature of the conception of the Universe. If we glance at what is taking place in the external world, we must say that empty talk, which is the sister of falsehood, is what has resulted from materialism, even for the ethical experience of humanity. This would become stronger and stronger if humanity were not helped by knowledge which leads to the Spirit, and which must be united with a raising of man's inner moral sense. We ought to acquire a realisation of how a spiritual-scientific conception of the world stands to the tasks and the whole dignity of Man and we should take this feeling as a starting point of our knowledge. This is only too necessary to mankind today, and one would like to find new phrases, new forms of expression in which to describe this aspect of the task of Spiritual Science!

To understand the world without understanding Man is impossible. That is the net result to be derived from our studies here. And for that very reason I wish today to contribute a little more to the understanding of Man. Let us then start from the disparity between the organisation of the head and that of the limb man—a subject on which we have already frequently spoken here.

First of all I would remind you that the head-organisation, as it meets us in the life between birth and death, is the outcome of all those formative processes which have been undergone from the last death to the earthly embodiment of this present life. From this we must conclude that everything connected with the head-organisation does not, in its conformity to law, follow those rules and forces to which we are adapted as earthly beings. Through the bodily organisation which we receive in this particular incarnation we are adapted to Earth-life. We have spoken a little of how this is manifested. We complete one revolution, of taking nourishment and digesting it, every 24 hours. Thereby we are adjusted with respect to the cycle of nourishment and digestion to the movement of the Earth in 24 hours. Something is accomplished in us, as it were, resembling what takes place in the processes of the Earth within the Universe. Our head, however, we virtually bring with us in its organisation at birth; therefore the head is primarily adjusted not to earthly relationships, but to such as are really from beyond the Earth. The head therefore is in a peculiar position in relation to the rest of man. A comparison may serve to make clear the position of man's head during the early epochs of his Earth-life.

Suppose we were on board a ship. The ship makes various movements in different directions. If we have a compass, we see that the set of the magnetic needle does not follow the movement of the ship, but points always to the magnetic North Pole. It is independent of the movements of the ship. The ship's movements can indeed be themselves regulated by the constant position of the magnetic needle. In a sense it is the same with the human head. Man does many things in the physical world with the rest of his organism: the head in a sense has no part in what he does in earthly life. It is always organised with its inborn forces in accordance with the extra-earthly. It is a very important fact that we have in the human head something organised in this way for the extra-earthly. Nevertheless there is always an interaction between the organisation of the head and that of the rest of man. This interaction is only gradually brought to completion in the course of the time that passes between birth and death. The head, as we receive it from the super-earthly worlds at birth, is organised primarily for the life of ideation. It is in a sense so constructed that the life of ideas can use it as an instrument. If it were to develop only on the basis of the forces which it receives on leaving the super-earthly worlds, it would develop solely as an organ of ideation or thought; our connection with the world through the head-organisation would in course of time be entirely lost. We should, as it were, so pass through earthly life with our consciousness as to develop by means of the head ideas only—that is, no more than pictures of earthly life. We should become more and more conscious of extending beyond our organisation which is connected with the Earth-being, of extending beyond it with our head; as though through our head we were beings who were strange to the Earth and developed only pictures of all that is connected with earthly life.

This is not so, and precisely for the reason that the rest of the organism sends its forces into the head. If we enquire into the quality of these forces, which from childhood onwards are more and more directed from the rest of the organism into the head, if we wish to describe them, we must look for them particularly in the forces of the Will. The rest of the organism is continually impregnating the Thought-nature of the head with Will-forces. Thus we can say, in effect, speaking diagrammatically, that we acquire the head as the bearer of ideas, as the result of the foregoing incarnation; while the Will-forces are sent into it from the rest of the organism. What has just been said takes place not only in the life of soul, but shows its effects in the bodily life also.

As head-man we are born in this earthly world as beings of thought and ideation, and the forces of ideation are at first very powerful. They ray out from the head into the rest of the organism, and it is they which during the first seven years of life enable the forces which manifest in the second dentition to work out of the rest of our organism, these same forces consolidate in us also the life of Thought, which is not consolidated until we acquire the second teeth. They are the actual forces which produce the teeth; so that when we have the teeth, these forces are set free, and can assert themselves in the life of ideas. They can then form ideas, and in a corresponding way build the power of memory. Clearly outlined ideas can begin to find a place in our thought. As long however as we are employing the forces in the formation of the teeth, they cannot show themselves as true consolidating forces in the life of ideas.

As we grow beyond the seventh or eighth year, the Will which is essentially bound up with the lower man and not with the head, begins to manifest, and now comes the time when it would, as it were, shoot its forces up into the head. This cannot however come about so easily; for our head, which is organised for the extra-earthly, would not be able to receive these strong forces which the metabolic system, as vehicle of the Will, wishes to send forth to it. These forces must first be stemmed; they must make a halt until sufficiently filtered, toned down, given more of a ‘soul’ character, to make their influence felt in the head. This halt is made at the end of the second septennial period. When the Will-forces are arrested in the organisation of the larynx—for that is the way they manifest; in the male organisation they suddenly break forth in the change of voice. In the female organisation they manifest differently. These are the Will-forces coming to a standstill, as it were, before they reach the head. Thus we may say that at the end of our second septennial period, the Will-forces are arrested in the speech organisation. At that time they are sufficiently filtered and “souled” to make their influence felt in the head-organisation. Having reached the age of puberty, and the change of voice which runs parallel with it, we have reached the point when the faculty of thought and ideation can work together with the Will in the head.

Here we have an example of how with our Spiritual Science we can point concretely to events. The abstract philosophies which make their influence felt in modern times—Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea for instance—all remain in the abstract. Schopenhauer took pains to describe the world in its ideal character on the one hand, and its will character on the other; but he remains, as it were, in the mere abstract. So also does Eduard von Hartmann. They all remain in the abstract. To be concrete is to observe how, through these two halts—at the first and second septennial periods—in quite definite and distinct ways Idea and Will meet in the cosmic system of the human head. The essential thing is that we can point to that which is of the soul and spirit and show how it manifests and reveals itself in the outer physical world. So too, we see the forces of the head, which are sent forth to the body and manifest therein in the forming of the teeth, work together with the forces of the body sent to the head, which prepare themselves, by what they undergo in the formation of speech, to become true soul-will. In the formation of speech they are arrested and held back and only then do they press forward into the head.

Thus we must understand Man in his process of formation, and look at what actually goes on with him. I have said that the human head is no more adjusted to the earthly relations of man than is the magnetic needle to the movements of the ship. The needle is independent of them, and the human head is in the same way independent of the earthly connection.

Here we have something which gradually leads to the physiological concept of freedom. Here we have the physiology of what I have set forth in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, namely, that one can only understand freedom by grasping it in sense-free thinking—that is to say, in the processes taking place in man when he directs pure thinking by his Will and orientates it in accordance with certain defined directions.

We see how man comes step by step to study rightly the mutual relationship of the soul-and-spirit and the physical-corporeal, and how the process of speech-formation can be really understood by conceiving of it as a product of two sources from which the human being is supplied—the sources which are in the head-man on the one hand and in the limb-man on the other.

We can now experience more fully how impossible it is to say that some kind of communication of the will is carried from the brain through the motor nerves. The brain only derives its full power of volition from the rest of the organism. Of course you are not to imagine this as if you could draw it in a diagram, for the process of speech-formation not only was prepared earlier, but is something which goes through the whole of life and only appears in its most characteristic feature in the special time of transition. Thus we must understand clearly how man is adapted to an earthly as well as an extra-earthly life.

He is so adapted to earthly life that certain forces which the animal brings to their conclusion, man does not bring to a conclusion in his purely natural organisation. The animal is, as it were, born ready-equipped for all its functions. Man has to be taught to acquire these functions for himself. What thus takes place in man is really only an outer expression of something that takes place in him organically If we study the metabolism of the animal correctly, we find that it goes further than that of man. The metabolism of man must be held back at an earlier halting place. What in the animal is carried to a certain stage—must in man be arrested at an earlier stage. Superficially expressed, man does not carry digestion so far as the animal; the digestive process ceases earlier. He retains, through the arrested digestion, forces which become the vehicle for what he sends to the head through the Will.

As you see, human nature is complicated; and if one does not wish to take the trouble really to study its complications—why then, one arrives at a science such as we have in the external science of today! One does not arrive at the real nature of Man. The essential nature of Man will only be revealed when Spiritual Science is allowed to illuminate natural science. If however, it is with Man as I have described, and the connection between Man and the extra-human world outside him is as we have described it in these studies, then you will see that the extra-human world can only exist for Man if it has a certain resemblance to him, to his organisation. We have seen that as limb-men we are adapted to earthly relationships, but that through the head-organisation we have removed ourselves as it were out of earthly relations, like the ship's compass on the ship. Now something of this kind must take place also in the extra-human world. There must, for instance, be adaptation to the human limb-nature. Something must lift itself out beyond, there must be something that does not belong.

How does modern natural science study Man? It studies him as though he had no head. Of course it studies the head too, but how? As a kind of appendage to the rest of his organism. What natural science produces for the comprehension of human nature is only calculated to explain the part outside the head, not the human head itself; that must be explained from the spiritual world.

I might have used the following comparison. I might have said—I have already spoken of it recently—that the human head sits upon the rest of the human organism as people sit in a railway carriage. They take no personal part in the movement. They sit still and allow the carriage to move. In the same way, the human head sits at ease. It regards the rest of the organism which is adapted to the outer world, as its coach, and allows itself to be carried. It is itself organised for a very different world. And this is how it must be in the outer world also. A natural history of man, such as we have today, really speaks of a headless man, it does not understand his true nature at all. And an astronomy constructed on the same principles would not correspond to the whole extra-earthly world, but only to a certain part of it; the other part that is withdrawn from this main part, is not considered at all. As a matter of fact the trend of natural science for the last three or four centuries has been such that it has developed the movements of the Universe, disregarding a certain content of this Universe, just as the rest of natural science disregards the human head. Therefore astronomy has derived forms of movements such as ‘The Earth revolves in an elliptical path round the Sun’, which are as little correct for the Universe as the natural science of today is for the whole being of Man. They do not correspond to the actual facts. Hence we must so often point out that the Copernican view must be fructified by Spiritual Science. Many mystics, and theosophists too, are fond of preaching: ‘The world of senses around us is Maya.’ But they do not draw the ultimate logical conclusion, otherwise they would have to say: ‘Even the world of the Copernican system, this movement of the Earth around the Sun is maya, is an illusion, and must be revised.’ For we must realise that within it is something which can no more be recognised on the basis of the hypothesis employed by Copernicus, Galileo—or even Kepler—than the whole nature of Man can be understood from the principles of modern science.

Now when we come to treat of a subject like this, we must at the same time point to something which has already taken place in human evolution. If we call to mind what we have often said—that in olden times there was a kind of primeval wisdom of which man had but a dreamy atavistic consciousness, but which in its content far surpassed what we have since acquired—if we remember all this, we shall not find it difficult to bear in mind also that the idea of the world which was held in olden times was quite different from any cosmology possible today. For what was the cosmology of our forefathers—that is, of ourselves in our former Earth-lives? What was it?

The cosmology that man had in those times consisted far more than it does now in what man brought into the world at physical birth. We may still find in children, if we understand how to observe them aright, something like a picture of the world in which man lived before descending to physical life. In later life however, and indeed very early in later life, this picture vanishes. In olden times this picture endured. What existed in earlier epochs of spiritual evolution as an astronomical description of the solar or planetary system and its relation to man, was something man felt within him, although he experienced it in a dream-like state. Today we look back upon those times of our ancestors with a certain arrogance, yet they were times when we really knew there was something within ourselves that had connection with Mars, Mercury, and so on. That was part of the inner consciousness of the human being. It disappeared however as man developed further. In primeval times he saw only the outer constellation, but felt within himself an inner constellation, an inner cosmic system. Not only did he perceive a cosmic system outside him; but in his own head, which today is merely the vehicle of the—shall I say—indefinite life of ideas, there within, shone the Sun, with the planets circling round. In his head man carried this cosmic picture, and it had an inner force which worked upon the rest of the organism and influenced what he received at birth, or rather at conception, from the Earth-forces; that too was influenced, so that the rest of man was also drawn into this adaptation to the planetary forces.

And now we can carry the thought a little further. Man is born into this world, and as a heritage he receives—let us say—in the first place, the power to acquire his teeth, the milk-teeth. These are completed approximately in the circle of the first year. The second teeth need seven times as long; they are brought forth by the human organism itself. This points in the deepest sense to the fact that a certain rhythm which we bring with us at birth and which relates to the yearly revolution is slowed down by seven times in our earthly life. By seven times is the yearly revolution slowed down, and this is expressed in the fact that man has introduced into his division of time the relation of one to seven—day and week. The week is seven times as long as the day. This is an expression of how something takes its course in man which goes seven times slower than what he brings into physical existence at birth. Man will not understand the actual processes in the human being until he is able to see quite clearly and exactly how something within him which, as it were, was brought in from conditions outside the Earth, has to be slowed down by seven times during the earthly period.

The ancient Mystery teaching spoke much of these facts. If I were to express in our language what the old Mystery teachings—the ancient Hebrew Mystery teaching, for example—said from their atavistic knowledge of these matters, I should have to put it in this way.—The old Hebrew teachers explained to their pupils: Jehovah, who is the true Earth God, who added the Earth-organisation to that of Saturn, Sun and Moon—Jehovah has the tendency to slow down seven times what comes from the Moon-organisation. In relation to the course of the Earth something in the human being wants to go at accelerated speed. I might even say that the old Hebrew Mystery teacher said to his pupils: Lucifer runs seven times as fast as Jehovah. This points to two movements, two currents in human nature. These two currents also exist in extra-earthly nature—only there they are present in a somewhat different form. The thought however, which we here approach, is one not very easy to understand. We can perhaps gain insight into it by starting from social relationships, and then coming back to the cosmic-tellurian relationships.

I have often spoken in public lectures of something I should like to express here. When we contemplate the misery of the present time, we find the peculiar fact that the whole intelligence of modern humanity has developed in a way that is quite estranged from reality. It is a peculiar fact that, in practical life, we find more inefficient people than efficient. This is patent, for instance, as I have shown, in the fact that in the nineteenth century there was much discussion concerning the effect of the gold-standard upon international economic relations. You can go through the Parliamentary reports of that century, and try to form an idea from them of what people then thought would be the result of mono-metalism, the gold-standard. They regarded it as something which would make free trade possible unhindered by imposition of duty. Throughout the united economic domains of the world this was predicted wherever the gold-standard was extolled. What has actually come about? The imposition of duty. Little by little the actual relations have developed in such a way that everywhere duties have been imposed. That is the actual outcome.

Judging superficially one might say: Well, those people must have been very stupid! But they were not at all stupid; among those who had pledged themselves to the promotion of free trade by the gold-standard, were very able and clever persons, but they had no sense of reality, they reckoned only according to logic. They could not dive into the true relationships, any more than can our modern scientists comprehend the organisation of the heart, liver, spleen and so on. They make abstract theories and hold on to them; although they are materialists they remain rooted in the abstract. That is why such an occurrence is possible as that related in the following anecdote, which is founded on fact and is really very illuminating.

In a certain Academy of science there was a physiologist, a learned man, who developed a theory as to the varying length of time particular birds can fast. He made out a beautiful schedule. He had large cages of birds placed in his corridor and he starved those birds to ascertain how long they could live without food. He registered the times and obtained some lovely big numbers as a result. He elaborated these in a paper which he read at an Academical Meeting. Now in the same house there lived on the floor above another physiologist who did not apply the same methods. After the learned treatise had been read, he rose and said: ‘I must unfortunately object that these figures are not correct, for I had such pity on the poor birds that I fed them in passing.’ Now things do not always have to happen just like this! This is an anecdote. But it is founded on fact; and really much of the material underlying our exact science has been obtained in a like way. Someone in the background has ‘fed the birds’ instead of their having starved as long as the schedule showed. If one has a sense for reality, one cannot very well work with statistical methods of that kind; they do not hold out much promise. But this sense for reality is wholly lacking in modern humanity. Why is this so? It is due to a certain necessity of the evolution of humanity; and we can understand the matter as follows:

Picture it to yourselves in this way. The man of ancient times looked into this outer world. By means of all that he bore within him, he viewed the relationships and connections of the world outside. He formed also his theory of the stars from out of his own inner stellar system. He had ‘a sense for reality’ and he carried it in his senses. This sense for reality has disappeared in the course of man's evolution. It will have to be developed again, it will have to be developed to the same degree inwardly as it formerly was outwardly. We must really cultivate this sense for reality in our inner being by the training we receive in Spiritual Science; only then shall we be able to develop it in the world outside. If man were to keep straight on in the path in which he has been evolving with modern intellectuality, he would at length be quite unable to perceive what is going on around him, and then it could easily happen that while the cry is heard, ‘Free Trade is coming!’ in reality it will be Customs restrictions that are being established. This is continually happening in the various domains of so-called practical life. What happened then in a big thing happens today in small things everywhere. The ‘practical’ man predicts one thing, the opposite happens. It would be interesting to keep an account of what ‘practical’ men have predicted as ‘certain to happen’ during the last years of the war. Always the opposite came about, especially in the later years, precisely because there was no longer any sense for reality among the people. This sense however, can arise in no other way than by developing it first within. In future times no one will be considered a practical man or a thinker attuned to reality, who disdains to educate himself in his inner being through Spiritual Science, in a manner that cannot be done through the outer world today. We must carry into the world outside what we develop within. Hence the necessity for Spiritual Science; for people cannot arrive at the relation of the heart to the liver if they do not first acquire the method for it by means of a training in Spiritual Science. In earlier times people could say: the heart is related to the liver somewhat as the Sun to Mercury in the outer world; and man knew something of how this relationship of Sun to Mercury was drawn from the super-sensible world into the sense world. This is now no longer understood, nor can it ever be thoroughly understood if the foundation, the basic impulse for this comprehension, be not acquired from within. It is not through clairvoyance alone that man can make it his own. By clairvoyance the facts of Spiritual Science are investigated; but man acquires this sense when he enters with his whole thought and feeling into what has already been discovered by clairvoyant methods, and regulates his life accordingly. That is the essential point. What is of moment is to study the conclusions of Spiritual Science, not to satisfy a curiosity for clairvoyance. That must be emphasised again and again. For in the whole development of human culture, this application of the methods of Spiritual Science to outer life and to the knowledge of the great world, the world outside man, is of quite special importance.

When we consider what we thus have to look upon as the original head-organisation, when we consider it in the course of our life, we see how it gradually becomes permeated with all in our organisation that is adapted to the world outside. Thus we must learn to understand the world outside man from man's own organism, from the human limb-organisation; and there, only such things as I have already hinted at can help us. I have shown the contrast that exists between the waking and sleeping conditions of man. These are contrasting conditions, and when one condition is passing over into the other, that is to say, when we wake up and when we go to sleep, then we pass through a zero-point of our existence. The moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep must have something to do with one another.

This indicates that if we try to turn the day-course of man into a geometrical figure, we can employ neither a circle nor an ellipse; for if we were to ascribe to the sleep condition one part of the ellipse, the conditions of awaking and falling asleep should fall apart; and this they cannot do. We shall see how even in outer appearance they present a similarity; they cannot fall apart. Thus we cannot draw the geometrical figure which is to correspond with man's daily round in a circular form nor in an elliptic form. We can only draw it as a looped line, a lemniscate. When we say: Man falls asleep out of the waking condition into the sleep condition, then with the lemniscate it is possible to show him coming out of sleep again through the same condition; and we have a curve, a line which truly corresponds to the daily course of human life. There is no other line for the daily course of life than the lemniscate, for no other line would lead the awaking through the same point as the falling asleep.

There is more than this. If we give attention to human evolution in childhood especially, we have to say: we wake up virtually the same as we went to sleep. We wake up the same in respect of the principal alternating conditions of

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waking and sleeping. But if we rightly observe life, we cannot exclude the sleeping condition from human life as a whole. We instruct our children during the day. Out of all we bring to the child, much of it is not his at once, but becomes so only the next day, after the Ego and astral body have passed through the night-condition; only then does the child duly receive what we have given him by day. We must always have this in mind and regulate our teaching and education accordingly. Thus in regard to the alternating condition of day and night, we can say: we sleep, and on awaking come to the same place where we fell asleep; but in regard to human evolution, we shall have to say: we press forwards a little. We progress in another direction.

Hence we may not draw the line quite as a lemniscate; but in such a way that we come out a little further on, and so attain a progressive lemniscate. (A).

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Thus when we observe the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, and continue the evolution, we obtain a spiral. This spiral is ultimately connected with our evolution, and our evolution again is connected with the whole cosmic system. Therefore we must seek this same line as the basis of the movements of the Universe. If, instead of abstract geometry, man had applied concrete geometry to celestial space, the concrete geometry that proceeds from a study of the whole man, he would have arrived at something different. For in the ancient wisdom one had this line (A). And one did not speak of Mars as moving along any other kind of line than this one. Gradually it was all forgotten. Man calculated instead of knowing. What was the result? It was a line which goes forward like this (B). But in that line one can get no further.

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So man took this line and set circles upon it (C) and acquired the epicycloid theory.

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The Ptolemaic theory is the last remnant of the old primeval wisdom. On its foundation Copernicus made a further simplification, and modern astronomy still speculates on that today—but in such a way that it much prefers to consider ellipses and circles than that inwardly curving line which presents a continuous spiral. Then people wonder that the observations do not agree with the calculations, and that fresh corrections have to be made continually.

Reflect how the whole theory of Relativity has been constructed on an error in Mercury's time of rotation. Only, the correction was attempted in a different way than would have been the case if one had gone back to Man's relation to the whole Cosmos. Of this more in the next lecture.

I drew attention yesterday to the fact that what is present in man points to something correspondingly present in the Cosmos outside him. What we have now to notice especially in man is the relation of the head to a world beyond the Earth—a world that lies outside the world upon which the rest of the human organism is dependent. The head points clearly to the world through which we passed between death and rebirth, its whole organisation being so modeled that it forms a distinct echo of our sojourn in the spiritual world. Now let us look for the corresponding phenomenon in the Cosmos.

We need only compare the behaviour of Saturn, who stands far out in the Universe, with that of the Earth, to notice a certain difference. Astronomy recognises this difference by saying that Saturn goes round the Sun in 30 years, the Earth in one year. We will not now stop to discuss whether these assertions are correct or whether they show a superficial view. We will only point to the fact that the observation which can be gained by following Saturn in cosmic space and comparing the rapidity of his progress with that of the Earth, brings us to the conclusion that according to the astronomical system of Copernicus and Kepler, Saturn needs 30 years and the Earth only one year, in which to go round the Sun. Looking at Jupiter, we assign to him a revolution lasting 12 years. Much shorter is that of Mars. And when we come to the other planets, Venus and Mercury, we find that they have even shorter periods of rotation than the Earth. All these conclusions are obviously well thought out, worked out on the basis of observations made in one way or another.

I have pointed out that we only gain a clear insight into these things by comparing what takes place in the far distances of cosmic space with what goes on within the boundary of our skin, in our own organism. Reflect for a moment and you will find that what is called the period of rotation of the Earth round the Sun, corresponds to something in yourself. In the foregoing lecture we showed that in order to represent the daily series of events, we have to use a certain curve, a certain line that turns back upon itself. In a similar way must the curved line corresponding to the yearly motion of the Earth be imagined. It is quite immaterial whether man's view is that the movement of the Earth is at the same time a movement round the Sun or no; for what have we here? Let us think. We have our own daily cycle of life, which we will consider now, not in its correspondence to the Cosmos, but as it presents itself in man, so that we can also include those whose sleeping and waking do not correspond with the alternation of day and night—idlers as well as all those who do not live by rule! Let us consider this daily round of man on the basis already established, that is to say, representing it in thought as a line in which the points of sleeping and waking lie upon one another, as I have pointed out. There are many reasons, but one will suffice for an unprejudiced judgement to understand that we are bound to place the point of waking over that of falling asleep. Consider the remarkable fact that when we look back over our life, it appears to us as an unbroken stream. We do not feel compelled to regard life in such a way as to say: Today I have lived and have been conscious of my environment from the moment of waking; before that all was darkness; before that again, my falling asleep of yesterday was preceded by life, I lived again, back to the moment of waking; but then darkness again. You do not picture the stream of memory like this, you picture it so that the moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep really unite in your conscious recollection. That is a plain fact. This fact can be expressed in that the curve representing the daily round in man comes out as a spiral, with the point of awaking always crossing the point of falling asleep. If the curve were an ellipse or a circle, then awaking and falling asleep would have to be separate, they could not possibly be joined. In this way alone therefore can we picture the daily round of man.

Now let us try to see exactly what this means in man himself. Your waking time runs from your awaking to your falling asleep. During that time you are a physical human being, and you are moreover a complete human being, possessing physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Now consider your condition from falling asleep until awaking. Then you have only physical body and etheric body. You are physical man, but you are not man; you have only physical body and etheric body. Strictly speaking, such a thing should not be. Your physical body and etheric body become really an untruth, for a being so composed should be a plant. It is the remainder of the whole man, left behind when the Ego and astral body have gone away; and only by virtue of the fact that these will return before the physical and etheric bodies can actually reach the plant stage—it is only because of this that you do not die every night.

Now let us examine what is left lying on the bed. What happens with it? It suddenly becomes of the nature of the plant. Its life is comparable to what takes place on Earth from the moment when plants sprout in spring until the autumn, when they die down. The plant-nature springs up and puts forth leaf in man, so to say, from falling asleep to awaking. He is then like the Earth in summer; and when the Ego and astral body return and man awakes, he becomes like the Earth in winter. So that we may say that the time between awaking and falling asleep is our winter, and that between falling asleep and awaking is our summer. For the year of the Cosmos—in so far as the Earth is part of it—corresponds with man's day. The Earth wakes in winter and sleeps in summer. The summer is the Earth's sleeping time, the winter her waking time. Outer perception obviously gives a false analogy, presenting summer as the Earth's waking time and winter as her time of sleeping. The reverse is the case, for during sleep we resemble the blossoming, sprouting plant-life; like the Earth in summer. When our Ego and astral body re-enter our physical and etheric bodies, it is as though the summer sun withdrew from the plant-laden Earth and the winter sun began to work. Thus the whole year is at different times represented in any one part of the Earth's surface. The case of the Earth is different from that of the individual man, but only apparently so. In respect to the Earth, in whichever part of it we may dwell, a year's course corresponds to the daily course of the individual man. The course of a year in the Cosmos corresponds to a man's day.

Thus we have the direct fact that when we look up to the Cosmos, we have to say: A year—that is for the Cosmos sleeping and waking; and if our Earth is the head of the Cosmos, it expresses in winter the waking of the Cosmos, and in summer its sleeping. If we now consider the Cosmos, which as we see manifests waking and sleeping—for the plant-covering of the Earth is an outcome of cosmic working—we shall find that we have to think of it as a great organism. We must think of what takes place in its members as organically fitted into the whole Cosmos, just as what takes place in one of our own members is fitted into our organism. And here we come to the significance of the difference expressed by astronomy in the shorter periods of Venus' and Mercury's revolutions as compared with the longer periods of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. When we consider the so-called outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, then the Sun, Mercury, Venus and the Earth, we find this apparently long period of revolution in the case of the outer planets stretching beyond a year, thus beyond the mere waking time. Let us consider Saturn with his 30-year period, the apparent time of his revolution round the Sun; how can we express his 30 years in the language of the Cosmos according to which its daily revolution is a year? If a year is the daily revolution of the Cosmos, then the so-called period of Saturn's revolution is approximately 30 days, a cosmic month, a cosmic four weeks. Thus we may say that if we regard Saturn as the outermost planet (the other two, Uranus and Neptune, regarded today as of equal standing with Saturn, are really fugitives that have wandered in), then we must say that Saturn bounds our Cosmos; and, in his apparent slowness, in his limping behind the Earth, we behold the life of the Cosmos in 4 weeks or a month, as compared to the life it displays in the course of the year, which for the Cosmos is like a falling asleep and awaking.

From this it may be seen that Saturn, if his apparent path is regarded as the outermost limit of our planetary system, is inwardly related to it in a different way from, let us say Mercury; Mercury needing less than 100 days for his apparent revolution, moves quickly, he is active inwardly, he has a certain celerity; whereas Saturn moves slowly.

To what exactly does this correspond? In the movement of Saturn you have something comparatively slow, in that of Mercury something that is very much quicker, an inner activity of the cosmic organism, something that stirs the Cosmos inwardly. It is as if you had, let us say, a kind of living, mucilaginous organism, itself revolving, but having besides within it an organ which is revolving more quickly. Mercury separates itself from the movement of the whole by its quicker revolution. It is, as it were, an enclosed member; so too is the movement of Venus. Here we have something analogous to the relation of the head in man to the rest of his organism. The head separates itself off from the movements of the rest of the organism. Venus and Mercury emancipate themselves from the movement set by Saturn. They go their own way; they vibrate in the whole system. What does this signify? They have something extra as compared with the whole system; their more rapid movement shows this. What is the corresponding thing to this extra in our head? Our head has something extra, namely its co-ordination to the super-sensible world; only, our head is at rest in our organism, just as we are at rest in a coach or a railway carriage, while it is moving. Venus and Mercury act differently; they do the exact opposite as regards their emancipation. Whereas our head is quiescent, like we are when we sit still in a railway carriage, Venus and Mercury emancipate themselves from the whole planetary system in the opposite way. It is as though we, sitting in the railway carriage, were impelled by something to move all the time much faster than the railway train itself. This is due to the fact that Venus and Mercury, which show a much quicker apparent movement, are related on their past not to space alone, but to that to which our head is also related; only these relations take opposite courses—our head being brought to rest, Venus and Mercury on the other hand becoming more active. They are the two planets through which our planetary system has a relation to the super-sensible world. They incorporate our planetary system into the Cosmos in a different way than do Jupiter and Saturn. Our planetary system is spiritualised through Venus and Mercury, more intimately adapted to the spiritual Powers than happens through Jupiter and Saturn.

Things that are real often appear quite differently when studied in accordance with true reality instead of in accordance with generally received opinion. Just as, when we judge externally, we call winter the sleeping time of the Earth, and summer her waking time, whereas it is the reverse; in the same way, judging externally, Saturn and Jupiter might be regarded as more spiritual than Venus and Mercury. This is not the case; for Venus and Mercury stand in more intimate relation to something behind the whole Cosmos than do Jupiter and Saturn. Thus we may say that in Venus and Mercury we have something which places us outwardly, as a member of the planetary system, in relation to a super-sensible world. Here, while we live, we are brought into connection with a super-sensible world through Venus and Mercury. We might say: When we are incorporated by birth into the physical world, we are carried into it by Saturn and Jupiter; while we live from birth to death, Venus and Mercury work within us and prepare us to carry our super-sensible part back again through death into the super-sensible world. In fact, Mercury and Venus have just as much share in our immortality after death as Jupiter and Saturn have in our life before death. It is really so, we have to see something in the Cosmos which corresponds to the relation between the comparatively more spiritual organisation of the head and the rest of the human organisation.

Now let us suppose that Saturn pursues his movement also in a like curve (lemniscate)—only, of course, his path is different through cosmic space—with the 30 times less rapid movement than the Earth; if we picture these two curves, we must realise that each Cosmic body which follows such a path (lemniscate) is obviously moved in this path by forces, but each one by forces of a different kind. Then we come to an idea which is extremely important and which, if taken rightly, will probably at once strike you as true. If it does not, it is only because, under the influence of the materialism of the last centuries, people are not accustomed to connect such things with the facts of the Universe.

To the modern materialistic view of the Cosmos, Saturn is observed merely as a body moving about in cosmic space; and the same with the other planets. This is not the case; for if we take Saturn, the outermost Planet of our Universe, we must represent him as the leader of our planetary system in cosmic space. He directs our system in space. He is the body for the outermost force which leads us round in the lemniscate in cosmic space. He is the driver and the horse at the same time. Saturn is thus the force in the outermost periphery. Were he alone to work, we should continually move in a lemniscate. But there are other forces in our planetary system which show a more intimate adjustment to the spiritual world—the forces that we find in Mercury and Venus. Through these forces our path is continually raised. Thus, when we look upon the path from above, we have the lemniscate, but when we look at it from the other side, we obtain lines which are continually rising upwards; there is a progression.

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This progression corresponds in man to the fact that during sleep what we have taken into us, though it may not pass over at once into consciousness, is elaborated; during sleep we work upon it. It is principally during sleep that we work on what we have absorbed through our life, our training and education. During sleep Mercury and Venus communicate that to us. They are our most important night-planets, as Jupiter and Saturn are our most important day-planets. Hence the old instinctive atavistic wisdom was right in connecting Jupiter and Saturn with the formation of the human head, Mercury and Venus with the formation of the human trunk, with the rest of the organism. These things arose from an intimate knowledge of the connection between man and the Universe.

Now I will ask you carefully to consider the following. It is first of all necessary to understand from inner grounds the movement of the Earth. We must recognise the influence upon it of the Venus and Mercury forces, which themselves bear the lemniscate on further, so that it progresses, and its axis becomes itself a lemniscate. We have thus for the Earth an extremely complicated movement. And now I come to what I wish to point out. Suppose we have to draw this movement. Astronomy tries to do so. Astronomy wants to have a planetary system; it wants to draw the solar system and explain it by calculation. Planets such as Venus and Mercury, however, have relation to the extra-spatial, the super-sensible, the spiritual, to that which does not originally belong in space, but has, as it were, come into it. Thus if you have the paths of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and, in the same space, draw in also the paths of Mercury and Venus, you will get at most a projection of the Mercury or of the Venus orbit, but in no sense the orbits themselves. If we employ the three-dimensional space to sketch in the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, we come at most to a boundary, where we get something like a path of the Sun. But if we wish to draw the others, we can no longer do so in the three-dimensional space, we can only get shadow-pictures of these other movements in it; we cannot draw the path of Venus and that of Saturn in the same space. From this we see that all delineations of the solar system where the same space is used for Saturn as for Venus, are only approximate, they do not suffice for a solar system. Such drawings are as little possible as it would be to explain the whole being of man according to purely natural forces only. This shows why no solar system is adequate. A non-astronomer such as Johannes Schlaf could easily prove to quite well-established astronomers the impossibility of their solar system by very simple facts, pointing out that if the Sun and the Earth are so related that the latter revolves round the former, the Sun-spots could not show themselves as they do, the Earth being at one time behind the Sun, at another in front, and then going round it again. That, however, is in no wise the case. No drawing of our solar system that is inscribed into one space of the ordinary three dimensions will be right. We must understand this. Just as in the case of man, in order to understand him as a whole we must pass from physical to super-sensible forces; so in the same way, to understand the solar-system, we must pass from the three dimensions into other dimensions. That is to say, we cannot delineate the ordinary solar system in the three-dimensional space. Planetary ‘globes’ and so forth we have to look at in this way: If here we have Saturn on the globe and there Mercury, then it is not the true Mercury but its shadow only, its projection.

These are things that must be brought to light by Spiritual Science. They have quite disappeared. About six or seven centuries before the Christian era, the ancient primeval wisdom began gradually to disappear, until replaced by Philosophy from the middle of the fifteenth century. But men such as Pythagoras, for instance, still knew so much of the ancient wisdom that they could say: We dwell on the Earth, we belong through the Earth to a cosmic system, to which Jupiter and Saturn also belong; but if we remain in these three dimensions, then we shall not belong in the same way to Venus and Mercury. We cannot belong to the two latter directly, as we do to Saturn and Jupiter; but if our Earth is in one space with Saturn and Jupiter, there must be a ‘counter-Earth’ which is in another space with Venus and Mercury. Hence ancient astronomers spoke of the Earth and the counter-Earth. Of course the modern materialist would say: “Counter-Earth? I see nothing of that!” He is like a person who weighs a man, having first charged him to think about nothing, and weighs him again when he has charged him to think a specially clever thought, and then says: I have weighed him, but I have not found the weight of his thought. Materialism rejects what has no weight or cannot be seen. Remarkable things however shine out of the atavistic primeval wisdom to which we can return by the inner vision of Spiritual Science. It is of urgent necessity that we should work our way through now to that which is entirely new and which has yet been on Earth all the time, and has only now in these days to be acquired in full consciousness. Unless we do, this we shall lose the very possibility of thinking.

I called attention yesterday to the fact that in social thought men strive for mono-metalism for the sake of free trade-and Protection comes! No true social order will arise out of what is being striven for on the foundation the thinking man possesses To-day; a true social order can only come about through a thinking trained in a science which does not draw a planisphere showing Saturn and Venus in the same space. For the view of the Universe which we are giving here does not merely mean that we hold something up before us, but also that, in a sense, we learn to think. What exactly does this mean?

Remember what I have said: When our bodily organisation is remodeled in the next incarnation, it not only goes through a change, but is turned inside out; as a glove is turned from a left-hand to a right-hand glove by turning it inside out so too what is now inside—liver, heart, kidneys—becomes the outer sense-organs, eye, ear and so on. It is all turned inside out. This corresponds to another turning inside out: Saturn on the one side, and wholly outside his space, Venus and Mercury. A reversal in itself. If we do not observe this, what happens? It is the same, when we do not observe the turning inside out in the case of the human head, or when we do not observe the Universe under this law of reversal; we do something very peculiar. We do not in that case think with our head at all. And this is something to which the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is tending, in so far as it is descending and not seeking to ascend again by means of Spiritual Science. Man would like to wrest his head free and think only with the rest of the organism; that mode of thought is abstract. He wants to set free the head. He has no desire to lay claim to what has resulted from the foregoing incarnations. He wants to reckon only with the present one. Not only do men wish to deny the theory of successive Earth-lives, but carrying their head as it were with external dignity, they would like to set it as lord over the rest of the organism, they would have it like a man riding in a carriage. And they do not take that rider in the carriage in earnest; they carry him about with them, but make no claim upon his innate capacities. They make no practical use of their repeated Earth-lives.

This tendency has virtually been developing ever since the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, and we can only oppose it by adopting Spiritual Science. One might even define Spiritual Science as that which brings man to take his head in earnest once more! From one point of view the essential part in Spiritual Science is really that it takes the human head in earnest, not merely regarding it as an addition to the rest of the organism. Europe especially, as it so rapidly approaches barbarism, would like to free the head. Spiritual Science must disturb this sleep. It must make its appeal to humanity: ‘Use your heads!’ This can only be done by taking the belief in repeated Earth-lives seriously.

One cannot talk of Spiritual Science in the way that is usually done, if one takes it in earnest. One must say what is; and to what is belongs something which appears as sheer madness, belongs the fact that men disown their heads. They would rather not believe this, they prefer to regard truth as madness. This has always been so. Things in human evolution come about in such a way that men are taken unawares by the new.

And so they must of course be shocked and astonished by this emphasis on the necessity for using the head. Lenin and Trotsky say: Do not use your head, act for the rest of your organism. The rest of the organism is the vehicle of the instincts. Men are to be led by instincts alone. And they carry it out. It is their practice that nothing that arises from the human head should enter the modern Marxist theories. These things are very serious—how serious they are has to be emphasised again and again.

You will remember that I have discussed in detail how much criticism has come from many sides of the idea of a connection between the Christ Event, the appearance of Christ on Earth, and Cosmic events such as the course of the Sun, or the relation of the Sun to the Earth. The connection can only be understood when one studies more deeply all that we have hitherto said as to the movements of the stellar system. Let us make a beginning in this direction today, for you will see that ultimately astronomy cannot really be studied at all without entering into a study of the whole being of Man. I have already mentioned this, but we shall see how deeply grounded is the statement in the whole being of the world, for we can only understand something of the nature of the world or of the nature of Man when we consider the two together, not separately, as is done at present. You will observe a curious fact in relation to this very matter, namely, that materialism, if only it is not directly acknowledged to be such, is preferred by the religious denominations to Spiritual Science. That is, both Protestants and Roman Catholics prefer to consider the outer world in its various realms in a materialistic sense, rather than to enquire how the Spiritual works in the world and presents itself in material phenomena. In confirmation of this you need only consider the Jesuits' views of Natural Science. These are strictly materialistic; from their point of view the outer world, the Cosmos, is only to be understood in the light of quite materialistic interpretations. The utmost care has been taken to protect in this way a certain form of faith, which has been cultivated since the Council held in Constantinople in 869—to protect it by keeping external science on the level of materialism. Of course in the widest circles, illusions have arisen through the apparent conflict with materialism even in scientific realms. This however is only apparent, for it does not matter whether one says that there is spirit somewhere, or whether one denies spirit altogether, if the material world itself is not explained spiritually.

You know perhaps that the acme of modern interpretation of external nature is Astro-physics, the theory that sets out to study the material starry world, to establish the material unity of the world accessible to the senses. Now one of the greatest Astro-physicists is a Roman Jesuit, Father Secchi. There is no difficulty in standing on the ground of modern material science and at the same time adhering to this shadow of religious belief. This means that as a matter of fact, a materialistic interpretation of the heavens stands nearer today to the religious creeds, and especially to one of the Jesuit persuasion, than does Spiritual Science, for this particular creed is especially concerned not to explain the world by showing the relation of the material to the spiritual. The spiritual must form the content of an independent form of belief in which nothing is said of the scientific study of the Universe; the latter is to remain materialistic, for the moment it ceases to be so it would have to go into what relates to the spiritual—it would have to speak of spirit.

What has just been said must be taken seriously, otherwise we should overlook the significant fact that the Jesuit scientists are the most extreme materialists in the domain of Natural Science. They continually allege that Man cannot approach the spiritual by research into Nature, and they take trouble to keep the spiritual as far removed as possible from such research. This can be traced even in Father Wasmann's studies of ants.

After these preliminary remarks, let us recall an important fact which apparently takes its course entirely in the spiritual world, but which, when we consider this part of our argument more closely, will make clear to us a parallel phenomenon between spiritual life and the life of the external starry world. As you know, we divide the post-Atlantean time into epochs of civilisation, naming the first the old Indian, the second the old Persian, the third the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian, the fourth the Graeco-Latin; and then there is the fifth, in which we now live, beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century. A sixth will follow this, and so forth. I have frequently shown how the fourth epoch began in the continuous stream of the post-Atlantean time, about the year 747 BC., and ceased—speaking roughly, I always say about the middle of the fifteenth century, but to speak more accurately, it really ended in the year AD. 1413. That was the fourth; and we are now in the fifth.

If we thus consider the succession of civilisations, we can describe their characteristics, bearing in mind the descriptions given in Occult Science. Thus we can describe the Graeco-Latin, in which the Event of Golgotha occurred, but in doing so we need not refer to that Event, for we can describe the epoch by connecting it with the preceding one. It is possible to describe the successive epochs in their fundamental nature, and to have an epoch from 747 BC. to AD. 1413 so running its course that nothing in history shows that during this time an important event occurs. Let us recall the time of the occurrence of the Event of Golgotha, remembering all we know concerning the civilisations of the most advanced people of the time—the Greek, the Roman and the Latin. Let us reflect that to these people the Event of Golgotha was an unknown affair. It occurred in a small corner of the world, and the first mention of its effects is to be found in Tacitus, the Roman historian, one hundred years later. It was not observed by its contemporaries, least of all by the most cultured.

Thus the fact comes into evidence in the historical stream of evolution that there was no necessity inherent in the regular progress of the evolution of mankind from the first three epochs of civilisation to the fourth, that the Event of Golgotha should take place. This fact should receive close attention. The Event actually took place 747 years after the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period. In trying to understand the Event of Golgotha, we may say that it gave purpose and meaning to the life of the Earth, that the Earth would not have had this meaning if evolution had simply gone on as the outcome of the first, second and third post-Atlantean epochs. The Event of Golgotha came as an intervention from other worlds. This fact is not sufficiently considered. In modern times several historians have alluded to it, but they have not been able to make anything of it. In fact, history practically omits the Event of Golgotha. At most the historians describe the influence of Christianity in the successive post-Christian centuries, but the actual intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha itself is not described in an ordinary course of history. It would indeed be difficult to describe it, if one kept to the ordinary methods of history. Certainly remarkable men—oddly enough, clergy among them—have attempted to explain the causes of the Event of Golgotha. Pastor Kalthoff, for instance, and many others. Pastor Kalthoff tried to explain Christianity from the consciousness and the economic conditions of the last centuries preceding the appearance of Christ. But what did this explanation amount to? In effect it said: People lived in certain economic conditions, and eventually the idea of Christ arose, the dream of Christ, as it were, the ideology of Christ; and from these arose Christology. It arose in humanity only as an idea. People like Paul, and a few others, described what had thus arisen as an idea as though it had occurred as a fact in a remote corner of the world!—Such explanations mean a doing-away with Christianity. It is a noteworthy phenomenon of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that Christian pastors should set themselves the task of saving Christianity, by eliminating Christ. People were ashamed to admit the facts of the rise of Christianity outright. They found it more satisfactory to explain the rise of Christology, to explain it simply as an idea. Various streams of thought found their way into this domain, and one special province of science has become remarkable in this connection, arising in the materialistic stream of culture which reached its culminating point in Marxism. Thus Kalthoff is a kind of Marxist Pastor who tries to explain Christology out of a sort of pious Marxism. Others have ridden other hobby horses in seeking an explanation for the phenomenon of Christianity; why then should not each explain Christianity or explain Christ Jesus, according to his own fancy? A psychiatrist explains Christ according to psychiatry, simply by saying that the way in which Christ appeared in His time can be explained today from the standpoint of psychiatry as due to an abnormal consciousness. This is no isolated case. And these are phenomena which must not be disregarded, otherwise we do not see what is happening at the present time, for they are signs of present day life as a whole. We must clearly recognise that which has given the Earth a meaning, was an intervention from another world. We must distinguish two streams in human evolution, which indeed run side by side today, but only met for the first time at the beginning of our era. One is the Christian stream, which was added to the continuous current from olden times. Natural Science, for instance, has not yet accepted the Event of Golgotha and flows on in the continuous stream as though that Event had never occurred. Spiritual Science must endeavour to bring natural scientific study and Christology into harmony; for where has Christology any place if the Kant-Laplace theory holds sway and we look back to a primeval mist out of which everything has been formed? Would Christianity ultimately have any real world-significance for Man on Earth if the stars were regarded as they are by Father Secchi? For the starry heavens are regarded by him materialistically, not as though an Event of Golgotha had been born from out of them. And that becomes the chief ground for leaving it to other powers to say how Man should think of the Event of Golgotha. If Man can develop nothing from Cosmic knowledge concerning the Event, some other source must be found to tell him what he ought to think of it, and it is obvious that Rome is that source. All these things are so consistently—in a sense, so grandly—thought out, that it is inexcusable to be under any illusions about them at the present difficult and fateful time.

These 747 years fall in the world's evolution as a period which speaks with the utmost significance. It tells us of all that is connected with the old evolution, all that recalls, and is related to the past periods of time. The new beginning commenced at the end of this epoch, 747 years after, let us say, the founding of Rome—which was really 747, not the point of time given in the ordinary history books.

Here we have a fresh start, and if we now go back and take the periods of time, we shall have to say that everywhere we must add fresh turning-points of time to those already rightly assigned. An entirely new division of the course of time was brought about by the Event of Golgotha's falling in this period, inserted into human evolution from outside, as it were. We must clearly realise the existence of these two streams in world evolution in so far as Man is involved in it. If we hold fast to this we can now see something more.

We know that according to the view of ordinary astronomy, the Moon moves round the Earth. (In reality she does not do this as generally as described; she too describes a lemniscate; but for the moment we will disregard this.) The Moon moves round the Earth. While so doing she also revolves around herself. I have already explained this. She is a polite lady and always turns the same side to us, her back is always turned away from the Earth. Not however quite exactly; we can only say that virtually, speaking generally, she always turns the same side to the Earth. A seventh part of the Moon indeed goes round the edge, as it were, so that really it is not quite always the front of the Moon that is turned towards us, for after a time a seventh part comes forward from the back, and another seventh part retires. This is compensated by the further movements; the whole seventh does not quite go over, it returns; and the Moon reels, as she goes round the Earth—she actually reels. I will only mention this here; in any elementary astronomy book you can look up further details. Could we transport ourselves to a far-distant spot in Cosmic space, which according to the calculations of astronomy would be only a far-distant star, this rotation of the Moon on its own axis would from there take somewhat more than 27 days. If however, we transport ourselves to the Sun, we see that the movements of the Sun and Moon are not uniform, they move with dissimilar velocities; this rotation of the Moon seen from the Sun is not the same as seen from a distant star, but takes rather more than 29 days. Thus we may say that the stellar day of the Moon is 27 days, and its solar day 29 days.

This of course is connected with all the intervolving which takes place in the Universe. As we know, the Sun rises at a different vernal point every Spring, moving round the whole ecliptic, round the whole Zodiac in 25,920 years. These reciprocal movements bring it about that the stellar day of the Moon is considerably shorter than its solar day.

Bearing this in mind we may say: Here too is something remarkable. Every time we make an observation we notice a difference from one full Moon to another in the mutual aspects of Sun and Moon, a difference of almost 2 days. That shows us that we have to do with two movements in Cosmic space, which indeed go together but do not point back to the same origin. What I have set forth here from a Cosmic point of view, can be compared with what I have set forth previously from an ethical-spiritual point of view. There is an interval between the beginnings of the individual epochs of civilisation in the one stream and the beginnings of those connected with the Christ Event. It is always necessary when it is full Moon, as regards sidereal time, to wait for the accomplishment of the solar time. That lasts longer. There is again an interval. Thus in the Cosmos we have two currents, two movements, one in which the Sun takes part, and another, the Moon; and they are of such nature that we may say: If we start from the Moon-stream, we find the Sun-stream intervening in it, just as the Christ-Event intervenes in the continuous stream of evolution, as though coming from a foreign world. To the Moon-world the Sun-world is a foreign world, from a certain point of view.

Now let us consider this subject from yet a third standpoint. This we can do by trying to remember exactly how the human memory works, especially when we include the reminiscence of dreams. We find, for instance, that what has taken place quite recently, although it does not enter the inner movements and course of the dream, plays into its picture world. Do not misunderstand me. We can of course dream of something that happened to us many years ago, but we do not do so unless something has recently occurred which is related by some thought or feeling to the earlier years. The whole nature of dreams is in some way connected with quite recent occurrences. If one wishes to observe such matters, it must be assumed that one is a person who notices the fine details of human life; if such be the case, observation will furnish as exact results as any exact science.

To what is this due? It is due to the fact that a certain time is required in order that what we experience in our soul may be imprinted by the astral body upon the etheric. Approximately from two and a half to three days, though sometimes after only one and a half or two days, but never without having slept upon it, what we have experienced in our intercourse with the world is imprinted by the astral upon the etheric body. It always takes a certain time to be established there. Now compare this fact with another—viz. the fact that in everyday life we alternately separate physical body and etheric body from the astral body and Ego in sleep, and in waking unite them. We may therefore say that altogether between birth and death there is a rather looser connection between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand and the Ego and astral body on the other. For the physical and etheric bodies remain always together between birth and death, and the astral body and Ego keep together also, but not the astral and etheric bodies; every night they separate. There is thus a looser connection between the astral and etheric bodies than between the etheric and physical; and this is again expressed in the fact that there must in a sense be a certain parting-asunder of the astral and etheric bodies before what we have experienced in the astral body is imprinted upon the etheric body. When some event influences us, it does so of course in the waking condition. This means it works upon the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego. There is however, a difference in their reception of its working. The astral body takes it up at once. The etheric needs a certain time for the impression to be so established that there should be complete harmony between the astral and etheric. Does not this clearly and distinctly show that although we confront an event with all four principles of the human being, there are two currents which do not run the same course in their connection with the outer world, one stream needing longer than the other? There we have the same as we have in history, the same too as we have in the Cosmos—Moon and Sun, Heathendom and Christendom; and now, etheric and astral. Always a differentiation in time. Thus we find this interaction of two streams appearing in our ordinary life, two streams which come together and give a common resultant for life, but yet cannot be grasped so simply as to permit of the causes and effects of the one stream coinciding with the causes and effects of the other.

These things are of the highest importance for the consideration of the Universe and of life, and cannot be dispensed with if one wishes to understand the Universe. There are other facts too which are also entirely overlooked. And what do all these things betoken? They indicate the existence of a certain harmony between cosmic life, historical life and the life of individual men; but a harmony not constructed as is usual today where there is a desire to account for everything by a fundamental law of bio-genesis. The consequence is that we cannot have a single Astronomy but need different Astronomies, one of the Sun, another of the Moon. If we have two clocks, one always a little slower than the other, then the latter will always be in advance; but we should never be able to assume that what happens on the one has its cause on the other. That would be impossible. So too, although there is a certain conformity to law in the one being always the same amount behind the other, the two streams of which we have been speaking have nothing to do with one another; they only work together as I look at them together. Solar astronomy has nothing to do with lunar astronomy. The two only work conjointly in our Universe.

It is important to bear this in mind, and just as we have to distinguish between the solar and lunar astronomy as regards the regulation of the movements of the Sun and Moon, so too must we distinguish in history between what takes place in us by reason of the movement in the periods of civilisation, and what takes place in us through our being in the cycle of time whose central point is the Event of Golgotha. These two things work together in the world, but if we wish to grasp them, we must discriminate between them. We see the prototype of the historical in the cosmic, and we see the ultimate expression—I do not say the effect—but the last expression of these universal facts in our own life in the two or three days which must elapse before our thoughts have become so far firm that they are no longer above in the astral body where they may appear as dreams, as it were, of themselves, but are below in the etheric body and must be brought up by our own active memory or by something that recalls them. Thus within us one movement flows into the other. Just as we have to realise that there is a lunar current that, as it were, generates independent systems or structures of movement, so we must realise that we in our human being are closely connected as regards our physical and etheric bodies with something beyond the human, while on the other hand, in our astral body and Ego we are closely related to something else beyond the human.

Concerning these things a veil of darkness is spread by modern observation, which confuses everything, and assumes a cosmic mist which forms into a ball from which the Sun, Moon, Planets emerge. This is not the case, the Sun and Moon are not from the same origin but are two streams running side by side; and just as little can Man's human Ego and astral body be traced to the same origin as his physical and etheric bodies. They are two different streams. In the book Occult Science it will be seen that these two streams must be traced back to the Sun period. Then to be sure, on going back from the Sun to Saturn, one comes to a sort of unity. This however, lies very far back indeed; from the Sun onwards, there is continually the tendency for two streams to run side by side.

In this description I have wished to show how necessary it is to throw light on the parallel between cosmic existence, historical existence and human existence, in order to arrive at a judgement of how Man has to relate to the cosmic movements. We have seen that if he places himself rightly, the result is not one astronomy, but two; a solar and a lunar astronomy. So too we have a human development of a heathen nature—natural science is still heathen—and a human development of a Christian nature. In our day many have the tendency to prevent these two streams, which have met on Earth in order to work together, from coming together.

Consider for instance, how the whole purport of a book such as that of Traub [*Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph, by Friedrich Traub, Tubingen, 1919.]—the rest of the book has no meaning without this—consists in the assertion: ‘Yes, Dr. Steiner wishes to unite the two streams, heathen and Christian. We will not let that happen. We want natural science to remain heathen, so that there may be no necessity to bring about anything in Christendom which may reconcile it with natural science.’ of course, if Natural Science is allowed to be heathen, Christianity cannot unite with it. Then it can be said: ‘Natural Science is carried on externally, materialistically; Christendom is founded on faith. The two must not be reconciled.’ Christ however, truly did not appear on Earth in order that side by side with his Impulses the heathen impulse should increase in power; He came to permeate the heathen impulse. The task of the present time is to unite what man would keep asunder—Knowledge and Faith—and this must come to pass. Therefore attention must be drawn to such things, as I have done in one of my recent public lectures. On the one side the Church has reached the conclusion that Cosmology is not to be admitted into Christology, and on the other hand a Cosmology is reached by the principle of the indestructibility of matter and force. [*The word “force” on this page is generally rendered “Energy” in English scientific writing (Indestructibility of Matter and Energy).] But if matter and force are regarded as indestructible and eternal, it leads to the treading under foot of all ideals. And then Christianity too is meaningless. Only when what constitutes matter and its laws is regarded as a transitory phenomenon, and when the Christ-Impulse becomes a seed of what will exist when matter and force no longer rule as they do now according to law but have died away, then alone will Christianity, and then alone will ethical ideals and human worth, have a true meaning. There are two great antitheses: The one arising from the final logical conclusion of heathenism—‘Matter and Force are immortal’, and the other arising from Christianity—‘Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.’

These are the two greatest contrasts which can be expressed in a concept of the world, and our age has indeed every need not to be confused about such things, but with a mind-awake, earnestly to look at what must be attained as a right concept of the world, in which moral human value and the Christian Impulse in the evolution of the world are not lost sight of in the illusion of indestructible matter and indestructible force. More of this in the next lecture.

I have now brought together many and various matters which may help us to a perception of the structure of the Universe in its relation to Man. We have seen—and this must be emphasised again and again—that the Universe cannot be grasped without Man. That means that it is not possible to understand the Universe in itself, without keeping in mind Man and the relation of the Universe to him. If one wishes to form in a very simple way an idea of Man's connection with the Universe, one need only think of a theme in elementary astronomy—the so-called ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’—that is, the oblique position of the Earth's axis in relation to the line, the curve, which passes through the Zodiac. This obliquity of the ecliptic may be understood and even interpreted as you will; with such interpretations we are not for the moment concerned as to whether they accord with reality or not; we are concerned rather to bring a certain fact to your notice. If the Earth's axis—the axis on which the Earth turns daily—were perpendicular to the plane through the Zodiacal ecliptic, then day and night would be equal throughout the year over the whole Earth. If the Earth's axis lay in the ecliptic, then over the whole Earth one half of the year would be day and one half night. Both extremes do in a certain respect actually occur at the equator and at the poles. But in between lie regions where the length of day varies in the course of the year. We need only reflect a little on this matter to arrive at the tremendous significance for the whole evolution of earthly civilisation, of the position of the Earth's axis in cosmic space. Just reflect, we could all of us throughout the Earth be only Eskimos if the axis lay in the ecliptic; were it vertical to the ecliptic, the whole Earth would be filled with the kind of civilisation that prevails at the equator.

Thus as regards the position of the Earth's axis, no matter how it may be interpreted—of course an understanding of the truth depends upon what interpretation we give it, but any interpretation will serve to make one perceive the connection between Man, his culture and civilisation, and the structure of the Universe; and the fact behind the interpretation, whatever the latter may be, compels us to regard Man and the Earth as forming part of the Universe, and not, in respect of man's physical being, as though he could be considered independently. This cannot be done. As physical being, Man is not a reality in himself, but only when regarded as one with the whole Earth, just as a hand severed from the human organism cannot be regarded as in any true sense a reality: it dies, it is only thinkable in connection with the organism. A rose, when plucked, dies, and as a reality it is only conceivable in connection with the rose-tree which is rooted in the Earth; so too, to estimate Man in his entirety, in his totality, one cannot regard him as simply enclosed in the boundaries of his skin.

Thus what we experience on Earth must be considered in connection with the Earth's axis. It is important in a view of the Universe based on reality that what is a partial truth should not be interpreted as a whole truth. We come to comprehend in its reality the whole man as a being of soul and spirit by not considering him as a reality in his physical nature. He is a reality as a being of soul and spirit, a complete independent reality, a true individual. What he inhabits between birth and death—the physical and etheric bodies—are not realities in themselves, they are members of the whole Earth, and as we shall presently see, they are even part of another whole.

This brings us to something which must be observed still more closely. I must again and again point out one thing. The ideas we form of man almost always tend, unconsciously, to our regarding him as a solid body. True, we are aware that he is not precisely a hard body, that he is to some extent plastic, but we are very often unaware that he consists of far more than 75% fluid, of which only the residue can be regarded as solid mineral being. Man is really 75% a water being. Now I ask you, therefore, is it possible to describe the human organism, as is usually done, in sharp outlines—saying: ‘Here we have the lobes of the brain, here this organ’, and so forth, and then assume that the solidly circumscribed organs combine in their activity to bring about the activity of the whole organism? There is no sense whatever in that. It is a question of bearing in mind the fact that Man within the limits of his skin, is, as it were, surging water; that what is purely inwardly surging fluidity also has a meaning, and that we should not describe Man as if he were more or less a solid body. In Spiritual Science this has a very deep significance. For precisely when we consider the solid in Man, which is in a manner connected with the external minerals, we find that the solid in the human being has a certain relation to the Earth.

We have observed the various relations of Man to the world around him, we will now establish the relation of his solid substance to the Earth. This connection exists; the watery element in Man has, however, primarily no connection with the Earth but with the planetary Universe outside, and especially with the Moon. Precisely as the Moon, not directly but indirectly, has a relation to the ebb and flow of the tides, to certain configurations of the fluid part of the Earth, so too it has a connection with what takes place in the fluid part of the human organism. I described yesterday that we have on the one side the astronomy that applies to the Sun—and also to the Earth. We ourselves are part of that astronomy, for we are organised into it as organisms containing solid substances. Lunar astronomy however, is different. We are organised into lunar astronomy in so far as it is connected with our fluid constituents. Thus we see that the forces of the Cosmos work into the solid and fluid parts of our physical nature.

This has a still greater significance, which is, that what we call our Ego has primarily a direct influence on our solid man, and that what we call our astral body has an indirect influence on our fluid man—so that what works from the soul and spirit upon our organisation, comes, through our bodily nature, also into connection with all the forces of the Cosmos. These movements of the Cosmos have always been a subject of observation, from the most varied points of view. When we look back to the ancient Persian civilisation we find that even then researches were made into the movements of the Universe. These researches were also made by the Chaldeans and by the Egyptians, and it is not without interest to study the attitude of the Egyptians to movements of the Universe. They had, of course, for what were apparently quite material reasons, to study the connection of the Earth with the outer Cosmos, for their land depended upon the inundations of the Nile which took place precisely when the Sun was in a definite position in the Universe. This position could be determined by that of Sirius; so that the Egyptians had arrived at making observations as to the position of the Sun in relation to what we now call the Fixed Stars. Especially in the Egyptian sacerdotal colonies, in their Mysteries, extensive researches were made into the relation of the Sun to the other stars. As I have already said, the Egyptians knew perfectly well that each year the Sun appeared to have shifted its position in the heavens in regard to the other stars, and they calculated thereby that the stars—whether apparently or really is immaterial just now—as they daily moved round the heavens, had a certain velocity, and that the daily movement of the Sun had also a certain velocity, but not quite so great as that of the stars. The Sun always lagged somewhat behind. The Egyptians knew and recorded the fact that the Sun lagged behind about one day in 72 years, so that when a particular star which rose with the Sun in a definite year rises again 72 years later, the Sun does not rise with it but 24 hours later. A star belonging to the world of fixed stars, a star in the Zodiac, outstrips the Sun by one day, one full day, in every 72 years. Multiply 72 by 360 and we obtain 25,920 years. That is a number which we often meet with. It is the time needed by the Sun in its lagging behind to get back to its starting-point; having thus gone round the whole Zodiac. The Sun is therefore exactly one degree behind in 72 years, for a circle has, as we know, 360 degrees. According to this reckoning, the Egyptians divided the great year—which really comprises 25,920 years—into 360 days; but such a day was 72 years long. And 72 years, what is that? It is the average limit of duration of man's life. Certainly there are individuals who live to be older, others not so old, but in general it constitutes the farther limit for human life. Thus one can say: The whole connection in the Universe is so constructed that it sustains a man's whole life for a solar day, which is 72 years. True, man is emancipated from that. He can be born at any time; but his life here as physical man between birth and death is arranged according to the solar day. Referring to historical records, one generally finds that the ordinary year of the Egyptians was reckoned as 360 days (not 365.25 as it actually is), until later on it was found to accord so little with the course of the stars that the other 5 days had to be inserted. How came it that the Egyptians originally took 360 days for the year? In the cosmic year a degree—that is, a 360th part—is actually a cosmic day of 72 years. Thus in the Egyptian Mysteries it was taught that man is so connected with the Cosmos, that the duration of his life is one day of the cosmic year. He was thus organised into the Cosmos. His relation to the Cosmos was made clear to him through connections which belong to the decadence of the whole evolution of the Egyptian people.

The essential nature of man and his connection with the Cosmos was not then made known to the wide mass of the Egyptians—that is characteristic of the time. It was said that if all men knew the nature of their being, how it is organised into the Cosmos, and that the duration of their own life has its part in the duration of the Sun's revolution, then those who felt themselves organised into the Universe would not allow themselves to be ruled, for each would regard himself as a member of the Universe. Only those were allowed to know this who it was believed were called to be leaders. The rest were not to possess such knowledge of the Cosmos, but a knowledge of the day only. This is connected with the decadence of the Egyptian civilisation. It was certainly necessary in regard to many other things, that immature people should not be initiated into the Mysteries, but this was extended to such things as gave power to the leaders and rulers.

Now, very much of what permeates our human souls today is derived from oriental sources. Traditional Christianity too contains much which has come from oriental sources; and especially into Roman Christianity a strong impulse has descended from Egypt. Just as the Egyptians were kept in ignorance concerning their connection with the Cosmos, so in certain circles of Romanism the view prevails that people must be kept in ignorance of their connection with the Cosmos which comes about through the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the fierce conflict which arises when, from an inner necessity of our age, we emphasise that the Event of Golgotha is not simply something which must be regarded as outside the rest of cosmic conception but rather as inserted into it, when we show how what took place on Golgotha is really connected with the whole Universe and its constitution. It is regarded as the worst heresy to describe Christ as the Sun-Spirit, as we have done.

It must not be supposed that the point at issue is not well-known; but just as the Egyptian priest knew quite well that the ordinary year has not 360 days but 365.25, so certain people are perfectly well aware that the matter with which the Christ Mystery deals is also connected with the Sun Mysteries. But present-day humanity is to be hindered from receiving this knowledge—the very knowledge that it needs; for as I have already said, the materialistic view of the Universe is much preferred by that side to Spiritual Science. Materialistic science also has its practical consequences, in which again the present time may be compared with ancient Egypt. I call attention to the fact that the Egyptians as such were thus dependent upon the course of the Sun, on the relation of the earthly to the heavenly, as regards their external civilisation. The withholding of the knowledge of the connection of cosmic phenomena and their effect on the cultivation of the land, represented a certain power in the hands of the declining priesthood, for thereby the Egyptian labourers had to submit to direction from the priests, who had the requisite knowledge.

Now if the European and American civilisations were to retain their present character, adhering only to the materialistic, Copernican view of the Universe—with its off-shoot, the Kant-Laplace theory—a materialistic cosmogony must necessarily arise concerning earthly phenomena, biological, physical and chemical. It would be impossible for a cosmogony of this kind to include the moral world order in its structure. It could not embrace the Christ-Event, for it is impossible to be a believer in the materialistic view of the world and at the same time a Christian; that is an inner lie, it is something that cannot be, if one is honest and upright. Hence it was inevitable that the practical consequences should be seen in Europe and American culture, of the split between materialism on the one hand and a moral cosmogony on the other, and along with the moral cosmogony, also the contents of the religious faiths. This result was evidenced in the fact that men who had no external reason for being inwardly dishonest, threw faith overboard, and established a materialistic cosmogony for human life also. Thereby the materialistic cosmogony became a social cosmogony. This would however have the further consequence for our European and American civilisation that man would have a materialistic cosmogony only and would know nothing of the Earth's connection with cosmic powers, in the sense that we have described it. Within a certain caste, however, the knowledge of the connection with the cosmogony would remain, just as the Egyptian priests kept the knowledge of the Platonic year, the great cosmic year and the great cosmic day; and such circles could hope then to rule the people who under materialism degenerate into barbarism.

Of course these things have been said today only from a sense of duty towards truth; but they must be said out of such a duty to truth. It is of importance that a certain number of people should realise how necessary it is to give the Mystery of Golgotha its cosmological significance. This significance must be recognised by a number of people, who must on their part, undertake a certain responsibility that the fact should not remain hidden from earthly humanity—the fact that humanity is connected with the non-earthly Spirit, who lived in Palestine in the Man Jesus, at the beginning of our era. It is necessary that the knowledge of the entrance of Christ from the non-earthly world into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, should not be withheld. To such penetration belongs the overcoming of that dishonesty which is so general today in questions of cosmic conceptions and of faith. For what is done today? We are told on the one hand that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and has evolved in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theory, and we subscribe to this; and on the other hand we are told that at the beginning of our era such and such events took place in Palestine. These two things are accepted, without being connected; people accept them and think it of no consequence. It is not without consequence however, for it is much less evil when a lie is consciously accepted, than when it takes shape unconsciously, and degrades Man and drags him down. For if we consider a lie as it appears in a man's consciousness, every time he falls asleep it leaves his physical and etheric bodies with his consciousness, and lives on in spaceless, timeless being, in the eternal being, while Man is in dreamless sleep. There is prepared all which can result from the lie in the future; that is, everything is made ready to correct it, if it is in the consciousness. But if it is in the unconscious, it remains with the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed. When Man is not occupying these bodies, it then belongs to the Cosmos, and not to the earthly Cosmos alone, but to the whole Cosmos; there it works for the destruction of the Cosmos; above all, for the destruction of the whole of humanity, for this destruction begins in humanity itself.

Man can escape what threatens humanity in this way, by no other means than by striving after inner truth as regards such supreme questions of existence. Thus there is a kind of appeal to humanity today from out of the impulses of our time to realise that a materialistic astronomy knowing nothing of how at a definite point of time the Event of Golgotha took shape, should no longer exist. Every astronomy which includes the Moon in the structure of the Universe just the same as the Sun and Earth, instead of allowing the two streams to run in with one another, but still as separate streams—every such astronomy is no Christian astronomy but a heathen astronomy. Therefore every theory of evolution which describes the Universe homogeneously must from the Christian stand-point be rejected. If you follow my book, Occult Science, you will see how, in the description of the Saturn and Sun periods, the stream divides into two, which then intermingle and work together. Here we have two streams. In the descriptions usually given, however, the ideas are in accordance with the continuation of the pagan development. And you will find this true down to the very details. You know that Darwinian theorists describing the evolution of the organic form, would say: First there were simple organic forms, then more complicated forms, then more and more complicated forms, and so forth, up to Man. But this is not so. If we take Man as three-membered, his head alone is the development from the lower animal form. What is added to it has arisen later. Thus we cannot say that in our vertebral column we have something which transforms itself into head, we must say: Our head certainly arose from earlier structures which were spine-like; but the present spine has nothing to do with that development, it is a later appendage. What is now our head-organisation has arisen from a differently formed spine.

This I say for those who are interested in the theory of descent. I mention it so that you may see that a straight line leads from cosmic considerations to consideration of what lies in human evolution, and so that you may see the necessity for an enlightened Spiritual Science in all different realms of knowledge and of life. For science must not simply continue to develop, as did the science of the last century, under the influence of the materialistic view of the Universe, which is itself a child of the materialistic comprehension of Christianity. We owe materialism to the materialisation of the Christian view of the Universe. The teaching of the cosmic Christ must be re-established in opposition to the materialised form of Christianity we have today. This is the most important task of our time; and until its importance is realised, man will not be able to see clearly in any domain.

I have wanted to tell you these things, because they will enable you to understand better why ill-willed opponents fight so strenuously against what we are bringing before the world today. I was obliged to connect this whole study with a kind of cosmology, with the consideration of which we will continue in the next lecture.

The essential part of our present study is to recognise how the two streams of the world's history, the heathen stream and the Christian stream, meet in our life, how they work into one another and are connected with the events in the whole Universe. In order to search more closely into this, we must first consider the following. It is essential that we should discriminate as exactly as possible wherein the heathen world-conception, taking it in the widest sense (for indeed, it is still and must remain at the basis of our modern conception of the Universe)—wherein this heathen world-conception differs from the Christian, which has only in a very small degree, in its full reality, passed into the minds of men. The point is, as I have often pointed out, that we have now come to a time when what we may call the cosmogony of Natural Science, and what we call the Moral Order of the Universe—to which of course, also belongs the religious view of the world—stand side by side, utterly unconnected. For the man of today, more than he is aware of, the occurrences belonging to natural and moral happenings are two things wholly apart, which he cannot at all unite if he wishes honestly to hold the position of modern cosmogony. That is why the greatest part of the advanced theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually has no Christology. I have often remarked on the existence of such books as Adolf Harnack's The Nature of Christianity, in which there is no reason whatever why the name of Christ should be mentioned; for what appears therein as ‘Christ’ is no other than the Deity met with in the Old Testament as the God Jehovah. There is really no actual difference between Harnack's ‘Christ’ and the God Jehovah—that is, there is no difference between what is said of the Christ-Being and what followers of the Old Testament view of the Universe said of their Jehovah. If we take the idea of Christ held today by many persons and compare it with what they have otherwise as their view of life, there is no reason whatever why they should speak of Christ and Christianity, for to speak of Christ and Christianity—and Nationalism, for example—as many do today is an absolute contradiction. These things only escape notice because people today avoid courageously drawing the logical conclusion of what they see before them. The widest rift however, the widest gulf, exists between the view of things held by natural science and what is held by Christianity; and the most important task of our time is to build a bridge over the gulf. The conception of the Universe held by natural science is absolutely the off-spring of the nineteenth century; and it is well not always to describe these things in the abstract, but to look into them a little in a concrete way.

I have often mentioned the name of a prominent personality of the nineteenth century, one who directs our attention directly to the conception of the Universe held by natural science—I refer to Julius Robert Mayer, whom we must associate with the nineteenth century view although in his case it leads to some misunderstanding. You know how in a popular way it has been said that the assertion of the law of the conservation of force originated with him—or, to speak more accurately, the law that the Universe contains a constant sum of forces which can be neither increased nor lessened, and can only be changed into one another. Heat, mechanical force, electricity, chemical force, all change one into the other; yet the quantity of the force existing in the Universe remains always the same. Every modern physicist holds this view. Although in popular consciousness men are not aware of this law of the conservation of force and energy, they think of natural phenomena in a way that they can only be thought of when one is under the influence of this law. I want you clearly to understand what I mean. There may be something in the action of a being that corresponds to a certain principle, even when that being is not in a position to understand that principle. Suppose, for instance, that one wished to make a dog understand that a double quantity of meat means that a single quantity has been taken twice over; it could not be done. The dog could not take that in consciously, but practically he will act according to this principle; for if he has the chance of snapping at a small piece or at one twice the size, he will as a rule, seize the larger, other conditions being equal. And a man can stand under the influence of a principle without explaining it to himself in abstract form as such. Thus we may say: Certainly most people do not think of the law of conservation of force, but they do picture the whole of Nature in a way that is in accordance with the law, because what they were taught in school was taught on the assumption that the law of conservation of force exists. It is interesting to see how Mayer's line of thought expressed itself when he had to put it clearly to others who did not as yet think along the same lines.

Julius Robert Mayer had a friend who kept a record of many of their conversations. He relates many interesting facts, facts by which one can examine thoroughly the mode of thought of the nineteenth century. In the first place, to give something quite external, I will choose the following. Julius Robert Mayer was so thoroughly steeped in the whole mode of ideas leading to that of the conservation of force, of the mere transmutation of one force into another, that as a rule, whenever he met a friend in the street he could not help calling to him from a distance: ‘Out of nothing, nothing comes!’ Visiting his friend one day—Rümelin was the friend's name—knocking at the door and opening it, these were his first words, even before greeting his friend: ‘Out of nothing, nothing comes.’ So deeply was this saying rooted in Mayer's consciousness.

Rümelin tells of a very interesting discussion in which he, not as yet knowing very much of the law of the conservation of force, wished to have its nature explained. Julius Robert Mayer, who came from Heilbronn—(his monument stands there)—said ‘If two horses are drawing a carriage and they go for some distance, what will happen?’—‘Well’, said Rümelin, ‘the travelers in the carriage will arrive at Ohringen.’—‘But if they turn and go back without having done anything in Ohringen, and return to Heilbronn?’ ‘Well,’ replied Rümelin, ‘in that case the one journey has so to speak cancelled the other, so that there is apparently no result; yet there is the actual effect that the travelers came and went between Heilbronn and Ohringen.’ ‘No’, said Mayer, ‘that is only a secondary effect; it has nothing to do with what actually happened. The outcome of the expenditure of force on the part of the horses, that is something quite different. Through this expenditure of force, first the horses themselves grew hotter, secondly the axles of the carriage round which the wheels moved became hotter, and thirdly if we were to gauge with a delicate thermometer the grooves made by the wheels in the road, we should find that the warmth within them was greater than at the sides. That is the actual result. In the horses themselves, matter was also consumed through the transmutation of substance. All this is the actual effect. The other effect, that the people traveled backwards and forwards between Heilbronn and Ohringen is a secondary effect, but not the actual physical occurrence. The actual physical occurrence was the spent force of the horses, the transmutation into increased heat of the horses, the increased heat in the axles, the heat-consumption of cart-grease through friction in the wheels, the warming of the tracks on the road, and so forth.’ When one measures—as Mayer then did and specified the corresponding amount—one finds that the whole of the force which the horses exerted passed without remainder into heat. The rest is all a secondary matter, a side issue.

This has of course a certain influence on our conception of things, and the ultimate result is that we must say: ‘Well, we must free natural occurrences from everything that is a side issue in the sense of strict scientific thought, for side issues have nothing to do with scientific thought in the sense it is understood in the nineteenth century. The secondary effect is right outside the bounds of the events of natural science.’ If, however, we ask: How does what we may call natural moral law come to expression? In what are human worth and human dignity expressed? Certainly not in the fact that the force (energy) of the horses is transmuted into the heat of the carriage axles; no, in this case the secondary effect is the chief point! Let us reflect however, how in all that is considered in natural science, this secondary effect is wholly omitted. The men of the nineteenth century, and even Kant in the eighteenth, formed their view of the origin of the Universe simply out of the principles which Julius Robert Mayer so sharply defined, when he separated out what belongs to nature alone from all that was for him merely secondary effect.

If we bear this clearly in mind, we are obliged to say: The Universe must thus be constructed from the principle we recognise as Nature-Principle; all that has taken place through Christianity, for instance, is just a secondary effect, like the fact of the persons journeying by coach from Heilbronn to Ohringen, for what they had to do there does not come into consideration in the view of Natural Science. Yet, do these two streams not cross in some way or other?

Let us suppose Rümelin had not been satisfied, but had raised the following objection—I know it does not hold good for the physicist of today, but it is applicable to the construction of a general view of the Universe—suppose the following was said: If the people who were traveling from Heilbronn to Ohringen had chosen not to do so, the horses would not have expended their force, the transmutation into heat would not have taken place, or it would have happened at a different place and under different conditions. Thus in our consideration of what happened in accordance with natural science, we are limited to that part of the event which does not lead us to the ultimate cause. The event would never have taken place if the travelers had not supposed they had something to do in Ohringen. Thus what natural science must regard as a side-issue enters notwithstanding into natural occurrences. Or, suppose that the travelers had something to do in Ohringen at a definite hour. Suppose the carriage axles not only became hot, but that one of them broke—in that case they could not have continued their journey. What happened, the breaking of the axle, would then of course be explicable scientifically, but what occurred through this natural phenomenon—namely, that something planned could not be carried out—might, as can easily be imagined, have tremendously far-reaching consequences, leading moreover to other natural processes, which would in their turn have led to further consequences.

Thus we see that even when one stands on purely logical grounds very significant and grave questions arise. We must at once say, that these cannot be answered by the conception of the Universe arising from the hypothesis of our modern training; they cannot be answered without Spiritual Science. They can in no wise be answered without it; for before the tendency to the natural-scientific mode of thought arose, which was first brought to such exactness by Julius Robert Mayer, there was not that sharp line of division between the natural-scientific mode of thought and moral thought. If we consider the twelfth or thirteenth century, we find that what people had then to say of the moral order and the physical order always harmonised. Today people no longer read seriously; but if you read such works—I might say, there are not many things left from olden times which have come down to our days quite unadulterated—but if you take works which are like stragglers of the old cosmic conceptions, you will discover many things that prove how in earlier times the Moral was carried into the Physical, and the Physical raised to the Moral. Read one of these—now already somewhat falsified yet still fairly readable—read one of the writings of Basil Valentine. When you read there about metals, planets, medicinal drugs, in almost every line you will come across adjectives applied to the metals—good, bad, sagacious metals, and the like; which show that even in this domain some moral thinking was introduced. That of course could not be done today. Abstraction has gone so far that natural phenomena have been severed from all the secondary effects, as we may see in Julius Robert Mayer; one cannot say that it was the kindness of the horses' feet which moved them to use up the axle-grease by the warmth produced by their movement! It is not possible in this scientific connection to bring in any kind of moral category. There are two domains, the natural and the moral, and these stand quite definitely side by side. If the world-happenings were as shown by that kind of presentation, man could not exist at all in our world, he would not be there—for what is the reason for the present physical form of man?

When I speak here of the physical form of man, I must ask you to take the word ‘form’ seriously. The natural philosophers of today do not take the expression ‘human form’ seriously. What do they do? Like Huxley and others, they count the bones of man and of the higher animals, and from the number of these they draw the conclusion that Man is only a more highly evolved stage of the animal. Or they count the muscles and so forth. We have repeatedly had to point out that the essential point is that the line of the animal spine is horizontal, while the human spine is vertical; and although certain animals raise themselves, the position with them is not characteristic, what is characteristic of the animal is the horizontal line of the spine. Upon this depends the whole formation. Thus I ask you to take seriously what I wish to express by the word ‘form’.

This form of man; where must we look for its origin, its primary physical origin, in a spiritual way in the Universe? I have already touched on this point in these lectures, I have pointed to the starry heavens which move—whether apparently or actually is immaterial at the moment—round the Earth; the Sun also. Thus the Sun takes the same way; but if we take into consideration what we now know, namely that the Sun shifts its point of departure every Spring, remaining behind a little in relation to the stars, we come to a specially important fact. The change in position of the Vernal Point can be seen in the fact that the constellation in the following year rises earlier than the Sun and sets earlier, showing us that the Sun remains behind. I have pointed out that even the old Egyptians knew that if the circle is divided into 360 degrees, the Sun remains one day behind in 72 years. That is, in 360 times 72 years, or 25,920 years, it remains the whole circle behind, and returns to the star from which it started 25,920 years before.

Thus we have the fact that in the Universe the stars travel round, and the Sun goes round—I will not go into the question as to whether this revolution is only apparent or not, the important point under consideration is that the Sun travels more slowly, remaining behind one degree of the cosmic circle in 72 years; and 72 years, as I have already indicated, is the normal maximum duration of a man's life. Man lives 72 years, exactly the period the Sun remains one degree behind the other stars.

We have lost the right feeling for these things. Even as late as in the Hebraic Mysteries, the teacher still impressed very strongly upon his scholars that it is Jehovah who brings it about that the sun lingers behind the stars and, with the force which the Sun thus kept back, He fashioned the human form, which is His earthly image. Thus, mark well, the stars run their course quickly, the Sun more slowly, and so a slight difference arises which, according to these ancient Mysteries, was that which produced the human form. Man is born out of time, he is so born that he owes his existence to the difference in velocity between the cosmic day of the stars and the cosmic day of the Sun. In modern parlance we should say: If the Sun were not in the Universe as it is, if it were just a star like other stars, having the same velocity as other stars, what would be the consequence? It would be that the Luciferic powers alone would rule. That this is not so, that man is able to withhold himself from the Luciferic powers with the whole of his being, is due to the circumstance that the Sun does not share in the velocity of the stars but lags behind them, not developing the Luciferic velocity but the velocity of Jehovah. Again, if there were only the Sun velocity and not that of the stars, man would not be able to run on in front of the rest of his development with his mental powers, as he does at present. Such a condition would not fit well into his whole evolution. In our time this is very striking. If we have studied Spiritual Science seriously, we know that a man of 36, for instance, understands things he could not at 25. Experience is necessary for the comprehension of certain things. This is not admitted today, for a man of 25 feels himself complete. He is only complete as regards mental powers, but not in experience, for experience is gained more slowly than understanding. If this were taken into account, we should not find that the young people of today have already formed their point of view, for they would know that they could not do so before acquiring a certain amount of experience. Understanding travels with the stars, experience with the Sun. Assuming that human life is 72 years (unless events of Nature intervene causing Man to die older or younger), we say that it lasts the time the Sun takes to retrograde one degree. Why is this? The reason lies in a certain fine adjustment in the Cosmos. Our preliminary study obliges me to ask you to follow me for a little while into this domain.

If we consider a lunar eclipse occurring in a certain year, then there will be a certain date when the eclipse can occur. The lunar eclipse occurs on the same date about every 18 years, and in the same constellation. There is a periodical rhythm in the lunar eclipse, a rhythm of 18 years. That is just a quarter of a cosmic day and just a quarter of a man's life. Man, if I may so express it, endures four such periods of darkness. Why? Because in the Universe everything is in numerical harmony. On the average, Man has in accordance with the rhythmic activity of his heart, not only 72 years of life, but 72 pulse beats, and approximately 18 respirations—again the quarter—in the minute. This numerical accord is expressed in the Universe by the rhythm between the 18 years—the Chaldean Saros period, so-called because the Chaldeans first discovered it—and the Solar period; and it is the same rhythm as is also to be found in man in the inner mobility between his respiration and his pulse-beats. Plato said, not without reason: ‘God geometrises, arithmetises’ ... Thus our 72 years of life, to which is co-ordinated also our heart and pulse activity, goes through the Saros period four times; because in our heart and pulse activity we have our breathing activity, as it were, four times over. Our whole human organism is constructed on the lines of the Universe, but we only see into its significance when we bear in mind another connection.

As I said in one of the foregoing lectures, we only gauge correctly the movement of the Moon, its revolution round its axis, when we connect its revolution not with the day of the Sun, but with the day of the stars. If we have the solar time in view, we must consider a shorter time, 27.5 days for the revolution of the lunar day. I have told you that the Moon's revolution is not such as quite to accord with that of the Sun, but with the time of the stars. Hence we only understand our lunar movement aright when we do not think of it as belonging to the solar movement, but to that of the stars. In a certain sense therefore, the solar movement is outside the system to which the Moon and stars belong. Thus we are so situated in the Universe that on the one hand we are co-ordinated to the stellar-lunar system, and on the other to the solar movement.

Here we see the gradual divergence of the solar and the stellar astronomy. As we have seen, if we have one astronomy only, everything falls into confusion. We can only reach a right understanding if, not limited to one astronomy, we say: On the one hand we have the starry system which, in a certain respect, contains within it the Moon; and on the other, the system to which the Sun belongs. They mutually interpenetrate. They work together. But we are wrong if we apply the same law to the two.

When we realise that we have two quite different astronomies, we shall say: The cosmic happenings in which we are involved have two origins, but we are so placed that these two streams flow together in us. They fuse in us human beings. What is it then that takes place in us? Suppose that only what is admitted by the natural scientist took place in us—all sorts of things would take place in the human organism, movements of substances and so forth; these would extend over the whole organism, also to the brain and consequently to the senses. What then would the consequence be if the whole transmutation of substances which goes on in the human organism and which is inserted into the Cosmos as I have explained—if this metabolism were to extend to the brain? We should never be able to have the consciousness that we ourselves think. Oxygen, iron and other substances, carbon and so forth—of these we should say, in their mutual relations, ‘they think in us’. But as a matter of fact we are not conscious of any such thing. There is no question of its being in our consciousness. What we have as a fact of consciousness is the content of our soul-life. That can exist under no other hypothesis than that the whole of this quite material happening is demolished, is annihilated, and that in us there actually is no conservation of force and substance, but room is made by the annihilation of substance, for the development of the thought life. In fact, Man is the one arena in which an actual annihilation of substance takes place. We shall never realise it so long as we are only conscious of what is outside ourselves.

Now, if we start from the assumption that after 72 years the Sun lags one degree behind in the celestial sphere, that there is this difference of velocity between the movement of the stars and that of the Sun (which difference works in us, converges, as it were, in us); and if we then picture to ourselves how the formation of our head comes from the starry heavens, and how when we, according to a very beautiful saying, first ‘see the light’, we become involved in the Sun's movement, then we must say: There is in us a continual tendency to work with a lesser velocity over against the more rapid velocity of the stars. The action of the stars in us is opposed. What is the effect of this opposition? It is the destruction of what the stars bring about in us materially, its destruction; thus, the destruction of the purely material law comes about through the solar activity. Hence we may say: In our progress through the world as human beings, if we kept pace, as it were, with the stars, we should accompany them in such a way as to be subject to the material law of the Universe. But this we are not. The solar laws oppose it, they hold us back. There is something within us which holds us back. The resultant of the two activities in us could be exactly calculated, for instance, in the following case. (The calculation cannot be followed up here, first because it would take too long and secondly because you would not be able to follow it). Here, let us say, a certain movement occurs (arrow pointing downwards), i.e. a flow takes place with a certain velocity; and the stream then fuses with another stream—it must be assumed that the other flow is going not in the same

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but in the opposite direction (arrow upwards). The two streams flow therefore into one another. Or imagine a wind whirling with a certain velocity from above downwards, and another from below upwards, and they whirl into one another. If we take the difference of velocity between the downward and the upward current, relating the latter to the former in such a way that a difference in velocity results bearing the same relationship as the difference in velocity between the stellar time and the solar time, then through the rotation a condensation arises which receives its own distinct form. One whirls downwards, and because the other whirls upwards driving with a greater velocity, the lesser velocity would be that driving downwards, which gives here (see diagram) through the collision, a condensation, a certain figure. This figure, disregarding imperfections, is a silhouette of the human heart.

Thus, through the meeting of the Lucifer stream and the Jehovah stream, it is possible to construct exactly the figure of the human heart. It is constructed simply out of the revelations of the Universe. It is absolutely true; the Sun-movement is an expression of a slower movement which meets a quicker movement, and we are so inserted into the two movements that the silhouette of our heart arises; and on to it the rest of the human form is fitted. We see from this what Mysteries are actually hidden in the Cosmos, for as soon as we admit we have two astronomies, which work together in their results—what is the result? The human heart. The whole outlook of modern natural science is based on the fact that it does not distinguish these two streams from one another. This brings upon it the tragic fate, that the harmonious working is split apart, leaving on the one hand, the events in Nature, as reasoned by Julius Robert Mayer; and on the other hand, the ‘secondary results’, because people are unable to unite cosmically in thought what works together from these two streams. Thus for man's thinking the world falls asunder in two extremes.

Here lies the cosmic aspect of something tremendously significant in regard to the understanding of Man and the Universe. Unless man can renew, on that basis of thought which we are giving today, the knowledge contained in the ancient Mysteries at the time when man was awaiting Christianity—as I have described in the book, Christianity as Mystical Fact—unless we can bring this ancient knowledge to life in a present form, as must be done, all knowledge remains an illusion; for that which comes to expression with such clarity in the human heart is to be found everywhere. Everywhere the events that happen are explainable through the union of two streams, arising from different sources.

In the insertion of the Mystery of Golgotha into the evolution of our Earth, we have to do with an Event of a totally different nature from all the rest of the happenings of Earth-evolution; and this we shall never understand unless we begin by learning to understand the Cosmos itself.

What I have said today is intended as a preparation or groundwork on which we shall be able to build up in our lectures of tomorrow and the day after.

In the foregoing studies we have indicated how necessary it is to study Man in his entirety if we would see how exact a copy he is in all his nature of the Universe as a whole. It is specially important to receive this knowledge not only into our intellect, but also into our feeling and will; for only by regarding Man in his totality as born out of the whole Universe, can a deeper understanding be gained for that which Christianity wishes to be for the world. It might easily be objected that if this is so, a complicated understanding of the details of the Universe and of Man is demanded of modern humanity in order that Man should become complete Man in his consciousness. Yet just reflect that this demand, which now approaches humanity as a cardinal demand, is not peculiar to Spiritual Science. In order to indicate exactly what I mean, let me first put the question: What demand did Christianity bring when it first came into the world? In reality it claimed an understanding of the Universe which originally belonged to the ancient heathen conceptions, but which has in course of time been completely forgotten. Just consider what has been gradually lost to Man in course of time of the fundamental views and characteristics of Christianity. Christianity first appeared in such a way that it could only be understood by comprehending e.g. the Trinity: The Nature of God the Father, God the Son—that is, Jesus Christ—and the Spirit. In the sense in which Christianity understood these three aspects of the Divine Spiritual, the understanding of them demanded no less than does the understanding of such things as are given by Spiritual Science today. Only all that leads to the comprehension of this idea of Father, Son and Spirit has been gradually eliminated; it has been thrown out of the intelligible and become empty words; empty husks of words have alone been retained. For centuries man has had these empty word-husks. This has gone so far that, after having first dogmatically rejected them, people have begun to ridicule them. The best of men have ridiculed these empty husks. Ridicule has been poured upon them. ‘Dogmatic Theology’, it is said, ‘claims that One is Three and Three One!’ it is indeed a terrible delusion, it is sheer deception to believe that the Christian movement has ever demanded less understanding, less self-sacrificing knowledge, than that demanded by modern Spiritual Science—and demanded by it in order to regain Christianity. The most important and basic facts have been cast out of Christianity, and if we leave out of account that these live on in the different confessions as words, we can ask: What really remains to man of the fundamental ideas of Christ Himself? How does modern man discriminate between Christ and the Universal Cosmic God who can be met with in the ideas of Jahveh or Jehovah? I have drawn attention to the fact that even theologians such as Harnack do not discriminate. How many people today are clear as to what is to be understood by the Spirit? People have become such ‘abstractlings’, satisfied with the mere empty husks of words; either they remain in the churches and are satisfied; or if they are—as they call it—‘enlightened’, they turn all to ridicule. What is given in empty husks of words can never have the power to bring light to the individual activities of human knowledge.

Only reflect how far we have actually gone in this direction. All that was comprised in the knowledge of ancient Greece was at the same time a healing principle. The healer was a priest and at the same time the teacher of the people. That the teacher and priest was also a healer presupposes that something unhealthy was present in the whole process of civilisation; otherwise there would be no ground for speaking of a healer. They spoke of the healer because from an instinctive knowledge they had still an understanding of the whole cosmic process, more comprehensive and intense than we possess today. Today man pictures the cosmic process as running its course in such a way that what comes later is always the effect of what was earlier; but this is not so in reality. The older instinctive knowledge was aware that this was not so. Today men imagine, especially those who speak of progress in the abstract, that evolution is bound continually to ascend. We find this notion of an ascending evolution among the superficial philosophers of modern times. A man who is simply carried along by the general prejudices of the time, such as Wilhelm Wundt, the non-philosopher, who became the philosopher of the hour for many, also spoke as an alleged philosopher of such “Universal Progress”, without the slightest knowledge of what really lies in the actual stream of human development. We must realise that in the real stream of human development there is always a tendency to degenerate. There is not a tendency towards progress there, least of all in history. There is a continual tendency towards degeneration, and only because what we call teaching, or knowledge, works steadily against it, is that raised up which would otherwise be drawn down into the depths. Only in this way do we have progress.

Consider from this standpoint how the matter stands with the child. The child is born. People speak of heredity, but we inherit only what would lead to decline. If the child were not educated by his whole environment and later by school and by life, he would degenerate. Education is a preservative from degeneration, it brings healing. The old instinctive knowledge of Man would still regard as a healing process everything connected with knowledge, education or priesthood. In olden times the office of the doctor could not be separated from that of the priest, they were one and the same. Modern evolution has separated natural science from the science of soul and spirit, as I explained in yesterday's lecture. Thus man leaves to medical science the healing of all that which, according to Julius Robert Mayer, has nothing to do with human aims, but is concerned only with the use of the forces of the horses and their transmutation to heat in the horses, in the wagon-axles, in the streets on which the wheels ran, and so forth. This is, roughly speaking, left to the physician; and people like Rubner in Berlin, who is only a representative of this mode of thought, calculate what is necessary to human life almost as though Man were a kind of complicated stove.

But now draw the social-ethical conclusion of such a conception, and recognise that if of all that takes place in the transmutation of force the purposes and aims of Man are only a secondary effect, then we are confronted with the possibility of believing that the world could get on without these secondary effects. As a matter of fact that is really the secret belief of modern man, that the real consists only of the physical, and everything else is a side-stream, a secondary effect.

In face of such a view it would be only consistent to reject Christianity, as the materialists of the middle of the nineteenth century did. They actually carried out to its logical conclusion the materialistic cosmic conception, by saying: If naturalism is correct, then there is nothing for it but to ridicule the idea of any difference between a transgressor and a good man—for of course, just the same amount of force is transmuted into heat in the one as in the other! The questions that flash through the world at the present time are really often questions of honesty, courage and consistency. At a time when man certainly does not possess this honesty in respect of the outer things of life, it is indeed not surprising to find that it is not there in respect of these cardinal questions.

Thus it comes about that modern humanity still talks of Christ, without really knowing that He must be distinguished from the Universal God underlying all nature. If the Christ-Concept has been gradually changed into the simple God-concept, that signifies a retrogression of humanity, back to before the Mystery of Golgotha. In order to understand Christianity rightly it is necessary to take this principle of degeneration seriously, and place in opposition to it the necessity of working out of something quite different from what bears the germ of degeneration within it. The attention of present-day man must be drawn to the fact that at that time in the course of Earthly events when the Earth moved—together with man, of course—through the Mystery of Golgotha, something took place as a happening on Earth which had significance not merely for humanity, but for the entire Earth-life.

To comprehend this, Nature and Spirit must of course be studied with much greater earnestness than lies in the inclination of modern humanity. In order to explain this, let me point back to something which lived in the consciousness of man, perhaps up to the eighth century before Christ. Man did not then perceive himself as an isolated being, as he does today. Today he feels himself as a being enclosed in his skin, but up to the seventh or eighth century BC. he felt himself to be a member of the whole Universe, taking part in the events of the whole Universe. Grotesque as it may seem today, it is a fact that in those olden times man did not feel his head so strongly shut off by his skull, he felt that that which lived in his head extended into the Cosmos, and belonged to the whole starry heaven. Strange as it seems today, he felt himself in the sphere of the stars, for he felt his head in living connection with them. Thus he said to himself: ‘When the night-sky arches over me, it is really I myself, who live there in living communion of my head with the stars.’ He said: ‘I follow the course of time further, when after the night the day appears. Then the stars which rose on the one side set on the other, and in their place the Sun rises. The configuration of the stars then no longer works in my head, for the Sun takes the place of the starry heavens and my eyes it is that are co-ordinated with the Sun.’ And because he vividly felt: ‘My eyes are co-ordinated with the Sun when I am busy on Earth during the day,’ he said to himself: ‘Just as now there is an earthly existence and my eyes are co-ordinated to the Sun, so in the existence preceding the Earth (we call it the Moon existence) my whole head was a kind of eye; not as now, perceiving the objects in a twofold way, but, looking out into the Cosmos there were within me, in my brain, as it were, as many little eyes as there are stars. Out of these little eyes has grown all that lives now in my brain; and my sense-eyes are but later products, co-ordinated to the Sun as was my brain to the starry heavens. Therefore my brain is a later product of evolution of an eye, or really of many separate eyes, as many in number as the stars shining out there in the night. Thus my brain has grown out of a sense; and what is now in Earth-existence, my eye, whereby I am in communication with my Earth-environment, will be an inner organ, as is now in my brain, when the Earth has been replaced by another planet (which as you know we call the Jupiter-condition). What is now on my outer surface will draw into my inner being. People will then look different. What they now have as corresponding with their environment will form an inner organ in future times.’ Ancient humanity felt this instinctively and said: ‘Light penetrates; through the eye of my senses, but in my inner being I preserve the light of olden times. It works in me as thought. Thought was a sense-perception before the Earth became Earth, when it was an earlier planet; and my sense-perception will be thought in the future.’ In ancient times man perceived all this as wisdom, which he felt ‘instinctively’ as we should say today. The ancients did not throw about the word ‘instinctive’ as is done today, they said: ‘It is the wisdom which the Gods in heaven have brought down to us on Earth.’ Of what arose in them instinctively concerning the past, present and future they said: ‘This was brought to us by the Immortals.’ This they represented to themselves in Pictures. What does the Isis-picture tell us? ‘I am the All; I am the Past, the Present and the Future. My Veil has no mortal ever lifted.’ The modern interpretation of this is really in truth a strange one! People today think in materialistic terms about a saying containing the term ‘mortal’. They do not think, in the case of this saying of Isis: ‘I am the Past, I am the Present, I am the Future. My veil hath no Mortal yet lifted;’ but they think of it as: ‘I am the Past, the Present and the Future; my veil hath no man yet lifted.’ The people of today do not reflect how on the other hand they hold themselves to be immortal and that therefore ‘My veil hath no mortal ever lifted’ cannot be regarded as a final sentence. Novalis said: ‘Well then, we must become immortal, so that we may lift the veil of Isis.’

Let us reflect on the underlying thought brought forward by modern materialists. It gives them pleasure to think: ‘I am the All. I am the Past, the Present and the Future. My veil no man hath ever raised.’ For they are thus spared the effort of lifting it, and their philosophers can teach that man has now reached the boundaries of knowledge. In reality they mean that man is too indolent to tread the path of knowledge. They do not like to say this, so they say that man has reached the boundaries of knowledge.

In our age, which wants to be independent of authority, these things are accepted, but they must not be carried into the future, if man is not to fall into decadence. It should not be overlooked that no one has the right to call himself a Christian who believes only in a general progress and does not realise that if the Earth had been left to itself since the Mystery of Golgotha, it would have fallen into decadence. Hence it is necessary for us to oppose to this decadence something which we cannot obtain from the Earth, nor from that from which the Earth is derived—the Father-God—but which must be obtained from God the Son, and must be injected into the continuous evolution of mankind. It is an absolute deviation of man from his task of today if he continues unwilling to admit that the Universe is to be brought into relation to the Christ-Event. Think what it really means when, though stormed at by Catholic and Evangelical confessions, Spiritual Science asserts that the Christ-concept and the Cosmos-concept must be united, while against that it is always said: ‘Spiritual Science has no idea that Christ is only to be understood in an ethical sense, as something inserted only into the moral order of the world.’ If man holds the moral order of the world as a secondary effect of the transmutation of forces, then the Christ-concept inserted only into the moral order of the world, also appears as a mere secondary effect in the cosmic system.

We have spoken of one thing whereto the old instinctive knowledge of mankind pointed, namely that the human brain stands in relation to the starry sphere, and that the human eyes are in a certain way co-ordinated with the Sun-sphere. Going back into earlier periods, when man still possessed a qualitative knowledge of astronomy and of the earthly elements, we see that Light was brought into relation with what is nearest our Earth, with Air. With their instinctive knowledge, the ancients could not think of Light without Air. Modern thinkers with their abstract knowledge do not bring what they explain as Light into relation with Air. Certainly they describe it in a wonderful way—as a vibratory movement of the ether; but in relation to Air, the farthest they go is to regard the Air as a medium through which the Light passes. It is really most remarkable how little people reflect upon what is imposed upon them! Earth: Infinite Space: Stars. Among these stars are some whose Light needs millions of years to reach the Earth. Night falls. Here is a star whose Light needs a shorter time to reach the Earth. Just imagine for a moment: What have we in the rays of its Light? Certainly we do not see the star itself when we look in the direction of the Light-rays. The Light-ray which meets our eye, according to this theory, comes from something millions of years back; it may even have perished long ago, but its Light is still traveling hither. Nothing is told us of what is really out there in the Cosmos. All we are told is how channels of Light are approaching, which may perhaps lead back to some still existing star but which may also lead to some star no longer there.

We must make ourselves acquainted with the thought of how for us the Light-phenomena as such make themselves apparent in the phenomenon of Air; for although the Light passes through the apparently airless space, by us it is not seen in airless space, but in the Air-filled space, for only in such can we exist. Thus for us Light and Air are experienced together. In this way we can go more deeply into the human constitution; we can go a step further. In the human head we can pass from the eyes to the nose. The nose (and oriental philosophy knows a great deal about this), the nose is the organ through which one breathes in and breathes out. The eye is the receptive organ for Light. The nose and eye are divided. The nose is adapted to the Air, and all that is adapted to the Air extends to the world of the planets. The Sun makes the beginning in working in our earthly part; but the rest of the planets work on the rest of our constitution; and as we come down from the starry world into that of the Sun and planets we arrive, in the case of man, as it were, at the nose. Then we come down quite to the earthly, passing from the nose to the mouth, to the organ of taste, and, taking up the substances of the Earth through that organ, we descend from the planetary into the Earth-world. We have the rest of man as an appendage; the head as appendage of the eyes, the breast as appendage of the nose, and all the rest of man, the limb-man, the metabolic man as appendage of the organ of taste. We have now apportioned man, taking him in his totality, to the starry world, the solar and planetary world and the Earth-world. We have placed him into the whole Universe and when we look at his brain—inwardly, not outwardly; not by physical anatomy, but by inner knowledge—we see in the human head, inasmuch as it is the bearer of the brain, a direct copy of the starry world. We see in all that extends from the nose to the lungs, a copy of the planetary system with the Sun. If we then consider the remainder, we see that part of man which is Earth-bound, as e.g. are animals. In this way only do we arrive at the true parallel between man and the rest of the world. Thus should man be understood, even in detail.

Consider for a moment the circulation of the blood. The blood, transmuted by the outer air, enters the left auricle, passes into the left ventricle, and from thence branches off through the aorta into the organism. We can say: Blood passes from the lungs to the heart, thence into the rest of the organism, but branching off also to the head. The blood however in passing through the organism takes up the nourishment. And into this is introduced all that is dependent on the Earth. All that the digestive apparatus introduces into the circulation of the blood is earthly. What is introduced through the breathing, when we bring oxygen into the blood-course, is planetary. And then we have the blood-circulation that goes to the head, which includes all that composes the head. Just as the circulatory course of the lungs with its absorption of oxygen, and giving out of carbonic acid, belongs to the planetary system, just as what is introduced through the digestive apparatus belongs to the Earth, so that part of the circulatory course that branches off above, belongs to the starry world. It is, as it were, drawn away from the aorta and then streams back and unites with the blood streaming back from the rest of the organism, so that they stream conjointly back to the heart. That which branches off above says, as it were, to the whole of the rest of the circulatory course: ‘I do not share either in the oxygenating process nor in the digestive process, but I separate myself out. I invert myself upwards.’ That it is that belongs to the starry world. And the nervous system might be followed up in the same way.

One arrives at no perception of man by thinking that he can be studied from his physical aspect only. In so doing we only find in the cranium that pulp described by our physical anatomy! What it describes is simply non-existent. It is in reality the confluence of forces of the starry heavens. To describe the physical brain by itself, is like describing a rose by itself. That has no sense, for a rose is no entity for itself. It cannot be dissociated from its bush. It is nothing apart from its bush. So too, the human brain is nothing apart from the starry heavens.

Let us however here recall the true nature of the Sun. Again and again I have emphasised how astonished the physicists would be if they could fit out an airship (it actually forms part of their ideal to do so), and could journey to the Sun, imagining they would find there a glowing ball of gas. They would not find this, but a suction-sphere, trying to absorb everything possible into itself, really an empty space, nay even less than empty, a negation of matter. Within the circumference of the Sun there is nothing comparable to our matter. It is not merely empty, but less than empty; it is blank, just like a hole, in comparison with the rest of matter. It is really important that one should not, in these days, begin to speculate on things of the world, without any accord with reality, but fill oneself with the spirit of reality. I have recently said a good deal on the Theory of Relativity. You will remember what I brought forward regarding the Einstein box by means of which the theory of gravity is to be overcome. Another affirmation of Einstein's is that even the dimension of a body is merely relative, and depends on the rapidity of movement. Thus, according to the Einstein theory, if a man moved through cosmic space with a certain velocity, he would not retain his bulk from front to back, but would become as thin as a sheet of paper. This is discussed in all seriousness. Such dwelling in thoughts foreign to reality forms the ‘science’ of today. And it is the opposite pole to what we have on the other hand as faith.

The physician has been relegated to the purely physical, the priest to what is purely of the soul. As for the Spiritual, it is abolished. But when it comes to considering everything outside the physical as a side-issue—horses, coach, these are real to the physical senses; and the forces of the horses, these are transmuted into heat, heat of the horses, heat of the axles, and heat of the furrows of the road; and for the rest, well, we cannot even call the rest a ‘fifth wheel’ of the wagon, for it is less that that, it is a mere side-issue, a secondary effect. As regards the priest, one cannot even say that he is the fifth wheel of the wagon in the modern conception—for what does he achieve if all the ‘rest’ is a side-issue? When physicians such as Julius Robert Mayer make philosophy, they make physics; and when the adherents of soul-substance, or whatever it is, make philosophy, it becomes abstract concepts; and the two world-streams flow on side by side quite foreign to one another, the materialistic physician of the middle of the nineteenth century and the preaching pastor; they have really neither understood nor even paid attention to one another, at most perhaps they have contended politically. A time has assuredly now come in which there is but little honesty or consistency, and this state of things must be seriously combated and overcome.

We have not only to combat ill-will, but what perhaps has also to be taken into account, namely all kinds of stupidity and ignorance. That is how things are.—Let me draw your attention especially to the fact that from a certain motive I intend at Whitsun to give three lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. [*See The Redemption of Thinking. English translation of these lectures by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicoll. Published by Hodder and Stoughton (1956).] I do not know whether our opponents will deny us the right to study Thomas Aquinas here. As you know, by an order of Pope Leo XIII, the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas was declared the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church and I wonder whether this, which we are about to study here, will be described as an unlawful propaganda issuing from Dornach! We will wait and see. Let the wind whistle from whatever quarter, we will await it. But perhaps it is well that we should once meet all the talk that comes from that particular quarter with a serious study of the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas.

When we try to ascertain man's position in the Universe as a whole, it is a question of turning our attention not only to Space but to Time. Anyone who follows the history of human evolution at all, will find that it is a peculiarity of the Oriental conception of the Universe to set Space in the foreground, not leaving Time wholly disregarded, but placing everything pertaining to Space in the foreground. The peculiarity of the Western conception of the Universe is to reckon to a very special degree with Time, and it is precisely this regard for the temporal in human evolution and the Universe which must have primary consideration in a right view of the Christ-Force. To recognise the full significance of the Christ-Force in human evolution on Earth, we must be able to place Man himself correctly in the whole Universe, in a temporal sense. The customary belief in the law of the conservation of force, and especially that of the conservation of substance, hinders this. The law of the conservation of force is one which would so place Man in the Universe that he stands there as a mere product of nature. Attempts have been made to discover the procedure of the transformation through combustion of what man takes in as nourishment, and to find out how the heat of combustion is set up and how other forces arise in man as transformed forces of the food. Such attempts have already been made in modern times by students. They are like thoughts which find expression somewhat in the following way. A man sees a building, he hears that it is a Bank, and endeavours by some method to calculate how much money is put into the Bank and how much taken out; and finding that the amounts are the same, draws the conclusion that the money has either transformed itself in there or has remained the same, but that there are no officials there in the Bank at all. This is approximately the logic of the thought that whatever a man has eaten may be found again in the transformed forces of his calefaction, his activity. Here too courage is lacking actually to put to the test the depth of thought underlying these modern principles. One might indeed arrive at many things by testing what we find in modern science; one has only to test its logic and more especially its reality.

Now the point is that on account of a mass of unreality and of illogical methods of thought, man is placed in the dilemma in which, as I have already pointed out, on the one hand stand ideals, as secondary effects, and on the other, natural occurrences; and we can find no means of building a bridge between them. At most an attempt is made today by chatterers in the sphere of philosophy to talk of natural occurrences in a way which flatters the primitive thought of man; this kind of talk has no desire to go into anything concrete, but prefers to acquiesce in such nonsense as that of Eucken or Bergson. What is of real consequence is, first of all, that one should ask oneself: What it is that man bears within him out of the whole compass of the Universe? What enables him as a member of the Universe so to work with his Ego, that one can see that what results from his activity is his own? Now of all things of the Universe, of all properties of being in the Universe, one such property is easier to study than others, if one only sets aside the prejudices of modern science, and that is the element of heat.

Certainly it must be said in the first place that even the animal world, and perhaps to some extent the plant world, have heat of their own; but the heat of the higher animal world and of man can be distinguished from other kinds of individual heat. And it is necessary to enquire now into what may be called the heat peculiar to man. For in this particular heat (leaving aside for the moment that of the animal, although what I am saying does not contradict the facts in the animal world; but it would lead us too far to include it in our present observations), in what man possesses as his own heat—in this he has his inmost corporeality, his inmost bodily field of activity. Our attention is not drawn to this, only because it escapes ordinary observation that the element of soul and spirit dwelling in man finds its immediate continuation in the effect it has on the heat within him. In speaking of man's bodily nature pure and simple, one should really speak of his heat-body. When we see a man before us, we are also confronted by an enclosed heat-space, which is at a higher temperature than its environment. In this increased temperature lives the soul and spirit element of man, and the soul and spirit in him is indirectly conveyed by means of the heat, to his other organs. In this way too, man's Will comes into existence.

The Will comes into being through the fact that in the first instance man's heat is acted upon, then his lung-organisation, thence his fluid-organisation, and thence only what is mineral or solid in his organism. Thus the human organisation must be represented as follows: The first part to be acted upon is the heat, then through heat the air is worked upon; thence an influence acts upon the water—the fluid-organism—and thence upon the solid organisation. (I have drawn attention to the fact that the solid part of man's organisation is the smallest, for he is more than 75% water-body.) This fact, that we really live and move in our heat element, is one of the physiological facts which we must keep carefully in mind, for we must not simply regard what forms an isolated heat-space as though it were just a space of pure uniform heat, having a higher temperature than the environment—no, we must regard it as having differentiated parts, warmer and colder. Just as our liver, lungs and so forth, differ from each other, so do the parts of our heat-organism; and this differentiation is continually changing inwardly. It is a constantly moving differentiation, and that which in the first instance unites with the activity of the soul and spirit has its being in this inner heat-organisation.

Philosophers today say that the effect of the soul and spirit upon the body cannot be perceived, because they imagine an arm as a sort of solid lever appliance; and of course they cannot see how the activity of the soul and spirit, which is conceived of as abstractly as possible, is to be transmitted to this solid lever-appliance. But one need only fix one's attention on the transition, and we find there that which has been organised for man out of the whole Universe. If we really study human thought, we find that the thought which asserts itself in our head has very much to do with this inner work that goes on within the heat-relationships. (This is not quite exactly spoken, but the inaccuracy can perhaps only be corrected in the course of time. We must try to get a complete picture, therefore I will begin with a more cursory description.) If we observe this inter-working of thoughts in the heat-space, in the isolated heat-space, it is evident that something like a co-operation of thought-activity and heat-activity takes place. In what does this consist? Here we come to something which demands very careful consideration.

Taking first the whole of the rest of man, and then his head, we can of course, trace a transmutation of matter (metabolism) from the former to the latter; and the fact that ultimately the head has to do with thought—that we perceive as a direct experience. Yet what really happens? We will lead up to this gradually by way of appropriate imagery. Let us suppose we have some fluid substance; we bring it to boiling point, then it evaporates, and changes into a more rarefied substance. This same process takes place far more intensely with human thought. All that plays its part as transmutation of substances in the human head, brings it about that all substance falls away like a sediment, it is precipitated, and nothing remains of it but the mere picture.

I will now use another example. Suppose you have a vessel containing a solution. This you cool down, which is again a heat-process. A sediment collects below, and above remains finer liquid. This is also the case with the human head; only here no substance whatever is collected above, nothing but pictures, all matter is expelled. This is the activity of the human head; it forms what are mere pictures, and expels the matter.

This process, as a matter of fact, takes place in everything that may be called the transition to pure thinking. All the material substance which has co-operated in the human inner life falls back into the organism, and pictures alone remain. It is a fact that when we rise to pure thought, we live in pictures. Our soul lives in pictures; and these pictures are the remains of all that has gone before. Not the substance, but the pictures remain.

What has just been presented can be followed into the thoughts themselves, for this process only takes place at the moment when thoughts change into mere pictures. At first thoughts live, as it were, embodied. They are permeated by substance; but as pictures they separate themselves out from this substance. If however, we go to work in a truly spiritually scientific way, we can quite easily distinguish pure thought, sense-free thought that has separated itself out from the material process, from all thoughts belonging to what I have called in these lectures the “instinctive wisdom of the ancients.”

This instinctive wisdom of the ancients, as we learn it today, bears in it, quite literally and exactly, the character of not being brought to such filtration of thought that all material substance fell away. Such falling away of all matter is a result of human development. Although not observed by external physiology, it is a fact that virtually—of course virtually and approximately—the thoughts of earthly humanity before the Mystery of Golgotha were always united with matter, and that at the time of the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha in Earth-life, humanity had arrived at the point in evolution of being able to dissociate itself from matter in the inner process of thought; matter-free thought became possible.

This is not to be regarded as unimportant! It is indeed of the utmost importance that we should observe this development in earthly life—that man in his evolution has become free from the embodiment of thoughts; that they have changed to pure pictures. Thus we may say that up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, embodied pictures lived in man; but after the Mystery of Golgotha, matter-free pictures lived in man. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Universe worked upon man in such a way that he could not attain to pictures free of the body, free of matter. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Universe has, as it were, withdrawn. Man has been transposed to an existence which only takes place in pictures.

What man felt before the Mystery of Golgotha as his connection with the Universe, that he related also to the Universe. He related human life on Earth to Heaven. This we can observe quite exactly. The Hebrew of old was clearly and distinctly conscious that the twelve tribes of old Israel were projections on Earth of the constellations of the Zodiac. The twelve-foldness of the Universe comes to expression in the life of man; and we may say that in those days the life of man was pictured as a result of the twelve-foldness of the Heavens, of the Zodiac. Every man felt the starry Heaven streaming into him; and above all a group of men felt themselves as a group into which the starry Heaven rayed. In the evolution of Hebrew antiquity we must go back to the time when we are told of the twelve sons of Jacob as the projection on Earth of the twelve regions of Heaven. Just as there was this in-streaming of the heavenly forces upon Earth-man in gray antiquity, so also, since in the different parts of the Earth's surface evolution came about at different times, in Europe we find a similar thing at a later time. We must go back to the Middle Ages and study the legends of King Arthur and his Round Table, those significant Celtic legends. For Mid-Europe developed later to the stage reached by the old Hebrews thousands of years before. Mid-Europe was only so far on at the time to which the Legends of Arthur and his Round Table are assigned. There was however, a difference. Hebrew antiquity evolved to the point where the in-streaming from the Universe still yielded embodied pictures. Then came the point of time when the body was withdrawn from the pictures, when the pictures had to be given a new substance. There was indeed a danger that, as regards his soul-life, man would pass completely into a picture-existence. This danger man did not at once recognise. Even Descartes was still floundering, and instead of saying: ‘I think, therefore I am not’, he said the opposite of the truth: ‘I think, therefore I am’. For when we live in pictures, we really are not! When we live in mere thoughts, it is the surest sign that we are not. Thoughts must be filled with substance. In order that man might not continue to live in mere pictures, in order that inner substance might once more be in the human being, that Being intervened who entered through the Mystery of Golgotha. Hebrew antiquity was the first to meet with this intervention of the central force, which was now to give back reality to the human soul that had become

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picture. This, however, was not at once understood. In the Middle Ages we have the last ramifications in the twelve around King Arthur's Table; but this was soon replaced by something else—the Parsifal Legend, which places One man over against the twelve, One man, who develops the twelve-foldness from out of his own inner centre. Thus, over against that picture which was essentially the Grail picture, must be the Parsifal picture, in which what man now possesses within him, rays out from the centre. The endeavour of those in the Middle Ages who wished to understand the Parsifal picture, who wished to make the Parsifal striving active in the human soul, was to bring into the picture-existence that could crystallise out in man after all the materiality had filtered away—to bring into it true substance, inwardness of being. Whereas the Grail legend shows still the in-streaming from without, the Parsifal figure is now set over against it, raying out from the pictures that which can restore reality to them.

Inasmuch as the Parsifal Legend appeared in this form, it represented the striving of humanity in the Middle Ages to find the way to the Christ within. It represents an instinctive striving to understand that which lives as the Christ in the evolution of humanity. If one studies inwardly what was experienced in the form of this figure of Parsifal, and compares it with what is to be found in the modern creeds, one receives a strong impulse towards that which must happen today. People are now satisfied with the mere husk of the word ‘Christ’ and believe that they thus possess Christ, whereas even the theologians themselves do not possess Him but hold to the outer interpretation of the word. In the Middle Ages there was still so much direct consciousness left, that by comprehending the representative of humanity, Parsifal, men were able to wrest their way upwards to the form of Christ. If we reflect on this we receive the impression of man's place in the whole Universe. Throughout the world of Nature, conversion of forces prevails. In man alone matter is thrown out by pure thought. That matter which is actually cast out of the human being by pure thought is also annihilated, it passes into nothingness.

If we reflect upon this, we must think of all Earth-existence as follows: Here is the Earth, and on the Earth, man; into man passes matter. Everywhere else it is transmuted. In man it is annihilated. The material Earth will pass away in proportion as matter is destroyed by man. When, some day, all the substance of the Earth will have passed through the human organism, being used there for thinking, the Earth will cease to be a cosmic body. And what man will have gained from this cosmic Earth will be pictures. These however, will have a new reality, they will have preserved an original reality. This reality is that which proceeds from the force which, as central force, makes itself felt through the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus, when we look to the end of the Earth, what do we see? The end of the Earth will come when all its substance is destroyed as described above. Man will then possess pictures of all that has taken place in earthly evolution. At the end of the earthly period the Earth will have sunk into the Universe, and there would remain merely pictures, without reality. What gives them reality however, is the fact of the Mystery of Golgotha having been there in humanity; that gives these pictures inner reality for the life to come. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, a new beginning is set for the future existence of the Earth.

From this we can see that what is contained in our stream of evolution is not to be regarded merely as a continuous stream, where one thing is always related to another as effect to cause, but we must so consider the Earth-evolution that we recognise in the first place a pre-Christian evolution, out of which came all that men were able to think at that time, for what they were able then to think was contained in the Father-God, was imparted to the Earth through Him. The nature and work of the Father-God however, was such that what He created as Earth-evolution was given over to that part of Earth-evolution that tends to pass away. A new beginning was made with the Mystery of Golgotha. Of all that went before only pictures were to remain, as it were descriptive paintings of the world. These pictures were, however, to receive new reality through that which entered as Being into the evolution of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. That is the cosmic significance of the Mystery of Golgotha; that is what I meant years ago, when I said: Christianity will not be understood until it has penetrated even into the physics of our Earth, until we understand how, even in physical things, the Christian substance works in the world-existence. We have not grasped Christianity until we can say to ourselves: Precisely in the domain of heat such a change is taking place in man that through it matter is being destroyed and a purely picture-existence comes forth out of the matter; but through the union of the human soul with the Christ-substance this picture-existence is made into a new reality.

If we compare this thought, showing us the interweaving of what man has transformed into soul and spirit with physical existence, if we compare this whole thought with the cheerless scientific thoughts of modern times which can lead only to a blind alley, we shall see its great and deep significance, and we shall see how we are to regard thoughts like those of Julius Robert Mayer, which are in reality that which falls away from cosmic existence, even as ice and snow melt before the Sun. Man however, retains these pictures, and they derive a reality for the future because a new substance has laid hold of them, the substance which has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And through this, the thought of freedom is established for man and is united with scientific thinking. This comes about because man says: Not ‘conservation of matter and of energy’; but, ‘matter and energy have a temporal life allotted to them.’ We take part not in the developing material Universe, but in its decay, and we have now to raise ourselves out of it to mere picture-existence and permeate ourselves with That to which we can only devote ourselves with our free-will, to the Christ-Being. For He so stands in human evolution that man's connection with Him can only be a free one. Anyone who seeks to be constrained to recognise Christ cannot find His Kingdom, he can rise only to the Universal Father-God, who however, in our world, has now only a share in a decaying world, and precisely on account of the decay of His own world, has sent the Son. Spiritual cosmogony must unite with natural cosmogony, but they must unite in man—and that by a free act. Hence we can only say of one who wishes to prove freedom that he is still at an ancient heathen standpoint. All proofs of freedom fail; our task is not to prove freedom, but to take hold of it. It is grasped when one understands the nature of sense-free thinking. Sense-free thinking however needs again the connection with the world, and this connection it does not find unless it unites with what has been introduced into the evolution of the world as new substance through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus the bridge between natural and moral cosmogony lies in a right understanding of Christianity. It might at first appear very strange that just those who uphold the modern creeds—as well as ancient creeds that extend their influence into modern life—do not desire a science leading towards Christianity, but desire a science as materialistic as possible, so that an unscientific faith may hold its own alongside of it.

In this connection we might say: Modern materialism and reactionary Christianity are very closely related, for the latter has driven mankind into the conception that things spiritual must not be penetrated by true knowledge. Knowledge must be kept free from the Spiritual, must be kept away from it, must extend only to the material. Thus on the one hand stands the advocate of one or other creed, who says: Science extends only to what is sense-perceptible; all else must be grasped by faith alone. On the other side stands the materialist, who says: science extends only to what is sense-perceptible; and faith I have given up.

Spiritual Science is not related to materialism. Modern creeds are indeed very closely related to it; that is to say, old creeds as introduced into modern life are indeed closely related to materialism.

I think I have now shown how the possibility of permeating the moral law with what we can know of nature, and conversely, of permeating nature-knowledge with moral law—is bound up with Spiritual Science. For the phantom which figures today in external science as Man, that delusive picture which shows Man as a configuration of mineral substance, simply does not exist. Man is just as much organised into the Fluid element as into the Solid; he is organised also into the element of Air, and above all, into that of Heat. When we come as far as Heat, we find the transition to the soul-and-spirit nature, for in Heat we have already the transition from Space to Time; and that which is of the soul flows in the temporal. Beyond Heat we pass more and more out of Space into Time, and it becomes possible, by the roundabout way here indicated, to seek the moral in the physical. Indeed it might be said that one who thinks short-sightedly will scarcely arrive at the connection of the moral with the physical in human nature—for one might certainly go to meet death as a miscreant without dislocating a limb, but remaining a well-formed man. The heat condition in the man is however not examined. The heat condition is changed far more subtly and delicately than is supposed, and works back upon what man carries through death. Today the method of study is such that we look up into abstraction, we have our thoughts up there; and we look down into the physical-material. We do not make the transition unless we pass over to the inwardly stirring heat lying between these, which has, at least for human instinct, still a physical as well as a soul aspect. We can develop warmth for our fellows morally—soul-warmth, which is the counterpart of physical warmth. This soul-warmth however, does not arise through a physical change in the sense of Julius Robert Mayer's theory; it arises—but how does it arise? I might say that here it gives palpable evidence of itself. Why do we speak of ‘warm’ feelings? Because we feel, we experience that the feeling we call ‘warm’ gives the picture of outer, physical warmth. The warmth percolates into the picture. What today is only soul-warmth will in a future cosmic existence play a physical part, for the Christ-Impulse will live therein. What today is simply picture-warmth in our world of Feeling—will live on, that it may become physical when the Earth-warmth has disappeared, for it is what the Christ-Substance, the Christ-Nature is. Let us try to find that delicate connection between external physical warmth and that which we instinctively call warmth of feeling; let us try to find it. Let us go to what Goethe said in his book called ‘The Material-Moral effects of Colours’, let us see how in his colour-perception he places the cooling colours on one side, and the warming colours on the other; how he unites the material-moral with the physical conditions which can to a certain extent be measured with a thermoscope, and shows how the element of soul interplays with the external and physical. Then we arrive at one aspect of how a moral cosmogony can be found in the study of Goethe.

The Jesuits of course hate this alliance. Therefore the best book on Goethe written out of the Jesuit thought is a poisonous book, a terrible book, though much more ingenious and effective than anything written about him elsewhere, because written with inner Jesuitical rhetoric. I refer to the three-volumed work on Goethe by Father Baumgartner. It is full of spite and malice, but it is both powerful and effective. We may be very sure that in that world, of which many people have no conception, a world which opposes us too, Goethe is better known than he is among more cultured circles. Those who appreciate Goethe and understand him from the positive standpoint, form but a small community. There is a large community of those who hate him; we do not conceive it half large enough. Some time ago I pointed out how little people are awake to what lives among us—I once said I would have liked counts to be taken at the door of all those who knew the German work, Weber's Thirteen Limetrees, a work that was truly Roman Catholic in the most positive sense. I should like to know how many it would be! The result would have been deplorable. Yet soon after publication this work ran through hundreds of editions. Have those who bring humanity forward any idea in their waking consciousness of how widespread these things are? That they have a widespread effect is certain; so too have those things from which the conflict with us proceeds. Whereas we have a small community which holds to Goethe, but is yet never able to point to anything of importance from Goethe's wisdom, the Jesuit book on Goethe is written with great cleverness and acumen—and that is precisely what we need, that we may be filled with spirit that is awake. Spiritual Science will surely succeed if a wakeful spiritual life really takes root in us.