The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of these lectures we have seen that the middle of the nineteenth century is an important time in the development of Western humanity. Attention was called to the fact that in a sense the culmination of the materialistic way of thinking and the materialistic world view occurred during this time. Yet it also had to be pointed out that this trend that has emerged in the human being since the fifteenth century was really something spiritual. Thus, it can be said that the characteristic of this developmental phase of recent human evolution was that simultaneously with becoming the most spiritual, the human being could not take hold of this spirituality. Instead, human beings filled themselves only with materialistic thinking, feeling, and even with materialistic will and activity. Our present age is still dominated by the aftereffects of what occurred in so many people without their being aware of it, and then reached its climax in mankind's development. What was the purpose of this climax? It occurred because something decisive was meant to take place in regard to contemporary humanity's attainment of the consciousness soul stage.

In focusing on the evolution of humanity from the third post-Atlantean epoch until approximately the year 747 (see sketch) before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that a process runs its course that can be called the development of the sentient soul in humanity. Then the age of the rational or mind soul begins and lasts roughly until the year 1413. It reaches its high point in that era of which external history has little to report. It must be taken into consideration, however, if European development is to be comprehended at all. This culmination point occurs approximately in the year 333 after Christ. Since the year 1413, we are faced with the development of the consciousness soul, a development we are still involved in and that saw a decisive event around the year 1850, or better, 1840.

A.D. 333

 ----------747-----------/-------------1413----------1840 Sentient Soul........Rational Soul....Consciousness Soul 

For mankind as a whole, matters had reached a point around 1840 where, insofar as the representative personalities of the various nations are concerned, we can say that they were faced with an intellect that had already assumed its most shadowy form. (Following this, we shall have to consider the reaction of the individual nations.) The intellect had assumed its shadowlike character. I tried yesterday to characterize this shadow nature of the intellect. People in the civilized world had evolved to the extent that, from then on it was possible on the basis of the general culture and without initiation to acquire the feeling: We possess intellect. The intellect has matured, but insofar as its own nature is concerned, it no longer has a content. We have concepts but these concepts are empty. We must fill them with something.

This, in a sense, is the call passing through humanity, though dimly and inaudibly. But in the deep, underlying, subconscious longings of human beings lives the call, the wish to receive a content, substance, for the shadow nature of rational thinking. Indeed, it is the call for spiritual science.

This call can also be comprehended concretely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the human organization, in the physical part of which this shadowy intellect is trained, had simply progressed to the point where it could cultivate this empty shadowy intellect particularly well. Now, something was required for this shadowy intellect; it had to be filled with something. This could only happen if the human being realized: I have to assimilate something of what is not offered to me on the earth itself and does not dwell there, something I cannot learn about in the life between birth and death. I actually have to absorb something into my intellect that, although it was extinguished and became obscured when I descended with the results of my former earth lives out of spiritual soul worlds into a physical corporeality, nevertheless rests in the depths of my soul. From there, I have to bring it up once again, I have to call to mind something that rests within me simply by virtue of the fact that I am a human being of the nineteenth century.

Earlier, it would not have been possible for human beings to have practiced self-awareness in the same manner. This is why they first had to advance in their human condition to the point where the physical body increasingly acquired the maturity to perfect and utilize the shadowy intellect completely. Now, at least among the most advanced human beings, the physical bodies had reached the point where one could have said, or rather, since then it is possible to say: I wish to call to mind what it is that I am seeking to bring up from the depths of my soul life in order to pour a content into this shadowy intellect. This shadowy intellect would have been filled with something and in this way the consciousness soul age would have dawned. Therefore, at this point in time, the occasion arose where the consciousness soul could have unfolded.

Now you will say: Yes, but the whole era prior to that, beginning with the year 1413, was the age of the consciousness soul. Yes, certainly, but at first it has been a preparatory development. You need only consider what basic conditions existed for such a preparation particularly in this period as compared to all earlier times. Into this period falls, for example, the invention of the printing press; the dissemination of the written word. Since the fifteenth century, people by and by have received a great amount of spiritual content by means of the art of printing and through writing. But they absorb this content only outwardly; it is the main feature of this period that an overwhelming sum of spiritual content has been assimilated superficially. The nations of the civilized world have absorbed something outwardly which the great masses of people could receive only by means of audible speech in earlier times. It was true of the period of rational development, and in the age of the sentient soul it was all the more true that, fundamentally speaking, all dissemination of learning was based on oral teaching. Something of the psycho-spiritual element still resounds through speech. Especially in former days, what could be termed “the genius of language” definitely still lived in words. This ceased to be when the content of human learning began to be assimilated in abstract forms, through writing and printed works. Printed and written words have the peculiarity of in a sense extinguishing what the human being brings with him at birth from his pre-earthly, heavenly existence.

It goes without saying that this does not mean that you should forthwith cease to read or write. It does mean that today a more powerful force is needed in order to raise up what lies deep within the human being. But it is necessary that this stronger force be acquired. We have to arrive at self-awareness despite the fact that we read and write; we have to develop this stronger faculty, stronger in comparison to what was needed in earlier times. This is the task in the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

Before taking a look at how the influences of the spiritual world have now started to flow down in a certain way into the physical, sensory world, let us pose the question today, How did the nations of modern civilization actually meet this point of time in 1840?

From earlier lectures we know that the representative people for the development of the consciousness soul, hence for what matters particularly in our age, is the Anglo-Saxon nation. The Anglo-Saxon people are those who through their whole organization are predisposed to develop the consciousness soul to a special degree. The prominent position occupied by the Anglo-Saxon nation in our time is indeed due to the fact that this nation is especially suited for the development of the consciousness soul. But now let us ask ourselves from a purely external viewpoint, How did this Anglo-Saxon nation arrive at this point in time that is the most significant one in modern cultural development?

It can be said that the Anglo-Saxon nation in particular has survived for a long time in a condition—naturally with the corresponding variations and metamorphoses—that could perhaps be described best by saying, Those inner impulses, which had already made way for other forms in Greek culture, were preserved in regard to the inner soul condition of the Anglo-Saxon people. The strange thing in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. is that the nations experienced what is undergone at different periods, that the various ages move, as it were, one on top of the other. The problem is that such matters are extraordinarily difficult to notice because in the nineteenth century all sorts of things already existed—reading, writing—and because the living conditions prevailing in Scotland and England were different from those in Homeric times.

And yet, if the soul condition of the people as a nation is taken into consideration, the fact is that this soul condition of the Homeric era, which in Greece was outgrown in the tragic age and changed into Sophoclism, has remained. This age, a kind of patriarchal conception of life and existence, was preserved in the Anglo-Saxon world up until the nineteenth century. In particular, this patriarchal life spread out from the soul condition in Scotland. This is the reason why the influence proceeding from the initiation centers in Ireland did not have an effect on the Anglo-Saxon nation. As was mentioned on other occasions, that influence predominantly affected continental Europe. On the British isle itself, the predominant influence originated from initiation truths that came down from the north, from Scotland. These initiation truths then permeated everything else. But there is an element in the whole conception of the human personality that, in a sense, has remained from primordial times. This still has aftereffects; it lingers on even in the way, say, the relationship between Whigs and Tories develops in the British Parliament. The fact is that fundamentally we are not dealing with the difference between liberal and conservative views. Instead, we have to do with two political persuasions for which people today really have no longer any perception at all.

Essentially, the Whigs are the continuation of what could be called a segment of mankind imbued with a general love of humanity and originating in Scotland. According to a fable, which does have a certain historical background, the Tories were originally Catholicizing horse thieves from Ireland. This contrast, which then expressed itself in their particular political strivings, reflects a certain patriarchal existence. This patriarchal existence retained certain primitive forces, which can be observed in the kind of attitude exhibited by the owners of large properties toward those people who had settled on these lands as their vassals.

This relationship of subservience actually lasted until the nineteenth century; nobody was elected to Parliament who did not possess a certain power by virtue of being a landowner. We only have to consider what this implies. Such matters are not weighed in the right manner. Just think what it signifies, for example, that it was not until the year 1820 that English Parliament repealed the law according to which a person was given the death penalty for having stolen a pocket watch or having been a poacher. Until then, the law decreed that such misdeeds were capital offenses. This certainly demonstrates the way in which particular, ancient, and elementary conditions had remained. Today, people observe life in their immediate surroundings and then extend the fundamental aspects of present-day civilization backwards, so to speak. In regard to the most important regions of Europe, they are unaware of how recently these things have developed from quite primitive conditions.

Thus, it is possible to say that these patriarchal conditions survived as the foundation and basis of a society that was subsequently infused with the most modern impulse, unimaginable in the social structure without the development of the consciousness soul. Just consider all the changes in the social structure of the eighteenth century due to the technological metamorphosis in the textile industry and the like. Note how the mechanical, technological element moved into this patriarchal element. Try to form a clear idea of how, owing to the transformation of the textile industry, the nascent modern Proletariat pushes into the social structure that is based on this patriarchal element, this relationship of landowner to subjects. Just think of this chaotic intermingling, think how the cities develop in the ancient countryside and how the patriarchal attitude takes a daring plunge, so to say, into modern, socialistic, proletarian life.

To picture it graphically, we can actually say that this form of life develops in the way it existed in Greece approximately until the year 1000 B.C. (see drawing). Then it makes a daring jump and we suddenly find ourselves in the year A.D. 1820. Inwardly, the life of the year 1000 B.C. has been retained, but outwardly, we are in the eighteenth century, say 1770 (see arrows). Now everything that then existed in modern life, indeed, even in our present time, pours in. But it is not until 1820 that this English life makes the connection, finds it necessary to do so (see drawing); it is not until then that these matters even became issues, such as the abolition of the death penalty for a minor theft. Thus we can say that, here, something very old has definitely flown together with the most modern element. Thus, the further development then continues on to the year 1840.

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Now, what had to occur specifically among the Anglo-American people during this time period, the first half of the nineteenth century? We have to recall that only after the year 1820, actually not until after 1830, it became necessary to pass laws in England according to which children under twelve years of age were not allowed to be kept working in factories for more than eight hours a day, no more than twelve hours a day in the case of children between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Please, compare that with today's conditions! Just think what the broad masses of working people demand today as the eight-hour day! As yet, in the year 1820, boys were put to work in mines and factories in England for more than eight hours; only in that year was the eight-hour day established for them. The twelve-hour day still prevailed, however, in regard to children between twelve and eighteen.

These things must certainly be considered in the attempt to figure out the nature of the elements colliding with each other at that time. Basically, it could be said that England eased its way out of the patriarchal conditions only in the second third of the nineteenth century and found it necessary to reckon with what had slowly invaded the old established traditions due to technology and the machine. It was in this way that this nation, which is preeminently called upon to develop the consciousness soul, confronted the year 1840.

Now take other nations of modern civilization. Take what has remained of the Latin-Roman element; take what has carried over the Latin-Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, what has brought over the ancient culture of the intellectual soul as a kind of legacy into the epoch of the consciousness soul. Indeed, what had remained of this life of the intellectual soul reached its highest point, its culmination, in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. We note that the ideals, freedom, equality, and brotherhood appear all at once in the most extreme abstraction. We see them taken up by skeptics such as Voltaire,¹ by enthusiasts such as Rousseau;² we see them emerge generally in the broad masses of the people. We see how the abstraction, which is fully justified in this sphere, affects the social structure

It is a completely different course of events from the one over in England. In England, the vestiges of the old Germanic patriarchal life are permeated by what the element of modern technology and modern materialistic, scientific life could incorporate into the social structure. In France, we have tradition everywhere. We could say that the French Revolution has been enacted in the same manner in which a Brutus or a Caesar once acted in the most diverse ways in ancient Rome. Thus, here also, freedom, equality and brotherhood surfaced in abstract forms. Unlike in England, the old existing patriarchal element was not destroyed from the outside. Instead, the Roman juridical tradition, the adherence to the ancient concept of property and ownership of land, inheritance laws, and so on, what had been established in the Roman-juristic tradition was corroded by abstraction, driven asunder by abstraction.

We need only consider the tremendous change the French Revolution brought to all of European life. We only need remind ourselves that prior to the French Revolution those who, in a sense, distinguished themselves from the masses of the nation also had legal privileges. Only certain people could aspire to particular positions in government. What the French Revolution demanded based on abstraction and the shadowlike intellect was to make breaches into that system to undermine it. But it did bear the stamp of the shadowy intellect, the abstraction. Therefore, the demands that were being made fundamentally remained a kind of ideology. For this reason, we can say that anything that is of the shadowy intellect immediately turns into its opposite.

Then we observe Napoleonism; we watch the experimentation in the public and social realm during the course of the nineteenth century. The first half of the nineteenth century was certainly experimentation without a goal in France. What is the nature of the events through which somebody like Louis-Philippe, for example, becomes king of France, and so on—what sort of experimenting is carried out? It is done in such a way that one can recognize that the shadowy intellect is incapable of truly intervening in the actual conditions. Everything basically remains undone and incomplete; it all remains as legacy of ancient Romanism. We are justified in saying that even today the relationship to, say, the Catholic Church, which the French Revolution had quite clearly defined in abstraction, has not been clarified in France in external, concrete reality. And how unclear was it time and again in the course of the nineteenth century! Abstract reasoning had struggled up to a certain level during the Revolution; then came experimentation and the inability to cope with external conditions. In this way, this nation encountered the year 1840.

We can also consider other nations. Let us look at Italy, for instance, which, in a manner of speaking, still retained a bit of the sentient soul in its passage through the culture of the intellect. It brought this bit of the sentient soul into modern times and therefore did not advance as far as the abstract concepts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood attained in the French Revolution. It did, however, seek the transition from a certain ancient group consciousness to individual consciousness in the human being. Italy faced the year 1840 in a manner that allows us to say, The individual human consciousness trying to struggle to the fore in Italy was in fact constantly held down by what the rest of Europe now represented. We can observe how the tyranny of Habsburg weighed terribly on the individual human consciousness that tried to develop in Italy. We see in the 1820's the strange Congress of Verona³ that tried to determine how one could rise up against the whole substance of modern civilization. We note that there proceeded from Russia and Austria a sort of conspiracy against what the modern consciousness in humanity was meant to bring. There is hardly anything as interesting as the Congress of Verona, which basically wished to answer the question: How does one go about exterminating everything that is trying to emerge as modern consciousness in mankind?

Then we see how the people in the rest of Europe struggled in certain ways. Particularly in Central Europe, only a small percentage of the population was able to attain to a certain consciousness, experiencing in a certain manner that the ego is now supposed to enter into the consciousness soul. We notice attempts to achieve this at a certain high mental level. We can see it in the peculiar high cultural level of Goethe's age in which a man like Fichte was active;⁴ we see how the ego tried to push forward into the consciousness soul. Yet we also realize that the whole era of Goethe actually was something that lived only in few individuals. I believe people study far too little what even the most recent past was like. They simply think, for example the Goethe lived from 1749 until 1832; he wrote Faust and a number of other works. That is what is known of Goethe and that knowledge has existed ever since.

Until the year 1862, until thirty years after Goethe's death, with few exceptions, it was impossible for people to acquire a copy of Goethe's works. They were restricted; only a handful of people somehow owned a copy of his writings. Hence, Goetheanism had become familiar only to a select few. It was not until the 1860's that a larger number of people could even find out about the particular element that lived in Goethe. By that time, the faculty of comprehension for it had disappeared again. An actual understanding of Goethe never really came about, and the last third of the nineteenth century was not suited at all for such comprehension.

I have often mentioned that in the 1870's Hermann Grimm gave his “Lectures on Goethe” at the University of Berlin.⁵ That was a special event and the book that exists as Hermann Grimm's Goethe is a significant publication in the context of central European literature. Yet, if you now take a look at this book, what is its substance? Well, all the figures who had any connection with Goethe are listed in it but they are like shadow images having only two dimensions. All these portrayals are shadow figures, even Goethe is a two-dimensional being in Hermann Grimm's depiction. It is not Goethe himself. I won't even mention the Goethe whom people at the afternoon coffee parties of Weimar called “the fat Privy Councillor with the double chin.” In Hermann Grimm's Goethe, Goethe has no weight at all. He is merely a two-dimensional being, a shadow cast on the wall. It is the same with all the others who appear in the book; Herder—a shadow painted on a wall. We encounter something a little more tangible in Hermann Grimm's description of those persons coming from among the ordinary people who are close to Goethe, for example, Friederike von Sesenheim who is portrayed there so beautifully, or Lilli Schoenemann from Frankfurt—hence those who emerge from a mental atmosphere other than the one in which Goethe lived. Those are described with a certain “substance.” But figures like Jacobi and Lavater are but shadow images on a wall. The reader does not penetrate into the actual substance of things; here, we can observe in an almost tangible way the effects of abstraction. Such abstraction can certainly be charming, as is definitely the case with Hermann Grimm's book, but the whole thing is shadowy. Silhouettes, two-dimensional beings, confront us in it.

Indeed, it could not be otherwise. For it is a fact that a German could not call himself a German in Germany at the time when Hermann Grimm, for example was young. The way one spoke of Germans during the first half of the nineteenth century is misunderstood, particularly at present. How “creepy” it seems to people in the West, those of the Entente, when they start reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation today and find him saying: “I speak simply to Germans, to Germans as such.” In the same way, the harmless song “Germany, Germany above all else”^T1 is interpreted foolishly, for this song means nothing more than the desire to be a German, not a Swabian, a Bavarian, an Austrian, a Franconian, or Thuringian. Just as this song referred only to Germans as such, so Fichte wished simply to address himself to Germans, not to Austrians, Bavarians, those from the province of Baden, Wuerttemberg, Franconia, or Prussia; he wanted to speak “to Germans.” This is naturally impossible to understand, for instance, in a country where it has long since become a matter of course to call oneself a Frenchman. However, in certain periods in Germany, you were imprisoned if you called yourself German. You could call yourself an Austrian, a Swabian, a Bavarian, but it amounted to high treason to call yourself a German. Those who called themselves Germans in Bavaria expressed the sentiment that they did not wish to look up merely to the Bavarian throne and its reign within Bavaria's clearly defined borders, but implied that they also wished to look beyond the borders of Bavaria. But that was high treason! People were not permitted to call themselves Germans.

It is not understood at all today that these things that are said about Germans and Germany, refer to this unification of everything German. Instead, the absurd nonsense is spread that, for example, Hoffmann's song refers to the notion that Germany should rule over all the nations of the world although it means nothing else but: Not Swabia, not Austria, not Bavaria above all else in the world, but Germany above all else in the world, just as the Frenchman says: France above all else in the world. It was, however, the peculiar nature of Central Europe that basically a tribal civilization existed there. Even today, you can see this tribal culture everywhere in Germany. A Wuerttembergian is different from a Franconian. He differs from him even in the formulation of concepts and words, indeed, even in the thought forms disseminated in literature. There really is a marked difference, if you compare, say, a Franconian, such as cloddy Michael Conrad—using modern literature as an example—with something that has been written at the same time by a Wuerttembergian, hence in the neighboring province.

Something like this plays into the whole configuration of thoughts right into the present time. But everything that persists in this way and lives in the tribal peculiarities remains untouched by what is now achieved by the representatives of the nations. After all, in the realm commonly called Germany something has been attained such as Goetheanism with all that belongs to it. But it has been attained by only a few intellectuals; the great masses of people remain untouched by it. The majority of the population has more or less maintained the level of central Europe around the year A.D. 300 or 400. Just as the Anglo-Saxon people have stayed on the level of around the year 1000 B.C., people in Central Europe have remained on the level of the year A.D. 400. Please do not take this in the sense that a terrible arrogance might arise with the thought that the Anglo-Saxons have remained behind in the Homeric age, and we were already in the year A.D. 400. This is not the way to evaluate these matters. I am only indicating certain peculiarities.

In turn, the geographic conditions reveal that this level of general soul development in Germany lasted much longer than in England. England's old patriarchal life had to be permeated quickly with what formed the social structure out of the modern materialistic, scientific, and technological life first in the area of the textile industry, and later also in the area of other technologies. The German realm and Central Europe in general opposed this development initially, retaining the ancient peculiarities much longer. I might say, they retained them until a point in time when the results of modern technology already prevailed fully all over the world. To a certain extent, England caught up in the transformation of the social structure in the first half of the nineteenth century. Everything that was achieved there definitely bypassed central Europe.

Now, Central Europe did absorb something of abstract revolutionary ideas. They came to expression through various movements and stirrings in the 1840's in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this region sat back and waited, as it were, until technology had infused the whole world. Then, a strange thing happened. An individual—we could also take other representatives—who in Germany had acquired his thinking from Hegelianism, namely, Karl Marx, went over to England, studied the social structure there and then formulated his socialist doctrines. At the end of the nineteenth century, Central Europe was then ready for these social doctrines, and they were accepted there. Thus, if we tried to outline in a similar manner what developed in this region, we would have to say: The development progressed in a more elementary way even though a great variety of ideas were absorbed from outside through books and printed matter.

The conditions of A.D. 400 in central Europe continued on, then made a jump and basically found the connection only in the last third of the nineteenth century, around the year 1875. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nation met already the year 1840 with a transformation of conditions, with the necessity of receiving the consciousness soul, the German people continued to dream. They still experienced the year 1840 as though in a dream. Then they slept through the grace period when a bridge could have been built between leading personalities and what arose out of the masses of the people in the form of the proletariat. The latter then took hold of the socialist doctrine and thereby, beginning about the year 1875, exerted forcible, radical pressure in the direction of the consciousness soul. Yet even this was in fact not noticed; in any case it was not channeled in any direction, and even today it is basically still evaluated in the most distorted way.

In order to arrive at the anomalies at the bottom of this, we need only call to mind that Oswald Spengler, who wrote the significant book The Decline of the West, also wrote a booklet concerning socialism of which, I believe, 60,000 copies or perhaps more have been printed. Roughly, it is Spengler's view that this European, this Western civilization, is digging its own grave. According to Spengler, by the year 2200, we will be living on the level of barbarism. We have to agree with Spengler concerning certain aspects of his observations; for if the European world maintains the course of development it is pursuing now, then everything will be barbarized by the time the third millennium arrives. In this respect Spengler is absolutely correct. The only thing Spengler does not see and does not want to see is that the shadowy intellect can be raised to Imaginations out of man's inner being and that hence the whole of Western humanity can be elevated to a new civilization.

This enlivening of culture through the intentions of anthroposophical spiritual science is something a person like Oswald Spengler does not see. Rather, he believes that socialism—the real socialism, as he thinks, a socialism that truly brings about social living—has to come into being prior to this decline. The people of the Occident, according to him, have the mission of realizing socialism. But, says Oswald Spengler, the only people called upon to realize socialism are the Prussians. This is why he wrote the booklet Prussianism and Socialism. Any other form of socialism is wrong, according to Spengler. Only the form that revealed its first rosy dawn in the Wilhelminian age, only this form of socialism is to capture the world. Then the world will experience true, proper socialism.

Thus speaks a person today whom I must count among the most brilliant people of our time. The point is not to judge people by the content of what they say but by their mental capacities. This Oswald Spengler, who is master of fifteen different scientific disciplines, is naturally “more intelligent than all the writers, doctors, teachers, and ministers” and so on. We can truly say that with his book about the decline of the West he has presented something that deserves consideration, and that, by the way, is making a most profound impression on the young people in Central Europe. But next to it stands this other idea that I have referred to above, and you see precisely how the most brilliant people can arrive today at the strangest notions. People take hold of the intellect prevalent today and this intellect is shadowy. The shadows flit to and fro, one is caught up in one shadow, then one tries to catch up with another—nothing is alive. After all, in a silhouette, in a woman's shadow image cast on the wall, her beauty is not at all recognizable. So it is also with all other matters when they are viewed as shadow images. The shadow image of Prussianism can certainly be confused with socialism. If a woman turns her back to the wall and her shadow falls on it, even the ugliest woman might be considered beautiful. Likewise, Prussianism can be mistaken for socialism if the shadowlike intellect inwardly pervades the mind of a genius.

This is how we must look at things today. We must not look at the contents, we must aim for the capacities; that is what counts. Thus, it has to be acknowledged that Spengler is a brilliant human being, even though a great number of his ideas have to be considered nonsense. We live in an age when original, elementary judgments and reasons must surface. For it is out of certain elementary depths that one has to arrive at a comprehension of the present age and thus at impulses for the realities of the future.

Naturally, the European East has completely slept through the results of the year 1840. Just think of the handful of intellectuals as opposed to the great masses of the Russian people who, because of the Orthodox religion, particularly the Orthodox ritual, are still deeply immersed in Orientalism. Then think of the somnolent effect of men like Alexander I, Nicholas I, and all the other “I's” who followed them! What has come about today was therefore the element that aimed for this point in which the consciousness soul was to have its impact on European life.

We shall say more tomorrow.

• 1. Francois de Voltaire (actually d'Arouet), 1694–1778, French philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher and pedagogue.
• 3. Congress of Verona: Congress of the “Holy Alliance” (1822) to which all the European powers belonged with the exception of England and the Vatican. Under Metternich, it pursued a clearly reactionary course.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German philosopher.
• 5. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901, German art historian and literary critic.
• T1. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the German national anthem.

Yesterday I tried to outline the various preparations of different nations for the significant point in humanity's development in the middle of the nineteenth century that then, in a sense, flowed from that time on into our present age. All this can be illustrated through descriptions of the connections between external phenomena and the inner spiritual course of development. Today, we shall bring together several facts that can throw some light on the actual underlying history of the nineteenth century. After all, it is true that the middle of that century is the point when intellectual activity completely turned into a function, an occupation, of the human physical body. Whereas this activity of the intellect was a manifestation of the etheric body during the whole preceding age; from the eighth century B.C. until the fifteenth century A.D., it has increasingly become an activity of the physical body since that time. This process reached a culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Along with this, the human being has in fact become more spiritual than was previously the case.

The insights into the spiritual world that had come about earlier and had diminished since the beginning of modern times were derived, after all, from the more intensive union of the physical body with the etheric body. Simply because they were now in a position to carry out something completely nonphysical with their physical body, namely, intellectual activity, human beings thus became completely spiritual beings in regard to their activity. But as I already pointed out yesterday, they denied this spirituality. People related what they grasped mentally only to the physical world. And as I attempted to characterize it yesterday, the different nations were prepared in different ways for this moment in the development of modern civilization.

From this earlier characterization, the fundamental difference between the soul condition of the Roman-Latin segment of Europe's population and that of the Anglo-Saxon part will have become clear. A radical difference does indeed exist in regard to the inner soul constitution. This radical difference can best be characterized if certain spiritual streams that have run their course in humanity's evolution since ancient times and have been recognized long ago are juxtaposed to the contrast between France, Spain, Italy, and the inhabitants of the British Isles and their American descendants. This can be characterized in the following way. Everything that was part of the Ahura-Mazdao cult in the ancient Persian culture, mankind's looking up to the light, encountered in a diminished form in the Egypto-Chaldean civilizations and, even more diminished, in Greek culture, finally became abstract in the Roman culture. All this left residual traces in what has been preserved throughout the Middle Ages and the modern era in the Romance segment of the European population. The last offshoot of the Ormuzd or Ahura-Mazdao culture has remained behind, as it were, whereas, on the other hand, the stream that was considered the ahrimanic one in the ancient Persian world view emerges as modern culture. Indeed, like Ormuzd and Ahriman, these two cultures confront each other in recent times. We find poured into this Ormuzd stream everything that comes from the Roman Church. The forms Christianity assumed by enveloping itself with the Roman-juristic forms of government, by turning into the papal church of Rome, are the last offshoots. We have indicated much else from which these forms originated, but together with all these things they are the last offshoots of the Ormuzd cult. These last traces can still be detected in the offering of the Mass and all that is present in it. A proper understanding of what lies at the basis of these traces will be attained only if less value is placed on insignificant aspects as compared to the great streams of humanity, only if in studying these matters the true value is sought in the forms of thought and feeling that hold sway.

In regard to external civilization, modern impulses came to expression in a tumultuous way in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. As I indicated yesterday, there lived in it though in abstractions, the appeal addressed to the individual, the conscious human being. We might actually say, like a counterblow against what continued to survive in Romanism, these abstractions of freedom, equality, and brotherhood came into being out of the world of ideas. We must distinguish between what found its way into the Roman forms of thought and feeling out of ancient spiritual streams, and the element that originated from human nature. After all, we must always distinguish the essence of a single nationality from the ongoing stream of humanity in general. We shall see how a light that clearly points to the characteristic moment in humanity's evolution in that century also takes shape precisely in the French civilization later on in the nineteenth century. But the national element in the French, Spanish, and Italian cultures contains in itself the continuation of the Ormuzd element in those times in which this element—naturally transformed through the Catholicity of Christianity—appears as a shadow of an ancient civilization. Therefore, we see that despite all aspirations towards freedom Romanism became and has remained the bearer of what the Roman Church in its world dominion represents.

You really do not understand much of the course of European development, if you do not clearly realize in what sense Roman ecclesiasticism continues to live in Romanism to this day. Indeed even the thought forms employed in the struggle against the institutions of the Church are in turn themselves derived from this Roman Catholic thinking. Thus, we have to distinguish between the general stream of humanity's evolution, which has assumed abstract character and flows through the French Revolution, and the particular national, the Roman-Latin stream, which is actually completely infected with Roman Catholicity.

Out of this stream of Roman Catholicity, a remarkable phenomenon arises in the beginning of the nineteenth century. This phenomenon and its significance for the development in Europe is given far too little attention. Most people who spend their lives being asleep to the phenomena of civilization know nothing of what has been living in the depths of European culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century and is still fully grounded in Roman Catholicity. All this is concentrated, I should say, in the first third of the nineteenth century in the activities of a certain personality, namely, de Maistre.¹ De Maistre is actually the representative of the Catholicity borne by the waves of Romanism, Catholicity that has the aspiration to lead the whole of Europe back into its bosom. With de Maistre, a personality of the greatest imaginable genius, of compelling spirituality but Roman Catholic through and through, appears on the scene.

Let us now give some consideration to something that is completely unfamiliar to those who think along Protestant lines, yet is present in a relatively large number of people in Europe. It is not commonly known that a spiritual stream does in fact exist that is quite unknown to what has otherwise developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century, but that is itself well-acquainted with the effects of this new mentality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

Let us try to characterize the world view in the minds of those for whom de Maistre was a brilliant representative in the first third of the nineteenth century. He himself has long since died, but the spirit that inspired him lives on in a relatively large number of people in Europe. Our present is the time in which it is coming to life again, assuming new forms and seeking to gain larger and larger dimensions. We shall characterize the world view at its roots in a few sentences. This view holds that since the beginning of the fifteenth century the course of human life on earth is going downhill. Since that time, only dissipation, godlessness, and vapidity have proliferated in European civilization; the mere intellect focusing on usefulness has gripped humanity. Truth, on the other hand, which is identical with the spirituality of the world, expresses something different since time immemorial. The problem is that modern man has forgotten this ancient, sacred truth. This primordial, sacred truth implies that man is a fallen creature. The human being has cause to appeal to his conscience and remorse in his soul so that he can lift himself up, so that his soul will not fall prey to materiality. But inasmuch as European humanity utilizes materiality since the middle of the fifteenth century, the European civilization is falling into ruin and with it the whole of mankind.

That is the world view whose main exponent is de Maistre. According to this view all of humanity falls into two categories, one representing the kingdom of God, the other representing the kingdom of this world. The followers of this view look upon the earth's population and distinguish those who they say belong to the kingdom of God. They are the ones who still believe in the ancient truths, who, in fact, have vanished in their true form since the beginning of the fifteenth century. Their noblest aftereffects can still be detected in the views of Augustine,² who also differentiates between human beings who are predestined to salvation and those predestined to damnation. The adherents of de Maistre claim that when one encounters a person in this world, he either belongs to the kingdom of God, or to the kingdom of this world. It only appears as though human beings were all mixed together. In the eyes of the spiritual world they are strictly separated from one another, and they can be distinguished from one another. In antiquity, those who belonged to the kingdom of the world, worshiped superstition, that is, they fashioned for themselves false images of the deity; since the beginning of the fifteenth century, they cling to unbelief. That is what de Maistre and his followers say. They know very well what the majority of the European population has slept through, namely, the new age that has in fact dawned since the beginning of the fifteenth century. They indicate this point in time; they indicate it as that moment in time when humanity forgot the source, the actual source of divine truth. The put it like this: Through sole use of the shadowy intellect, human beings found themselves in a position where the connecting link between them and the source of eternal truth was severed. Since that time, Providence no longer extends mercy to mankind, only justice, and this justice will hold sway on the day of Judgment.

If one relates something like this, it is like telling people a fairy tale; nevertheless, there are those in Europe who cling to this view that since the beginning of the fifteenth century divine world rule has assumed a quite different position in regard to earth humanity. They cling to this tenet just as modern scientists adhere to the law of gravity or something like that. Despite the fact that the existence of this view of life is of fundamental significance particularly for the present, people today do not wish to pay any heed to something like this. De Maistre sees the most pronounced defection from ancient truth in the French Revolution. He does not view it in the way we considered it, namely, as the arising in abstract form of what is supposed to direct human beings to the consciousness soul. Instead, he views this Revolution as the fall into unbelief, the worst thing that could have happened to modern humanity. The French Revolution in particular signifies to him that the seal has now been set on the fact that the divine world power no longer has any obligation to extend mercy in any form on the human being but merely justice, which will be sure to prevail on the Day of Judgment. It is assumed in these circles that those who will fall prey to the powers of doom are already predestined, and also already preordained are those who are the children of the Kingdom of God, who are destined to save themselves because they still cling to ancient wisdom that enjoyed its special bloom in the fourth century A.D.

Such an impulse pervades the text Observations About France de Maistre wrote in 1796 when he still lived in Piermont. Already then he reproached France, the France of the Revolution, for its long list of sins. Already then, he referred to the foundations of Romanism that still retain what has come down from ancient times. This sentiment is expressed even more strongly in de Maistre's later writings, and the latter are connected with the whole mission in world history de Maistre ascribed to himself.³

After all, he chose Petersburg as the setting for his activity; his later writings proceeded from there. De Maistre had the grandiose idea to tie in with Russianism, particularly with the element that had found its way since ancient times from Asia into the Orthodox Catholic, Russian religion. From there, he wished to create a connection to Romanism. He tried to bring about the great fusion between the element living in the Oriental manner of thinking in Russian culture, and the element coming from Rome. The article he wrote in Petersburg in 1810, ”Essay Concerning the Creative Principle of Political Constitutions,” is already imbued with this view. We can discern from this text how de Maistre refers back to what Christianity was in regard to its metaphysical view prior to the scholastic age, what it was in the first centuries and what was acceptable to Rome. De Maistre aimed for Roman, for Catholic, Christianity as a real power, but in a certain sense he even rejected what the Middle Ages had already produced as an innovation on the basis of Aristotle's philosophy. In a certain sense, de Maistre tried to exclude Aristotle, for the latter was to him already the preparation for what has appeared since the fifteenth century in the form of the modern faculty of reason. Through human faculties other than logic, de Maistre wanted to attain to a relationship with spirituality.

The essay he wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century, “Concerning the Pope,” moves particularly strongly in the direction of this concept of life. We might say that it is a text that exudes a classic spirit in its composition, a spirit that belongs, in a manner of speaking, to the finest times of French culture under Louis XIV. At the same time, it had as penetrating an effect as any inspired writing. The Pope is presented as the rightful ruler of modern civilization, and it is significant that this is being stated in Petersburg. The manner of presentation is such that one is supposed to distinguish between the temporal, namely, the corruption that has come into the world through a number of Popes, the objectionable elements in regard to some of the Popes, and the eternal principle of Roman Papacy. In a sense, the Pope is represented as incarnation of the spirit of the earth that is to rule over this earth. One is moved to say: All the warmth that lives in this essay about the Pope is the shining forth of Ormuzd's spirit that very nearly sees Ahura-Mazdao himself incarnated in the Roman Pope and therefore makes the demand that the Roman Catholic Church in its fusion with all that found its way from the Orient into Russia—for this is implied in the background—will rule supreme, that it will sweep away all that the intellectual culture has produced since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

De Maistre was really brilliantly effective in this direction. In 1816, his translation of Plutarch was published.⁴ In it he tried to demonstrate the sort of power that Christianity possessed; a power, so he thought, that had insinuated itself as thought form into Plutarch's dissertations although the latter was still a pagan. Finally, the last work from de Maistre's pen, again proceeding from Petersburg, Twilight Hours in St. Petersburg, was published in two volumes.⁵ First of all, everything I have already characterized appears in them in an especially pronounced form; in particular he depicts the radical struggle of Roman Catholicism against what appears on the British Isles as its counterpart.

If, on the one hand, we see how Roman Catholicism crystallizes in all this in a certain direction, if we note what is connected in the form of Roman Catholicism with personalities like Ignatius of Loyola,⁶ Alfonso di Liguori,⁷ Francis Xaverius,⁸ and others and relate this to the brilliant figure of de Maistre; if we observe everything that is present here, then, in a manner of speaking, we see the obsolete, archaic light of Ormuzd. On the other hand, we note what de Maistre sees arising on the British Isles and what he then assails cuttingly with the pungent acid of his penetrating mind. This struggle by de Maistre against the true essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit is one of the most grandiose spiritual battles that has ever taken place. In particular, he aims at the personality of the philosopher Locke⁹ and sees in him the very incarnation of the spirit that leads mankind into decline. He opposes Locke's philosophy brilliantly to excess.

We need only recall the significance of this philosophy. In the background, on the one hand, we must note the Roman principles of initiation that express themselves like a continuing Ormuzd worship. We must be aware of everything that flowed into this from somebody like Ignatius of Loyola,¹⁰ and in such grand manner from de Maistre himself. On the other hand, in contrast to everything that has its center in Roman Catholicism in Rome itself, yet is based on initiation and, I might say, is certainly the newest phase of the Ormuzd initiation, we have to observe all the secret societies that spread from Scotland down through England and of which English philosophy and politics are an expression. From a certain, different viewpoint, I have described that on another occasion. De Maistre is just as well informed about what makes itself felt out of an ahrimanic initiation principle as he is knowledgeable about what he is trying to bring to bear as the Ormuzd initiation in the new form for European civilization. De Maistre knows how to evaluate all these things; he is intelligent enough to recognize them esoterically, inasmuch as he attacks the philosopher Locke who in a sense is an offspring, an outward, exoteric offspring, of this other, ahrimanic initiation. He is attacking an important personality, the one who made his appearance with the epochal book Concerning Human Reason, which then greatly influenced French thinking. Subsequently, Locke was indeed revered by Voltaire.¹¹ His influence was such that Madam de Sevigne¹² remarked concerning an Italian writer who made Locke palatable in a literary sense for Italy, that the latter would have liked to consume Locke's rhetorical embellishments in every bowl of boullion.

Now de Maistre took a close look at Locke and said: It is impossible that Voltaire, for example, and other Frenchmen could have even read this Locke! In his book Twilight Hours in St. Petersburg de Maistre discusses in detail how writers actually gain world fame. He demonstrates that it is quite possible that Voltaire had never read Locke; he really could not have read him, otherwise he would have been smart enough not to defend Locke as he did.

Even though de Maistre sees a veritable devil in Voltaire, he still does him justice by saying this of him. And in order to substantiate this, he offers long essays on how individuals like Locke are written and spoken about in the world, individuals who are viewed as great men. This is notwithstanding the fact that in reality people are not concerned with gaining firsthand knowledge about them, but instead familiarize themselves with such individuals by means of secondary sources. It is as if humanity were imprisoned in error—this is how Locke affects these people. The whole modern way of thinking that, according to de Maistre's view, then led to the catastrophe of the French Revolution actually proceeds from Locke; in other words Locke is the exponent, the symptom, the historical symptom for this. From the point from which Locke proceeded, this way of thinking dominates the world. De Maistre scrutinizes Locke, and he says that there were few writers who had such an absolute lack of a sense of style as did Locke, and he demonstrates this in detail. He tries to prove in every instance that Locke's statements are so trivial, so matter of fact, that one need not reckon with them at all, that it is quite unnecessary to trouble one's thoughts with them. He states that Voltaire said Locke always clearly defined everything, but, asks de Maistre, what are these definitions by Locke? Nothing but truisms, “nonsensical tautologies,” to use a modern term, and ridiculous. According to him, all of Locke's pen pushing is supposedly a joke without style, without brilliance, full of tautologies and platitudes.

This is how de Maistre characterized something that became most valuable for modern mankind, namely, that people today see greatness in platitude, in popular style, in the lack of genius and style, in what can be found in the streets but passes itself off as philosophy.

Yet, de Maistre is actually a person who in all instances pays attention to the deeper spiritual principles, to the spiritually essential. It is most difficult for matters such as these encountered here to be made comprehensible to a person today. For the way a personality like de Maistre thinks is really quite foreign to present day human beings who are accustomed to the shadowy intellect. De Maistre not only observes the individual person; he sees the spiritual element working through that individual. What Locke wrote must be characterized in de Maistre's sense in the way I have just described it. However, de Maistre expresses this with extraordinary brilliance and geniality. At the same time, he says: If, in turn, I consider Locke as a person he was indeed a quite decent fellow; one can have nothing against him as a person. He is the corrupter of Western European humanity, but he is a decent person. If he would be born again today and would have to watch how human beings make use of this triviality that he himself recognized as such after death, he would cry bitter tears over the fact that people have fallen for his platitudes in this manner.

All this is expressed by de Maistre with tremendous forced and plausible emphasis. He is imbued with the impulse thus to annihilate what appears to him as the actual adversary of Roman Catholicism and what, according to his view, thrives especially on the other side of the Channel. I would like to read to you one passage verbatim from the “Petersburg Twilight Conversations,” where he speaks of the—to his view wretched—effect of Locke on politics: “These dreadful seeds”—so he says—“perhaps would not have come to fruition under the ice of his style; animated in the hot mud of Paris, they have produced the monster of the Revolution that has engulfed Europe.”

After having uttered such words against the spirit working through Locke, he again turns to Locke as a person. This is something that is so difficult to impress on people of our age who constantly confuse the external personality with the spiritual principle that expresses itself through that human being and see it as a unit. De Maistre always distinguishes what reveals itself as actual spirituality from the external human being. Now he turns again to the outward personality and says: He is actually a man who had any number of virtues, but he was gifted with them about as well as was that master of dance who, according to Swift,¹³ was so accomplished in all the skills of dance and had only one fault—he limped. Thus, says de Maistre, Locke was gifted with all virtues. Yet, de Maistre truly sees him as an incarnation of the evil principle—this is not my figure of speech, de Maistre himself uses this expression—that speaks through Locke and holds sway supersensibly since the beginning of the fifteenth century. One really gains some respect for the penetrating spirituality that imbued de Maistre. One must also be aware, however, that there really exist people who are gaining influence today and are on the verge now of winning back their influence over European civilization, who are definitely inspired by that spirituality that de Maistre represented on the highest level.

De Maistre still retained something of the more ancient, instinctive insights into the relationship between world and man. This is particularly evident from his discourse about the Sacrifice Offering and the ritual of the Sacrifice. He had somewhat of an awareness of the fact that what is linked to the physical body in regard to the consciousness soul must make itself felt independently in the human being and that it is embodied in the blood. Basically, it was de Maistre's view that the divine element had only been present in human evolution up to the fourth Christian century. He did not wish to acknowledge the Christ Who works on continuously. Above all, he tried to extinguish everything existing since the fifteenth century. He longed to return to ancient times. Thus, he acquired his particular view of the Christ, a view that possessed something of the ancient Yahweh, indeed of the old pagan gods, for he really went back to the cult of Ormuzd. And he gathered from this viewpoint that the divine element can only be sought far beyond the human consciousness soul, hence, beyond the blood. Based on such profound depths of his world view de Maistre expressed the thought that the gods—namely the gods of whom he spoke—have a certain distaste for the blood, and in the first place have to be appeased by the blood sacrifice. The blood has to offer itself up in sacrifice.¹⁴

It goes without saying that this is something the supremely enlightened modern human being laughs at. Yet it is something that has passed on from de Maistre to those who are his followers and who represent a segment of humanity that must be taken seriously, but who are also intimately connected with everything proceeding today from Roman ecclesiasticism. We must not forget that in de Maistre we confront the finest and most brilliant representative of what infused France from Romanism and what indeed has come to expression in French culture, I would say, in an ingenious but folk-oriented form. It is this that lives in French culture and has constantly brought it about that clericalism played a significant role in everything motivating French politics throughout the whole nineteenth century.

In France, the abstract impulses of freedom, equality, and brotherhood clashed with what existed there as Roman Catholicism. Actually, we must vividly feel what imbued a person such as Gambetta¹⁵ when, at a decisive moment, the deep sigh escaped from him: “Le clericalisme, voila l'ennemi!” (“Clericalism, that is the enemy!”). He sensed this clericalism that pulsed up from everything in the art of social experimentation during the first half of the nineteenth century. It lived in Napoleon III; it was something even the Commune¹⁶ had to struggle against. It was an element that survived into¹⁷ of the 1880's and the conflicts around the personality of Dreyfus;¹⁸ it is something that is alive even today.

An element is present in France that stands in an inner, spiritual, and absolutely radical difference to all that exists on the other side of the Channel in Great Britain and is basically embodied in the elements that remained behind from something else, from the various Masonic orders and lodges. Whereas, on the one hand, we are dealing with initiated Roman Catholicism, on the other hand we encounter the movements of secret societies, which I have already characterized here from another viewpoint and which represent the ahrimanic stream. There is a tremendous difference in the way the modern question of one person's individual status is expressed, say, in the elections to Parliament in France, or over in Great Britain. In France, everything proceeds from a certain theory, from certain ideologies. In England, everything emerges directly from the practical relationships of commercial and industrial life and collides, as I pointed out yesterday, with the ancient patriarchal conditions that prevailed particularly in the landowners' lifestyle. Just look at the way things take place in France. You find everywhere what you might call spiritual battles. There are struggles for freedom, for equality and brotherhood; people fight for the separation of school and church. People struggle to push the church back. But it is not possible to do so, for the church dwells in the depths of the soul's existence. Everything runs its course, in a manner of speaking, in the domain of certain dialectics, of certain arguments.

Over in England, these matters run their course as questions of power. There, we find a certain spiritual movement that is typical of the Anglo-Saxon people. I have often pointed out that as the middle of the nineteenth century approached, certain people came to the conclusion that things could not be allowed to go on in the same way any longer; human beings had to be made aware of the fact that a spiritual world does exist. The merely shadowlike intellect did not suffice. Yet people could not make up their minds to bring this inclination towards the spirit to the attention of the world in a manner other than through something that is “super-materialistic,” namely, through spiritism. This spiritism, which in turn has a greater impact than one would think, has its origins there. Spiritism, out to grasp the spirit externally, so to speak, just as one grasps matter, is therefore super-materialistic, is more materialistic than materialism itself. Locke lives on, so to say, in this super-materialism. And this element that in a sense, dwells in the inner sphere of the modern cultural development, expresses itself outwardly. It is certainly again and again the same phenomenon.

We encounter a tendency toward that spiritual stream de Maistre opposes so radically in the 1840's across the Channel: The tendency to comprehend everything by means of material entities. Locke basically referred to the intellect in such a manner that he deprived the intellect of its spiritual nature. He made use of the most spiritual element in the human being in order to deny the spirituality in the human being, indeed, in order to direct human beings only to matter. Similarly people in the nineteenth century referred to the spirit and tried to demonstrate it through all sorts of material manifestations. The intention was to make the spirit comprehensible to human beings through materialism. The element, however, that imbued the initiates of the various fraternities then passed over into the external social and political conditions.

One is inclined to say: By fighting for the abolition of the grain tariff in 1846 and succeeding in that endeavor, the cotton merchant Cobden and the Quaker Bright¹⁹ were the outward agents of the inner spiritual stream in the political life in the same way as the two most inept individuals who ever existed in politics, Asquith and Grey in the year 1914.²⁰ Certainly, Cobden and Bright were not as blind as Asquith and Grey, but basically it is the same symptom, presented to the world in outward phenomena such as the abolition of the grain tariff in 1846 when industry was victorious over the ancient patriarchal system, only on a new stage. Yesterday, I listed the other stages preceding this one. Then we can observe, so to speak, stage following upon stage. We see the workers organizing themselves. We note that the Whigs increasingly become the party concerned with industry, that the Tories turn into the party of the landowners, of the old patriarchal system. But we also see that this ancient patriarchal element could no longer resist the abrupt clash with modern technology—I characterized the manner of that yesterday—and that, all at once, modern industrialism pushed its way in. Thus, centuries, indeed millennia, were skipped, and England's mental condition that dated back to pre-Christian eras and existed well into the nineteenth century simply merged with what has developed in recent times.

Then we see the right to vote increasingly extended, the Tories calling for the support of a man, who only a short while ago certainly would not have been counted among them, Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, who was of Jewish extraction, an “outsider.”²¹ We watch the Upper House finally becoming a shadow and the year 1914 approaching in which a quite new England emerges. Only future historiography will be able to evaluate this emergence of the new England correctly.

You see, this is the course of the major events in the development of the nineteenth century. We see the various moments flashing up, indicating how significant a point in humanity's evolution has actually appeared. Only the most enlightened minds, however, can discern the light flashes that are the most important. I have frequently called attention to a phenomenon that is highly significant for the comprehension of the development in the nineteenth century. I have called attention to the moment in Goethe's house in Weimar when, having heard of the July revolution in France, Eckermann appeared before Goethe and Goethe said to him: “In Paris, unheard-of things have occurred, everything is in flames!” Naturally, Eckermann believed that Goethe was referring to the July revolution. That was of no interest at all to Goethe; instead, he said: “I don't mean that; that is not what interests me. Rather, in the academy in Paris, great controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire has broken out concerning whether the individual types of animals are independent or whether the one type passes over into the next.” Cuvier claimed the first, namely, that one is dealing with firm, rigid types that cannot evolve into other types. Geoffroy held that one has to view a type as being changeable, that one type passes over into the next.²² For Goethe, this was the major world event of modern times!

In fact, this was true. Goethe, therefore, had a profound, tremendously alive sensitivity. For what did Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire argue against Cuvier? The former sensed that when human beings look into their inner being, they can animate this shadowy intellect, that it is not merely logic, which is passively concerned with the external world, but that this logic can discover something like living truth about the things in this world within itself. In what imbued Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, Goethe sensed the assertion of the living intellect, something that arose, I might say, in the occult development of modern humanity and reached its culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Goethe really sensed something of great significance.

Cuvier, the great scholarly scientist, claimed that one had to be able to differentiate between the individual species and had to place them side by side. He stated that it was impossible to transform one type into the next, least of all, for example, the bird species into that of the mammals, and so on. Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, on the other hand, claimed that it was possible to do so.

What sort of confrontation was that? Ordinary truth and sublime error? Oh no, that is not the case. With ordinary, abstract logic, with the shadow-intellect, one can just as easily prove the correctness of what Cuvier claims as of what Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire has stated. On the basis of ordinary reason, which still prevails in our science today, this question cannot be resolved. This is why it has come up again and again; this is why we see Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire confront Cuvier in Paris in 1830 and in a different manner Weissmann²³ and others confront Haeckel.²⁴ These questions cannot be determined by way of this external science. For here, the element that has turned into the shadowlike intellect since the beginning of the fifteenth century, something that de Maistre detests so much, is really aiming at abolishing spirituality itself.

De Maistre pointed to Rome, even to the fact that the Pope—except for the temporal, passing papal personalities—sits in Rome as the incarnation of what is destined to rule over modern civilization. The culmination point of these discourses by de Maistre was reached in the year 1870, when the dogma of the Pope's infallibility was proclaimed. By way of the outmoded Ormuzd worship, the element that should be sought in spiritual heights was brought down into the person of the Roman Pope. What ought to be viewed as spirituality became temporalized matter; the church was turned into the secular state. This was subsequent to the fact that the church had already for a long time been successful in fitting the secular states into the form it had assumed itself when it had turned into the state religion under Constantine.

Therefore, in Romanism, we have on the one hand something that turns into the modern state inasmuch as the legal principle itself rebels and brings about its own polarity, so to speak, in the French Revolution; on the other hand, we have the outdated Ormuzd worship. Then we confront the element arising from the economic sphere, for all the measures that are taken on the other side of the English Channel originate from that sphere. In de Maistre we encounter the last great personality who tries to imprint spirituality into the judicial form of the state, who tries to carry the spirit into earthly materiality. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to oppose. It wishes to establish super-sensible spirituality. It tries to add to the prolonged Ormuzd worship, to the ahrimanic worship, something that will bring about a balance, it wishes to make the spirit itself the ruler of the earth.

This cannot be accomplished other than in the following manner. If, on the one hand, the earthly element is imprinted into the structure of political laws and, on the other hand, into the economic form, this spiritual life, in turn, is established in such a way that it does not institute the belief in a god who has become secular but rather inaugurates the reign of the spirit itself that flows in with each new human being incarnating on earth. This is the free spiritual life that wishes to take hold of the spirit that stands above all that is earthly. Once again, the intention is t bring to bear what one might call the effusion of the Spirit.

In A.D. 869, during the general ecumenical council, the view of the spirit was toned down in order to prevent human beings from arriving at the acknowledgment of the spirit that rules the earth from heaven, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in order to make possible the appearance of a man such as de Maistre as late as the nineteenth century.

This is what is important: Rather than appealing to the spirit believed to be incarnated in an earthly sense, a Christ-being believed to be living on in an earthly church, we must appeal to the spiritual entity that is indeed connected with the earth, yet must be recognized and viewed in the spirit. But since everything human beings must attain in the earthly domain has to be acquired within the social order, this cannot come about in any other way but by acknowledging the free right of the spirit descending with each new human life in order to acquire the physical body, the spirit that can never become sovereign in an earthly personality and dwells in a super-sensible being.

The establishment of the dogma of infallibility is a defection from spirituality; the last point of what had been intended with that council of 869 had been reached. We must return to the acknowledgment, belief in, and recognition of the spirit. This, however, can only come about if our social order is permeated with the structure that makes possible the free spiritual life alongside other things—the earth-bound political and economic life.

This is how the insight human beings must acquire today places itself into the course of civilization. This is how it has to be experienced within the latter. If we fail to do that, we cannot arrive at the essence of what is actually trying to come to expression in the “Threefold Social Organism,” of what tries to work for the salvation of a civilization that otherwise must fall victim to decline in the manner described by Spengler.

• 1. Joseph-Marie Comte de Maistre, 1753–1821, French diplomat and political theoretician.
• 2. Augustine, 354–430, neo-Platonist, Church Father. Converted to Christianity in 387, Bishop of North Africa. Wrote City of God, Confessions, among other books.
• 3. “Considerations sur la France,” London, 1796; “Essai sur le principe generateur des constitutions politiques,” Petersburg, 1810; "Du pape," Lyon, 1819.
• 4. Plutarch, around A.D. 125, from Chaironea. Greek philosopher and historian of the Roman-Hellenistic age.
• 5. Joseph de Maistre, Les soirees de St. Petersbourg, 1821, or “Twilight Conversations in St. Petersburg, Discourses About the Reign of Divine Providence in Temporal Matters,” with an appendix: “Explanations Concerning the Sacrifices.”
• 6. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, founder of the Jesuit Order, canonized in 1622.
• 7. Alfonso Maria di Liguori, 1696–1787, founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, canonized in 1839.
• 8. Francis Xaverius, 1506–1552, Jesuit; missionary to India and Japan.
• 9. John Locke, 1632–1704, English philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 10. Jaques Benigne Bossuet, 1627–1704, French theologian and Church politician.
• 11. Voltaire, actually Francois-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778, French theologian and philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 12. Madame De Sevigne's remark concerning an Italian writer: See de Maistre's Les soirees de St. Petersbourg, vol. 1, p. 413. Concerning his discourse about Locke, see the whole sixth conversation in Les Soirees, vol. 1, p. 337–430.
• 13. Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745, Dublin, English writer and satirist.
• 14. See note 5.
• 15. Leon Gambetta, 1838–1882, French statesman and republican. Remark from a speech on May 4, 1877.
• 16. Commune: Socialistic-Communistic community council that ruled over Paris for several months following the armistice of 1871 with Germany. The movement was bloodily defeated in May of 1871.
• 17. Boulangism: George Boulanger, 1837–1891, French general and monarchist.
• 18. Alfred Dreyfuss, 1859–1935, French officer, banished in 1894 for alleged high treason, pardoned in 1899. The Dreyfuss affair gave rise to consolidation of the political Left in France.
• 19. Richard Cobden, 1804–1865, and John Bright, 1811–1889, adherents of free trade, brought about abolition of the grain tariff, which, along with other factors, brought about England's industrial advancement.
• 20. Herbert, Earl of Oxford and Asquith, 1852–1928, liberal British Prime Minister in 1914; Edward Grey, 1862–1923, British Foreign Minister in 1914, belonging to the imperialistic faction of the Liberals.
• 21. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1804–1881, British Prime Minister from 1868 until 1880.
• 22. Baron George Cuvier, 1769–1832, and Geoffroy de St.-Hilaire, 1772–1844, French natural scientists. See Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, part 3, conversation of August 2, 1830 (the quote is not verbatim).
• 23. August Weissmann, 1834–1914, zoologist.
• 24.

The fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the development of humanity's intellect, was guided by the Greek mystery centers. Initially, the mysteries provided the basis of this intellectual or mind culture for the general population of Asia Minor and southern Europe. The secret of human life and its connection with the sun played a major role in these mysteries. We know from the descriptions given in my book Theosophy how the ego lights up within man's intellectual or mind soul, after which it is meant to attain to its full inner power through the consciousness soul. Now, insofar as man's ego was destined to be developed during the age of the intellectual culture, the mysteries of that age had to be occupied with the secrets of the sun's life and particularly the sun's links with the human ego. You also know from my description in Riddles of Philosophy that the Greeks still perceived their ideas and concepts in the outer world, just as we today perceive colors, sounds, and so on. For the ancient Greeks, the element that dwells in concepts was not something merely created within the mind. It was something they beheld with the objects. In this respect, Goethe definitely possessed something of a Greek nature. He made this evident in the famous conversation with Schiller. When he heard Schiller say that his mental images—something conceptual and ideal—were not perceptions but ideas, Goethe replied that in this case he saw his ideas just as he saw external perceptions around him.

The Greeks' relationship to concepts was associated with a quite definite sensation the Greeks experienced when they directed their glance upon the outer world. In fact, they regarded the conceptual content that shone forth to them everywhere as the offspring of the sun's life. When the sun rose in the morning, they sensed the rising of conceptual life in space. With the setting sun they experienced the disappearance of the life of thought. We cannot understand the evolution of nations if we do not take into consideration this change in the soul life.

That faculty, my dear friends, has actually been lost from the soul life of human beings, namely, the faculty to sense and experience the spirituality of the whole environment. Today, a person sees the rise of the sun's round globe and only has an awareness of what is encountered there in the way of colored and shining atmospheric phenomena; it is the same when the sun is viewed as it disappears in the red glow of a sunset. The Greeks had the feeling that in the morning the world arose and bestowed on them their world of ideas. It vanished in the evening and a world then appeared that withdrew from them their world of ideas. In the darkness of night, they felt bereft of their ideas. When they looked up at the sky, which appears blue to us, but for which they used the same term as for “darkness,” they actually felt that the boundaries of space consisted of what was beyond conceptual life.

Where the Greeks saw the universe reaching a boundary, there ended for them the world of ideas with which the human being is endowed. Beyond this universe, the Greeks divined the existence of other worlds, the thought worlds of the gods. Those worlds seemed to them closely linked to what they designated as light.

They were revealed to them concentrated, as it were, in the sun's life, whereas, otherwise, they withdrew into the expanse of the dark cosmic firmament. We have to have insight into this quite different world of sensations if we are to understand the way in which this manner of perception in all its inner vitality affected the evolution of the human being for some time. We have to realize what the most advanced representatives of mankind felt when they could no longer experience the spiritual reflection of the sun's life in the cosmos upon them. And especially the most advanced representatives of humanity who had received their education in the Greek mysteries then experienced the Mystery of Golgotha as a salvation inasmuch as it once again brought about the possibility of enkindling this light within their being. The light such individuals had actually experienced earlier as a divine element they now wished to experience by means of participating with their soul and spirit in the events of the Mystery of Golgotha.

We do not acquire an actual knowledge of what has come to pass in mankind in the course of millennia when we merely study these things with the intellect. We have to focus on the transformation of the whole human mind and soul life. Living since the beginning of the fifteenth century in the age of the consciousness soul development, we have retained only the shadowy nature of our inner intellectual activity, of the spirituality of reason that existed in the fourth post-Atlantean period. I have outlined this here during the past few weeks. Now, once again, we have to struggle to attain an awareness of what can permeate our form of shadowy intellect with a living perception of the universe. It was precisely because of the modern culture of the shadowy intellect that the human being, in a manner of speaking, has been fettered to the earth. Today we actually consider only what the earth offers to us, particularly when we allow ourselves to be infected by the constantly expanding, purely scientific culture. People have no idea that they belong not only to the earth with their whole being but to the whole extraterrestrial universe as well. This knowledge of their connection with the cosmos beyond earth is something mankind must acquire once again.

We simply take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and construe a view of the whole universe in accordance with conditions on earth. The resulting picture of the universe is then not much else than the transference of earthly conditions to extraterrestrial ones. Thus, by means of the tremendous achievements of modern science, through spectral analysis and other methods, a view of the sun was developed that is really modeled entirely upon earthly conditions. A conception is formed of what a luminous body of gas might look like. This conception is then transferred to what meets our eye as the sun in the cosmos. We must once again learn to use the materials of spiritual science to arrive at a conception of the sun. The physicist believes that the sun would present itself to him as a luminous sphere of gas if he were able to travel out into space. Yet, despite the fact that it reflects the cosmic light to us in its own way in the manner it receives it, the sun is a spiritual entity through and through. We are not dealing with a physical entity that moves about somewhere out there in the universe but with a completely spiritual being.

The Greeks still had the right feeling when they experienced the light, shining down upon them from the sun, as something that must be brought into a connec tion with their ego development insofar as this ego development is tied to the conceptual nature of the intellect. The sun's rays were to the Greeks something that enkindled their ego within them. It is therefore obvious that the Greeks still had a feeling for the spirituality of the cosmos. To them, the sun being was substantially a being related to the ego. The element the human being becomes aware of when he says "I" to himself, the force that works in him and enables him to say “I” to himself, this is what the Greeks looked at. They felt called upon to address the sun in the same way they addressed their ego, to regard the sun with the same feelings they had for their ego.

Ego and sun are the inner and the outer aspects of the same being. What orbits out there through space as the sun is the cosmic I. What lives within me is the human I.

One is inclined to say that this sensation is still faintly perceptible to those who have a somewhat deeper feeling of affinity for nature. The basis of such an experience has already vanished to a large degree. Yet, something is still alive in the human being today that is attuned to the rise of the sun in springtime, that can still experience the spirituality of the sunbeam and can feel how the ego is imbued with new life when the rays of the sun illuminate the earth with greater intensity. Yet, it is but a last, faint sensation that, even in this external manner, is dying out in mankind. It is about to disappear in the abstract, shadowy culture of the intellect that has gradually become prevalent in the whole of civilized life today. However, we must once again reach the point where some recognition can be gained of humanity's relationship with super-sensible existence. In this respect I want to point out a number of things today.

By bringing together all the references found here and there in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able, first of all, to comprehend once more the sun's connection with the ego. We shall be able to perceive the significant contrast between the forces radiating from the sun to the earth and those forces that are active in what we term the moon. Sun and moon are in a certain respect total opposites. Complete polarity exists between them. When we study the sun by means of spiritual science, we find that the sun sends down to us everything that fashions us into bearers of our ego. We owe to the rays of the sun what in fact bestows on us the human form and, in the latter, molds us into an image of the ego. What works in the human being from outside and determines his form from without even as early as the embryonic stage are influences from the sun. When the human embryo is developing in the womb, a great deal more is taking place than what present-day science is dreaming about, namely, that forces originate from the impregnated mother that then develop the human being. No, the human embryo merely rests in the mother's body; it is given form by the sun's forces. It is true, however, that we must bring these sun forces into connection with the moon's forces that have opposite effects. The moon forces become evident, above all, as the inner influence in the lower, metabolic nature of man. In drawing an outline, we may therefore say: The sun's forces are the element molding the human being from outside. What develops in the metabolic processes from within are the moon's forces, positioning themselves within the human organism and radiating outward from the center.

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This does not contradict the fact that these moon forces also play a part, for instance, in forming the human countenance, They shape the face because the effects that proceed from the center, from the lower, metabolic system, exert an attracting power, as it were, from outside on the development of the human face. The moon forces have a differentiating effect on this development due to adding their influence to that of the sun's forces while counteracting the latter from within the human being. For this reason, the organism connected with human reproduction depends on the moon forces, which bestow the form. On the other hand, the result of procreation depends on the sun forces. With their whole being human beings are placed into the polarity between sun forces and moon forces.

In seeking the moon forces within the inner human organism, we have to distinguish them in the metabolic process from the forces originating within this process itself. The moon forces play into the metabolism but the latter possesses its own forces. These are the earth forces. The forces contained in food substances, in vegetables and other foods, work in the human being by virtue of their own nature. Here, they are active as earth forces. Metabolism is primarily a result of the earth's forces, but elements of the moon's forces work into them. If the human being possessed only the metabolic process with its forces, if only the substances of his foods would unfold their forces in his body after having been consumed, then he would have nothing but a chaotic play of all kinds of forces. The fact that these forces continuously work to renew the human being from within does not depend at all on the earth; it is due to the moon that is added to earth. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the moon, from without inwards by the sun. Inasmuch as the sun's rays are received through the eye into the human head organization, they also have an inward effect; nevertheless, they still work from outside in.

Thus, on the one hand, in regard to his whole ego development the human being depends on the influence of the sun; without the sun he could not be an ego dwelling solidly on the earth. On the other hand, there would be no human race, no propagation, if the moon were not the earth's companion. It is possible to say that it is the sun that firmly places the human being as a personality, as an individual, on the earth. It is the moon that conjured human beings in their multitude, in their whole evolution, upon the earth. The human race in its physical succession of generations is the result of the moon forces, which stimulate human beings. Man as a single being, an individuality, is the product of the sun forces. Therefore, if we wish to study the human being as well as the human race, we cannot study merely the conditions of earth. Geologists seek in vain to investigate the earth's conditions in order to comprehend the human being; they study in vain the other forces of earth so as to arrive at this understanding. Human beings are not primarily a creation of the earth. They are formed out of the cosmos; they are the offspring of the world of the stars, above all, of sun and moon. From the earth, only those forces are derived that are contained in matter itself. They are effective outside man and then continue their effects when, through eating and drinking, they have entered into the human being, but there they are received by something that is of an unearthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means merely earthly ones; they are definitely something provided for out of starry worlds. It is this insight that human beings have to struggle to attain once again.

When we observe the human being further, we can take into consideration, first of all, that he is a physical body. This body absorbs the external foods. They in turn extend their forces into this physical body. But the latter is also taken hold of by the astral body, and in it the moon's influence is active in the manner I have just described. The sun's effect also plays into this astral body. Imbuing it with their forces, sun and moon permeate the astral body, and the latter works in the manner I have outlined above. The etheric body stands in the middle between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces coming from foodstuffs, we find, to begin with, that they are active in the physical body, and, in the manner I described earlier, are then taken hold of by the astral body containing the sun and moon influences. But in between the physical and astral bodies we find something else that is active in the etheric body. It, too, is not derived from the earth but from the whole surrounding cosmos. When we study the earth with its products in relation to the human being, the substances composed of solid, liquid, or aeriform ingredients, we see that they are consumed by the human being and then worked upon by the forces of sun and moon. In addition, there are also active in man forces that stream in from all directions of the universe. The forces active in the foodstuffs come from the earth. Those streaming into the human being from all corners of the universe are the etheric forces. They also take hold of the foodstuffs, but in a much more uniform manner, and transform them in such a way that they become inwardly capable of life. In addition, the etheric forces turn these foodstuffs into something that can inwardly experience the etheric element as such, namely, light and warmth. Thus, we can say that because of his physical body the human being is part of the earth, because of his etheric body he is related to the whole surrounding sphere, and because of his astral body man in connected above all with the effects of moon and sun.

Now, these effects of moon and sun contained in the astral body are in turn modified. They are modified to the extent that a powerful difference exists between the effects upon the upper human organization and those on the lower human organism.

Let us refer today to the part of the human being that is permeated by the bloodstream flowing upwards toward the head as “upper human organization”; let us refer to what lies below the heart as “lower human organism.” In viewing the human being thus, we have, first of all, the upper part including his head and whatever is organically connected with it. Its formation is dependent mainly on the sun's effects and also develops first during embryonic life. Already in the embryo, the sun's effects work on this organization in a quite special way, but these effects then continue after birth when the human being is present physically in the life between birth and death. Roughly speaking, what lies in this part of the human organism above the heart—a more detailed description would have to trace the blood circulation above the heart—is then modified in regard to the astral influences by Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars (see outline p. 248).

According to the Copernican world view, Saturn has forces it develops in its orbit around the sun and then sends down to the earth. It possesses those forces that are effective in the whole human astral body, particularly in the part belonging to the above mentioned upper organism of man. Saturn possesses the forces that stream into this astral body. As these forces penetrate and enliven the latter, they essentially determine the extent to which the astral body places itself in a proper relationship to the physical body. When a person cannot sleep well, for example, when his astral body does not properly emerge from the etheric and physical bodies, when it does not correctly reenter them upon awakening, or in some other way does not fit itself properly into the physical body, then this is an effect, but an irregular one, of the Saturn forces. Saturn is chiefly that celestial body that, by way of the human head, brings about a correct relationship of the astral body to the human physical and etheric bodies. By means of this, on the other hand, it is the Saturn forces that produce the connection between astral body and ego because of Saturn's relation to the sun. This relationship of Saturn to the sun's effect is expressed in regard to space and time in the fact that Saturn completes its orbit around the sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being this relationship of Saturn to the sun comes to expression in the ego achieving an appropriate relationship to the astral body, and above all, in the proper incorporation of the astral body into the whole human organization. Thus, we can say Saturn possesses a relationship to the upper part of the whole human astral body. This relationship was definitely an important factor for people in ancient times. Even in Egypto-Chaldean times, going back to the third and fourth millennium prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, we would find that among the teachers, the sages in the mysteries, every individual was judged according to how he had determined his relationship to Saturn by the date of his birth. For these wise men knew quite well that depending on whether a person was born during one or another of Saturn's celestial positions, he was one who could use his astral body in the physical body in a more efficient or less efficient manner. Insight into such things played an important role in ancient times. The progress of mankind's evolution, however, is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we are freeing ourselves of the influences affecting us there.

My dear friends, do not misunderstand this. It does not mean that Saturn is not active in us today. It works in us just as it did in antiquity; the point is that we have to free ourselves from it. And do you know in what this freeing ourselves in the proper way from the Saturn influences consists? You free yourself most poorly from the Saturn influences if you follow the shadowy intellect of the present time. In doing so you actually permit the Saturn effects to run riot within yourself, to shoot hither and thither, and actually to turn you into what is nowadays called a nervous person. A nervous condition in a person is caused mainly by the fact that the astral body does not fit properly into the whole physical configuration. The nervousness of our age is due to this. Human beings must be induced to strive for real perception, for Imagination. If they remain with abstract conception, they will become more and more nervous, for they are actually growing out of the Saturn activity, which is nevertheless within them, shooting back and forth, pulling the astral body out of the nerves, thus making people nervous. In a cosmic sense, the nervousness of our age has to be recognized as an effect of Saturn.

Just as Saturn is chiefly involved with the upper part of the whole astral body inasmuch as the latter is connected with the whole organism through the nervous system, so Jupiter is active in thinking (see outline p. 248).

Human thinking, after all, is also based in a certain way on a partial activity of the astral body. I should say, a smaller part of the astral body is active in thinking than in sustaining the whole human being. It is Jupiter's effect that works in our astral body and, above all, strengthens our thinking. The effect of Jupiter deals mainly with the astral permeation and organization of the human brain.

Now, Saturn's effects actually extend over the whole of adult human life after the first three decades of our life. For our whole life and health depend on how we develop in our astral body during the periods of growth, and in fact, they only cease after age thirty. That is why Saturn requires thirty years to circle around the sun. This completely fits the human being. The thinking that develops in us has to do with the first twelve years of life. After all, what orbits out there in space is not without a connection to the human being.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so Mars has to do with speech.

Saturn—upper part of the whole astral body

Jupiter—thinking

Mars—speech

Mars separates a still smaller part of the astral body from its incorporation into the remaining human organization than the one that comes into play in regard to thinking. And it depends on the Mars effects within us that the forces can unfold that then pour into speech. The small revolution of Mars also has a bearing on this. A human being acquires the first sounds of speech within a time span that corresponds roughly to half the Martian orbit around the sun.

Ascending and descending development! We see how this whole development is linked with the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars insofar as it is tied to the region of the human head.

We have thus considered the outer planets' activity in the human astral body. Whereas the sun is connected more with the ego, these three cosmic bodies, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, have to do with the development of what is tied to the astral body, namely, speech, thinking, and the whole conduct of the human soul in the human organism.

Besides the sun, which has to do with the actual ego, we also have in addition those planets called the inner planets. They are the ones that are closer to earth than to the sun, having their place between earth and sun, whereas, seen from the earth, the other planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, are on the other side of the sun. When we focus on these inner planets, we likewise arrive at a consideration of the connections between their forces and the human being. To begin with, we shall consider Mercury.

Similar to the moon, Mercury has its target points more in the inner being of man, working from outside only on the human countenance. In the part lying below the region of the heart, its forces are effective by taking hold inwardly of the human organization and, in turn, streaming forth from there. Mercury's chief task is to bring the astral body's activity into all breathing and circulation processes of the human being. Mercury is the intercessor between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in man. Thus, we are able to say that its forces intercede between the astral element and the rhythmic activity (see outline on p. 250). Due to this, similar to the moon forces, the Mercury forces also intervene in the whole human metabolism, but only insofar as the metabolism is subject to rhythm, reacting upon rhythmic activity.

Then there is Venus. Venus is active especially in the human etheric body, in what works out of the cosmos in the human etheric body and its activities.

Finally we have the moon, which we have already mentioned. It is the element in the human being that is the polar opposite of the sun forces. From within, it leads substances into the realm of life and therefore is also connected with reproduction. In the fullest sense, the moon stimulates inner reproduction as well as the procreative process of reproduction.

You realize now that what actually takes place in the human being is becoming evident to you in its dependence on the surrounding cosmos. On the one hand, with the physical body, the human being is tied to the earthly forces. On the other hand, he is linked to the whole cosmic environment with his etheric body. In that body, differentiations occur in the manner I have just outlined, and inasmuch as the differentiation proceeds primarily from man's astral body, the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and moon integrate themselves into this body. By way of the ego, the sun is also active in man. Now take into consideration that due to the fact that the human being is integrated into the cosmos in this manner, it makes a difference whether a person stands at a given spot on the earth, and Jupiter, for instance, shines down on him from the sky, or whether he is in a location where Jupiter is covered by the earth. In the first case, Jupiter's effects on the person are direct ones; in the second case, the earth is placed in between. This results in a significant difference.

We have said that Jupiter is connected with thinking. Let us assume a person receives the direct Jupiter influence during the period when his physical organ of thinking is in the stage of major development after birth. His brain will be formed into a quite special organ of thinking; the person receives a certain predisposition to thinking. Assume that a person spends these years in a place where Jupiter is on the opposite side of the earth, the latter thus hindering Jupiter's influences. Such a person's brain is less developed into an organ for thinking. If, on the other hand, the earth with its substances and forces is active in a person and everything proceeding from them is transformed, say, by the moon influences, which, in a certain sense, are always present, such a person turns into a dull dreamer, one who is barely aware. Between these two possibilities we find any number of variations.

Let us take the case of an individual possessing forces from his former incarnation that predestine his thinking to develop in a pronounced way in the earth life on which he is about to embark. He is on the verge of descending to earth. Since Jupiter has its set time for completing its orbit, he chooses the moment when he is to appear on earth, when he is to be born, so that Jupiter sends down its rays directly.

In this manner, the starry constellation provides the setting into which the human being allows himself to be born, depending on the conditions of his former incarnations.

Today, in the age of the consciousness soul, the human being must free himself increasingly from what is becoming evident to you here. It is a matter, however, of freeing oneself from these forces in the proper manner, of actually doing something I have indicated in regard to the Saturn effects, namely of trying to turn once again from the mere shadowy, intellectual developing of thoughts to a pictorial, concrete one. What is developed out of spiritual science in the way I described it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is also a guideline for human beings to become independent in the right way from the cosmic forces that are nevertheless active in them.

It depends on the starry constellations how a human being finds his way into earth life as he allows himself to be born. Yet, he has to equip himself with forces that make him independent in the right way from this starry constellation.

It is to such insights that our civilization must attain once again, insights concerning the relationship of the human being with the cosmos beyond the earth. Human beings must acquire an attitude that makes them realize that it is not only the ordinary forces of heredity acknowledged by today's science that are active in the human organization. In regard to the actual facts it is sheer nonsense, for example, to believe that the forces transmitted through heredity are contained in the structure of the female organism. Nowadays, heredity is an unclear, mystical concept; it is thought that the above forces then develop a heart, a liver, and so on. There would be no heart in the human organism if the sun did not incorporate it into the latter, and proceeding from the head at that. There would be no liver if Venus would not incorporate it into the human organism. And so it is with each single organ. They are certainly connected with extraterrestrial effects. The Jupiter forces are active in the human brain. The Saturn forces influence the healthy or pathological way in which the astral body is fitted into the physical organization. Human beings learn to speak because the Mars forces work in them; they become evident through speech.

These are matters humanity must once again learn to understand. We must realize that human beings cannot be explained by a science that merely considers earthly phenomena. Then, the connection between the human being and the earth will also become better known. After all, the other beings dwelling in our surroundings are also not merely creatures of the earth. To begin with, only the minerals are earth beings. Yet, in the minerals, too, changes have taken place that in turn were dependent upon forces in the earth's cosmic environment. Insofar as they are crystallized, all our metals owe their shape to extraterrestrial forces. They were formed when the earth had not yet evolved its own forces intensely but when forces from outside the earth were still active in it. Healing properties contained in minerals and particularly in metals are connected with the way the metals developed within the earth through cosmic forces.

When we go back in the post-Atlantean age to the first epoch, when the ancient Indian culture was at its prime, we see that the human being definitely experienced himself in the whole universe, as a citizen of the cosmos. Although he had not yet developed the faculties mankind is so proud of today, he was Man in the true sense of the word.

Subsequently, the human being was more or less diverted from the cosmic forces. Still, in the whole Chaldean epoch and early Greek time, we see that human beings looked up at least to the sun. In a certain sense, they were still like a kind of amphibian, a being that was happy when the rays of the sun poured down upon it and it no longer had to burrow in the earth's dankness. The human being had turned into an amphibian. Now, inasmuch as he believes he is related only to the earth's forces, one cannot even say any longer that man is like a mole. At most, he is really an earthworm that is aware of the return of something that rose in the first place from earth into space, namely, of rain water. This is the only thing the human being still perceives of extraterrestrial forces. But even earthworms perceive that—you could have seen it this morning if you had set foot in the streets! In his materialism, the human being today has basically turned into an earthworm. Once again, we must overcome this earthworm nature. We can do that only when we develop to the point of recognizing our connection with the cosmos outside the earth.

Therefore, my dear friends, the point is that we must bring it about in our age to lift ourselves out of our civilization and this earthworm-state to a new spirituality.

The lectures I have just given on the nature of color and the lecture last Thursday preceding the ones on color¹ may have served to show that we can approach the true nature of man only if we consider the human being in connection with the whole universe. Yet, when asking about the nature of the human being, we must at length learn to look up from the earth to what is extraterrestrial. Our age in particular stands in need of this. For, as we have seen, the human intellect has grown more and more shadowlike. Particularly since the developments of the nineteenth century it is no longer rooted in reality.

All this indicates to us that human beings absolutely have to think of receiving new impulses into their soul life. All this will become even clearer to us as we turn our minds today again to certain incisive cosmic events; having studied them already from outer points of view, we shall bring these cosmic events once more before our souls.

You will no doubt remember and probably also know from your reading of my Occult Science that one of those mighty events that intervened in the earth's evolution was the moon's withdrawal from the earth being. The moon we see shining down upon us from the cosmos was once united with the earth. It separated from the earth and has been circling it ever since as its satellite.

We know of the profound changes in human evolution that are connected with this separation of the moon from the earth. You know that we have to go far back—far beyond the Atlantean flood—to reach that time when the moon departed from earth existence.

Today, we will only consider what became manifest on earth with respect to the human being and the surrounding kingdoms of nature through the moon's separation from the earth. We have already seen that the variously colored minerals basically derive their colors from this relationship of the moon to the earth. This insight has enabled us to bring these cosmic events together with an artistic conception of existence. Very important other things are also connected with this. The human being, as we know, has brought his nature with him from the preceding metamorphoses of earth existence, from the Saturn, Sun, and Moon nature. Now, while he evolved as a Saturn, Sun, and Moon being, no mineral kingdom existed as yet in his environment. The mineral kingdom and everything of a mineral nature appeared only during earth evolution. Hence, what is now considered mineral matter permeated the human being only during the earth age. During the ancient Saturn, Sun, and Moon age, the human being contained nothing of a mineral element. Nor was he as yet a being who depended on spending his existence on earth. On the contrary, he was a being who, through his very constitution, belonged to the whole cosmos.

Prior to the moon leaving the earth, before the mineral kingdom in its multicolored nature developed within the earth, the human being was as yet not adapted at all to the earth. And, if we may so express ourselves, the question of what to do with man was indeed a very real one for the spiritual beings guiding this earth evolution. Should he be placed upon the earth or should he spend his existence outside and beyond it? We can actually call it a decision on the part of the beings who guide the evolution of mankind that the moon was separated and that the whole earth and man along with it were changed. For through the fact that the crude moon substance was separated from the earth the human being acquired the organization that enabled him to become an earth being. Hence, through this event—through the moon separation and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into earth—the human being became an earthly being. Basically, it was this that gave man his earthly weight. On the other hand, he would never have become a being capable of inner freedom if he had not received this earthly weight. Earlier, he was not a personality in the proper sense. He became a personality due to the fact that the forces intended to form his body drew together. This densification took place because of the moon separation and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom. The human being became a personality and thus accessible to freedom.

This evolution of man on earth since the departure of the moon has gone through the most diverse stages. One can say that as long as nothing else had occurred except that the moon had left the earth, it was always possible for the human being to receive images of ancient clairvoyance due to his whole organization and nature of body and soul.

The human being was not deprived of this faculty of having clairvoyant images by the moon's separation. He beheld the world in images, something we have often described. If nothing else had taken place, human beings would be living in that world of images to this day. But as we know, evolution went still further. The human being did not remain in a condition that merely fetters him to the earth. He was in turn induced to a regressive development, as it were, and the nineteenth century was the culmination point of this development. I have characterized this repeatedly in my recent lectures. Already in ancient times it had come about that although in a sense man was earth-bound, weighted down in his metabolic system, in his head system he was enabled to cosmic existence. Human beings developed their intellect. The images of ancient clairvoyance condensed into this intellect, something that continued up until the fourth century A.D. It was only then, and particularly after the fifteenth century, that the human intellect became more and more shadowy. Though it is something entirely spiritual, this human intellect has no real existence at all; basically, it possesses only what would have to be described as a picturelike existence. When a person thinks today merely by means of his intellect, his thoughts are not rooted in reality. Human thoughts only move about in a shadowy existence and this is becoming more and more the case. This development reached an extreme in the nineteenth century and today human beings altogether lack a sense of reality. They live in a spiritual element but are materialists. With their spiritual thoughts that are, however, only shadow thoughts, they think only in terms of material existence.

Thus this second event came to pass. The human being has again become more spiritual, but the spiritual contents bestowed on him by matter in earlier times no longer ensoul him. He has become more spiritual; yet, with what is spiritual he merely thinks of things material.

Now you know that one day the moon will reunite with the earth. The point in time when this reunion of moon and earth will occur is placed by astronomers and geologists who live in abstractions, many, many thousands of years in the future; that, however, is an illusion. In reality, we are not so very far away from that point in time. As you know, humanity as such is becoming younger and younger. It is becoming more and more the case that the development of body and soul only continues up to a certain point in life. At the time of the death of the Christ when the event of Golgotha took place, mankind in general was capable of physical and soul development until age thirty-three. Today, people are able to develop only until age twenty-seven. In the fourth millennium A.D., a time will come when human beings will be capable of development only until age twenty-one. Again, in the seventh millennium, a time will come when their bodily nature will be capable of development only until the fourteenth year of life. Then, women will cease to be fertile; an entirely different form of living on earth will come about. That will be the time when the moon will again approach the earth and will be incorporated into it.

You see, my dear friends, human beings must now begin to pay attention to such extraterrestrial events. They must not go on dreaming, vaguely and abstractly, of something divine. They must begin to focus on the events connected with their evolution. They must know: The moon once separated from the earth; the moon will reunite with the earth again. And just as this moon separation had a tremendous impact, so will the moon's reentry. It is true that we will still be inhabiting the earth then as human beings, but we shall no longer be born in the ordinary way. We shall be connected with the earth in a way other than through birth. We shall have evolved in a certain manner by the time this point is reached. We must now learn to connect what is happening today—the increasing shadowiness of the intellect—with what will occur one day in earth evolution as an incisive event, namely, the moon's whirling back into earth's matter.

Our intellect is becoming more and more shadowy. If this were to go on, if men were never to make up their minds to receive what can come to them from spiritual worlds, the human being would gradually become completely absorbed in the shadowy cast of his intellect.

Try to realize what this shadowlike intellect actually contains. It cannot really understand the human being himself; it comprehends the minerals. That, after all, is the only thing the shadowy intellect can understand to a certain degree. Already the life of the plant remains a riddle for it; this is true even more so of the life of the animals, and its own life becomes completely obscure for it. Thus people go on evolving views of the world that, in reality, are but questions, because all they contain is unable to approach the nature of plant and animal, least of all that of the human being. Yet, this forming of pictures will increase more and more unless we make up our minds to receive what is being given us by way of new Imaginations in which the existence of the world is described. Into our shadowy intellectual concepts the living wisdom that spiritual science is able to give must be received. The shadow images of the intellect must in this way be called to life.

This calling to life of the shadow images of the intellect is not only a human event, it is a cosmic event. Remember what I described in my Occult Science—how once upon a time human souls migrated up to the planets and afterward returned to earth existence. I outlined in my Occult Science how the human beings of Mars, Jupiter, and so on came down again to earth. Now, a most important event took place—it can only be described from the facts that are confirmed as truths in the spiritual world—a very important event occurred at the end of the seventies of the nineteenth century. Whereas in ancient Atlantean times these human beings descended to earth from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the other planets—and it was therefore a matter of human soul beings entering the earth existence then—now a time is beginning when beings who are not human are coming down to earth from cosmic regions beyond. These beings are not human but depend for the further development of their existence on coming to earth and on entering here into relationships with men.

Thus, since the eighties of the nineteenth century, heavenly beings are seeking to enter this earth existence. Just as the Vulcan men were the last to come down to earth,^T1 so Vulcan beings are now actually entering this earth existence. Heavenly beings are already here in our earth existence. And it is thanks to the fact that beings from beyond the earth are bringing messages down into this earthly existence that it is possible at all to have a comprehensive spiritual science today.

Taken as a whole, however, how does the human race behave? If I may say so, the human race behaves in a cosmically rude way toward the beings who are appearing from the cosmos on earth, albeit, to begin with, only slowly. Humanity takes no notice of them, ignores them. It is this that will lead the earth into increasingly tragic conditions. For in the course of the next few centuries, more and more spirit beings will move among us whose language we ought to understand. We shall understand it only if we seek to comprehend what comes from them, namely, the contents of spiritual science. This is what they wish to bestow on us. They want us to act according to spiritual science; they want this spiritual science to be translated into social action and the conduct of earthly life.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century, we are actually dealing with the influx of spirit beings from the universe. Initially, these were beings dwelling in the sphere between moon and Mercury, but they are closing in upon earth, so to say, seeking to gain a foothold in earthly life through human beings imbuing themselves with thoughts of spiritual beings in the cosmos. This is another way of describing what I outlined earlier when I said that we must call our shadowy intellect to life with the pictures of spiritual science. That is the abstract way of describing it. The description is concrete when we say: Spirit beings are seeking to come down into earth existence and must be received. Upheaval upon upheaval will ensue, and earth existence will at length arrive at social chaos if these beings descended and human existence were to consist only of opposition against them. For these beings wish to be nothing less than the advance guard of what will happen to earth existence when the moon reunites once again with earth.

Nowadays it may appear comparatively harmless to people when they think only those automatic, lifeless thoughts that arise through comprehension of the mineral world itself and the mineral element's effects in plant, animal, and man. Yes, indeed, people revel in these thoughts; as materialists, they feel good about them, for only such thoughts are conceived today. But imagine that people were to continue thinking in this way, unfolding nothing but such thoughts until the eighth millennium when moon existence will once more unite with the life of the earth. What would come about then? The beings I have spoken about will descend gradually to the earth. Vulcan beings, Vulcan supermen, Venus supermen, Mercury supermen, sun supermen, and so on will unite themselves with earth existence. Yet, if human beings persist in their opposition to them, this earth existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years. People will indeed be capable of developing their intellect in an automatic way; it can develop even in the midst of barbaric conditions. The fullness of human potential, however, will not be included in this intellect and people will have no relationship to the beings who wish graciously to come down to them into earthly life.

All the beings presently conceived so incorrectly in people's thoughts—incorrectly because the mere shadowy intellect can only conceive of the mineral, the crudely material element, be it in the mineral, plant, animal or even human kingdom—these thoughts of human beings that have no reality all of a sudden will become realities when the moon and the earth will unite again. From the earth, there will spring forth a horrible brood of beings. In character they will be in between the mineral and plant kingdoms. They will be beings resembling automatons, with an over-abundant intellect of great intensity. Along with this development, which will spread over the earth, the latter will be covered as if by a network or web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom. Yet their organization will not even reach up to the level of the plants. They will be horrible spiders who will be entangled with one another. In their outward movements they will imitate everything human beings have thought up with their shadowy intellect, which did not allow itself to be stimulated by what is to come through new Imagination and through spiritual science in general.

All these unreal thoughts people are thinking will be endowed with being. As it is covered with layers of air today, or occasionally with swarms of locusts, the earth will be covered with hideous mineral-plant-like spiders that intertwine with one another most cleverly but in a frighteningly evil manner. To the extent that human beings have not enlivened their shadowy, intellectual concepts, they will have to unite their being, not with the entities who are seeking to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but instead with these ghastly mineral-plant-like spidery creatures. They will have to dwell together with these spiders; they will have to seek their further progress in cosmic evolution in the evolutionary stream that this spider brood will then assume.

You see, this is something that is very much a reality of earth humanity's evolution. It is known today by a large number of those human beings who hold mankind back from receiving spiritual scientific knowledge. For there are those who are actually conscious allies of this spidery entangling of human earth existence. Today, we must no longer recoil from descriptions such as these. For descriptions of this kind are behind what is said to this day by many people who, based on ancient traditions, still have some awareness of things like these, and who would like to surround these ancient traditions with a certain veil of secrecy. The evolution of earthly humanity is not such that it can be veiled in secrecy any longer. However great the resistance in hostile quarters, these things must be said; for, as I have stated again and again, the acceptance or rejection of spiritual scientific knowledge is a serious matter facing mankind. It is not something that can be decided on the basis of more or less indifferent sympathies or antipathies; we are dealing with something that definitely affects the whole configuration of the cosmos.

We are dealing with the question of whether humanity at the present time will resolve to grow gradually into what benevolent spirits, wishing to ally themselves with human beings, bring down from the universe, or whether mankind will seek its continued cosmic existence in the gradual entanglement, in the spider-brood of its own, merely shadowy thoughts. It does not suffice today to set down in abstract formulas the need for spiritual scientific knowledge. It is necessary to show how thoughts become realities. This is what is so dreadful about all abstract theosophists who appear on the scene and place abstractions before people, for example: Thoughts will become realities in the future. But it does not occur to them to present the full and actual implications of these matters. For the concrete implication is that the intellectual, shadow-like thoughts, spun inwardly by human beings today, will one day cover the earth like a spider's web. Human beings will become entangled in it if they are not willing to rise above these shadowy thoughts.

The path of the ascent, my dear friends, is indeed outlined. We must take profoundly serious thoughts such as the one with which I concluded my lectures on color last Sunday where I said: The point is to lift the comprehension of color out of the abstractions of physics into a region where the creative fancy, the feeling of the artist who understands the being of color, will harmonize effectively with a spiritual scientific insight into the world. We have seen how the beings and nature of color can be taken hold of, how the artistic element, which physics with its dreadful diagrams lets slide down into the ahrimanic sphere, can be lifted up. Thus, a theory of color can be founded; it would be remote from the established thought habits of modern science, yet can provide a basis for artistic creativity, if we will only imbue ourselves with its insight. Such thoughts must certainly be taken seriously.

Another thought must be earnestly considered. What do we witness today throughout the civilized world? Our young people are sent into the hospitals and to the scientific faculties of the universities; there the human being is explained to them. They become acquainted with the human skeleton and with the human organism by studying the corpse. They learn to put together the human being logically in abstract thoughts.

Yet, my dear friends, this is no way to comprehend the human being; in this way, one only gets to know the mineral aspect of man. What we learn about the human being through such a science is something that simply and solely has significance from the moon's separation until its return, something that out of the spider thoughts of today will then turn into spider beings. A knowledge must be prepared that takes hold of the human being quite differently, and this can be done only if science is lifted into artistic vision. We must admit that science in the present-day sense of the word can reach only to a certain level. It reaches only as far as the mineral element in the mineral, plant, and human kingdoms. Already in the plant kingdom science must change into art; still more so in the animal. It is sheer nonsense to try to understand the animal form in the way the anatomists and physiologists do. And as long as we do not admit that it is nonsense, the shadowy intellect cannot really be transformed into a living, spiritual grasp of the world.

What our young people are taught in so wretchedly abstract a form in the universities must everywhere turn into an artistic comprehension of the world. For nature around us creates artistically. Unless it is understood that nature around us is an artistic creation and can be grasped only with artistic concepts, no good will come of our world conceptions. The idea should take hold that the torture chambers in medieval castles, where people were locked into the “Iron Maiden,” for instance, and them pierced through with spears, remind us of a procedure that, though more physical and concrete, is the same as the one that occurs when young people today are introduced to anatomy and physiology and told that this will make them understand something of human nature. No, they comprehend nothing but what has been produced by a soul-spiritual element of torture: The human being torn limb from limb, the mineralized human being—that part of man that one day will be woven into the spider-cover of the earth.

Is it not sad that the power of civilization belongs now to those who consider the thoughts of truth itself, which most inwardly and intimately relate to the salvation and whole mission of mankind's development in the world, nonsense! It is tragic and we must be mindful of this tragedy. For only if we place this clearly and objectively before our soul's eye, shall we perhaps bestir ourselves to resolve to do what we can so that the intellect, shadowy as it has become, may find the way to admit the spiritual world that is approaching from the heavenly realms. Then, this shadowy intellect will be made fit for the potential it is to achieve. After all, this shadowy intellect should not be cast back into the realm beneath the plant kingdom, into a spider brood that will spread over the earth. No, it is intended that the human being shall be lifted up, in that time when women will no longer be fertile, when the eighth millennium will have arrived and the moon will unite again with the earth. The earthly shall then remain behind, and the human being only direct it from outside—like a foot stool. It will be something he is not supposed to take along with him into his cosmic existence. Human beings should prepare themselves so that they need not become one with what will someday have to develop on the surface of this earth in the manner described above.

Mankind entered from a pre-earthly existence into this physical existence. At the time of the departure of the moon, physical birth commenced. The human being began to be born of woman. Just as this came to pass, so in the future the human being will no longer be born of woman. For that is only a passing episode in the whole of cosmic evolution. It is the episode that is to bring to man the feeling of freedom, the consciousness of freedom, the integrated wholeness of individuality and personality. It is an episode that must not be disdained, an episode that was necessary in the whole cosmic process, but it must not be retained. Human beings must not give themselves up to the indolence of merely looking up to an abstract divine principle; they must concretely behold everything connected with their evolution. For they can attain a true inner revitalization of the whole soul-spirit being only if they comprehend that great period of time—but in its concrete evolutionary configuration—through which they will live in successive earth incarnations.

This is what a true spiritual science tells us today. Yet, such a spiritual science encounters opposition. We are threatened by a conscious will that would exclude us from spirituality and unite us with the spider web of the earth. This conscious will dwells in some people, for they believe that it will be to their advantage if they train only themselves spiritually and leave the others to live in ignorance. In most cases, however, this is done in ignorance; basically, people do not have the remotest idea of the appalling earthly destiny they are approaching by uniting themselves with what an ancient spiritual knowledge called the sixteen paths of human perdition. For, my dear friends, just as there are many ways in which we can turn with the shadowy intellect toward what can come to us as a message from the spiritual worlds, so there are variations of the shadowy intellect itself, various ways of uniting ourselves through this intellectual activity with the elements of spidery incrustation that will be spun over the whole earth in the future. In that time, the intellect will hold sway objectively in the manifold limbs these spider creatures will possess. They will entwine and wind themselves around one another; in doing so, in these convolutions reminiscent of the caduceus, they will produce the most marvelous, clever, the most ingenious formations—ingenious in todays's sense of the word. However, by again acquiring an understanding of the artistic from within, human beings will be able to show understanding for what goes beyond the mineral and is expressed in the formation of the plant.

It is symptomatic that in the course of mankind's evolution it was Goethe who discovered the teaching of metamorphosis—Goethe, who was artistically inclined. All the pedants around him considered it to be dilettantism, and they think so even today. In Goethe, however, the artistic conception of the world and his clarity of mind in general combined with the power of vision that recognizes, even in nature herself, nature as the artist. He was not yet capable of seeing the animal kingdom in the same way, except for the formation of the vertebra and the skull. That wondrous transmutation of a previous existence of man, where the present shape of the head develops from the form of the earlier remainder of the body, that marvelously artistic transformation of the long bones of the limbs into the spherical bones of the skull—only when this will truly be perceived will a real inner comprehension of the difference between the head and the whole remaining human form result. Such is the insight we must attain if we would plastically connect the head with the remainder of the human organism.

Yet, as art, this is at the same time true science, for all science that does not rise to the level of art is a deceptive science, a science casting humanity into cosmic misfortune. Thus, we see, on the one hand, that a true spiritual science shows us the way to an artistic grasp of things. Like a great hymn, I might say, this dwelled in Goethe's soul, when, as early as 1780, he wrote “Nature” his hymn in prose: “Nature, we are surrounded and encompassed by her ...” The whole hymn weaves a tapestry of thoughts such that one would like to say: It is like the unfolding of a mighty longing to receive spirit beings from the whole universe. Indeed, to pursue and develop further the thoughts living in Goethe's hymn "Nature" would be to provide a dwelling place for those beings who are seeking to descend from the cosmos to the earth. On the other hand, the torturous concepts developed in the nineteenth century concerning human physiology, biology, the system of plants, and so on, actually have nothing to do with the true being of the plants, something we had occasion to point out during our reflections on color. These inartistic concepts neither provide real insight nor do they penetrate to the human level. Therefore, what is held to be science today is essentially a product of Ahriman; it leads mankind to earthly doom and does not allow the human being to reach the sphere that, if I may say so, is brought toward him since the last third of the nineteenth century by beings from the cosmos.

The cultivation of spiritual science, my dear friends, is no abstract pursuit. It implies opening doors to cosmic influences that have been trying to enter upon the earth since the last third of the nineteenth century. It is a real, cosmic event to cultivate spiritual science. We need to become conscious of this fact.

Thus we may say, we overlook the whole span of time from the moon's departure until its return. This moon, which reflects the sunlight to us, has indeed a profound connection to our existence. It separated from the earth in order that the human being might become free. Humanity, however, must make use of this period so as not to provide for the moon, when the latter will have returned again, the material that can be bound up with the moon existence in the earth in that new kingdom of nature, of which I have now told you a little in a more or less graphic form.

We can say that now and then there arises in human beings some kind of forboding of what is to come. I do not know what meaning has been attached by readers to what Nietzsche describes in the chapter on the ugliest man in the valley of death in his Zarathustra. It is a touching, tragic description. Of course, Nietzsche had no vision of the valley of death into which earth existence will be transformed when the above-mentioned spider brood will cover the earth. Nevertheless, at the time when this fantasy of the valley of death arose in Nietzsche, there lived in him subconsciously something of this picture of the future. Therefore, he placed the ugliest of human beings into this vale of death. It was indeed some sort of foreboding of the time to come when human beings will be carried along in the most hideous shapes by the moon existence as it sinks down upon the earth, if they continue to cultivate only their shadowy thoughts. As the ugliest of men, they will fall into this swarm of spiders and be united with it.

What would be the use of keeping these things secret today, as many people would have us do? It would mean pulling the wool over people's eyes. After all, a large part of what is disseminated as spirituality today is nothing else but throwing dust in people's eyes. Occasionally one encounters people who realize what this means, namely, not to comprehend a single historical event as it is in reality. How many people are there today who know that events of fundamental importance are taking place in our days? I have already drawn attention to these things. How few are prepared really to enter into them? People would like to close their eyes to them. They would like to say: Well, these things are really not of so much importance. Yet, the signs of the times are there, and should be understood by human beings.

This is what I wished to add to my considerations on the world of color and man's relationship with the cosmos beyond the earth. We shall continue with these studies in the future.

• 1. Lectures of May 6, 7, and 8, 1921 in Colour, RSE 623, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1977.
• T1. This occurred during the Atlantean age.

Dornach, June 2, 1921

In the past few weeks, I have repeatedly spoken of the great change that took place in Western civilization during the fourth century A.D. When such a matter is discussed, one is obliged to point out one thing again and again, that has already been the subject of discussion here many times. Yet it is necessary to focus on it time and again. I am referring to the metamorphoses of human development, markedly differing from each other on the soul level. When speaking of such a major point in human evolution as the one in the fourth century, one has to pay heed to the fact that the soul life of humanity changed in a sense with one great leap.

This view is not prevalent today. The prevailing opinion holds that the human race has undergone a certain history. This history is traced back to about the third or fourth millennium along the lines of the most recent documented records. Then, going back further, there is nothing for a long time; finally, one arrives at animalistic-human conditions. But in regard to the duration of the historical development, it is assumed that human beings have in the main always thought and felt the way they do today; at most, they formerly adhered to a somewhat more childish stage of scientific pursuit. Finally, however, human beings have struggled upward to the level of which we say today that it is splendid how far we have come in the comprehension of the world. To be sure, a reasonably unbiased consideration of human life arrives at the opposite view. I have had to indicate to you the presence of a mighty transition in the fourth Christian century; I outlined the other change in the whole human soul life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Finally, I described how a turning point in human soul life occurred also during the nineteenth century.

Today, we shall consider one detail in this whole development. I would like to place before you a personality who illustrates particularly well that human beings in the relatively recent past thought completely differently from the way we think today. The personality, who has been mentioned also in earlier lectures, is John Scotus Erigena,¹ who lived in the ninth century A.D. at the court of Charles the Bald in France.² Erigena, whose home was across the Channel, who was born approximately in the year 815 and lived well into the second half of the ninth century, is truly a representative of the more intimate Christian mode of thinking of the ninth century A.D. It is, however, a manner of thinking that is still completely under the influence of the first Christian centuries. John Scotus Erigena apparently was intent on immersing himself in the prevalent scholarly and theological culture of his time. In his age, scholarly and theological knowledge were one and the same. And such learning was most readily acquired across the British Channel, particularly in the Irish institutions where Christianity was cultivated in a certain esoteric manner. The Franconian kings then had ways of attracting such personalities to their courts. The Christian knowledge permeating the Franconian kingdom, even spreading from there further east into western Germany, was mainly influenced by those who had been attracted from across the Channel by these Franconian kings.

John Scotus Erigena also immersed himself into the contents of the writings by the Greek Church Fathers, studying also the texts of a certain problematic nature within Western civilization, namely, the texts by Dionysius the Areopagite.³ As you know, the latter is considered by some to be a direct pupil of Paul. Yet, these texts only surfaced in the sixth century, and many scholars therefore refer to them as pseudo-Dionysian writings composed in the sixth century by an unknown person, which were then accredited to Paul's disciple.

People who say that are ignorant of the way spiritual knowledge was passed on in those early centuries. A school like the one in which Paul himself taught in Athens possessed insights that initially were taught only orally. Handed down from generation to generation, they were finally written down much, much later on. What was thus recorded at a later time, was not necessarily anything less than genuine for that reason; it could preserve to some extent the identity of something that was centuries old. Furthermore, the great value that we place on personality today was certainly not attached to personality in those earlier ages. Perhaps we will be able to touch upon a circumstance in this lecture that must be discussed in connection with Erigena, namely, why people did not place much value on personality in that age.

There is no doubt about one thing: The teachings recorded in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite were considered especially worthy of being written down in the sixth century. They were considered the substance of what had been left from the early Christian times, which were now in particular need of being recorded. We should consider this fact as such to be significant. In the times prior to the fourth century, people simply had more confidence in memory working from generation to generation than they had in later periods. In earlier ages, people were not so eager to write everything down. They were aware, however, that the time was approaching when it would become increasingly necessary to write down things that earlier had been passed on by word of mouth with great ease; for the things that were then recorded in the writings of Dionysius were of a subtle nature.

Now, what John Scotus Erigena was able to study in these writings was certainly apt to make an extraordinarily profound impression on him. For the mode of thinking found in this Dionysius was approximately as follows. With the concepts we from and the perceptions we acquire, we human beings can comprehend the physical sensory world. We can then draw our conclusions from the facts and beings of this sensory world by means of reasoning. We work our way upward, as it were, to a rational content that is then no longer visually perceptible but is experienced in ideas and concepts. Once we have developed our concepts and thoughts from the sensory facts and beings, we have the urge to move upward with them to the supersensory, to the spiritual and divine.

Now, Dionysius does not proceed by saying that we learn this or that from the sensory things; he does not say that our intellect acquires its concepts and then goes on to deduce a deity, a spiritual world. No, Dionysius says, the concepts we acquire from the things of the senses are all unsuitable to express the deity. No matter how subtle the concepts we form of sensory things, we simply cannot express what constitutes divinity with the aid of these concepts. We must therefore resort to negative concepts rather than positive ones. When we encounter our fellowmen, for example, we speak of personality. According to this Dionysian view, when we speak of God, we should not speak of personality, for the concept of personality is much too small and too lowly to designate the deity. Rather we should speak of super-personality. When referring to God, we should not even speak of being, of existence. We say, a man is, an animal, a plant is. We should not ascribe existence to God in the same sense as we attribute existence to us, the animals, and the plants; to Him, we ought to ascribe a super-existence. Thus, according to Dionysius, we should try to rise from the sensory world to certain concepts but then we should turn them upside down, as it were, allowing them to pass over into the negative. We should rise from the sense world to positive theology but then turn upside down and establish negative theology. This negative theology would actually be so sublime, so permeated by God and divine thinking that it can only be expressed in negative predicates, in negations of what human beings can picture of the sensory world.

Dionysius the Areopagite believed he could penetrate into the divine spiritual world by leaving behind, so to speak, all that can be encompassed by the intellect and thus finding the way into a world transcending reason.

If we consider Dionysius a disciple of Paul, then he lived from the end of the first Christian century into the second one. This means that he lived a few centuries prior to the decisive fourth century A.D. He sensed what was approaching: The culmination point of the development of human reason. With a part of his being, Dionysius looked back into the days of antiquity. As you know, prior to the eighth century B.C., human beings did not speak of the intellect in the way they did after the eighth century. Reason, or the rational soul was not born until the eigth century B.C., and from the birth of the rational soul originated the Greek and Roman cultures. These then reached their highest point of development in the fourth century A.D. Prior to this eighth century B.C. people did not perceive the world through the intellect at all; they perceived it directly, through contemplation. The early Egyptian and Chaldean insights were attained through contemplation; they were attained in the same manner in which we acquire our external sensory insights, despite the fact that these pre-Christian insights were spiritual insights. The spirit was perceived just as we today perceive the sensory world and as the Greeks already perceived the sensory world. Therefore, in Dionysius the Areopagite, something like a yearning held sway for a kind of perception lying beyond human reason.

Now, in his mind, Dionysius confronted the mighty Mystery of Golgotha. He dwelled in the intellectual culture of his time. Anybody studying the writings of Dionysius sees—regardless of who Dionysius was—how immersed this man was in all that the intellectual culture of his time had produced. He was a well educated Greek but at the same time a man whose whole personality was imbued with the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha. He was a man who realized that regardless of how much we strain our intellect, we cannot comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and what stands behind it. We must transcend the intellect. We have to evolve from positive theology to negative theology.

When John Scotus Erigena read the writings of this Dionysius the Areopagite, they made a profound impression on him even in the ninth century. For what followed upon the fourth Christian century had more of an Augustine character and developed only slowly in the way I described in the earlier lectures. The mind of such a person, particularly of one of those who had trained themselves in the schools of wisdom over in Ireland, still dwelled in the first Christian centuries; he clung with all the fibers of his soul to what is written in the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet, at the same time, John Scotus Erigena also had the powerful urge to establish by means of reason, by what the human being can attain through his intellect, a kind of positive theology, which, to him, was philosophy. He therefore diligently studied the Greek Church Fathers in particular. We discover in him a thorough knowledge, for example of Origen,⁴ who lived from the second to the third century A.D.

When we study Origen, we actually discover a world view completely different from the Christian view, that is from what appeared later as the Christian view. Origen definitely still holds the opinion that one has to penetrate theology with philosophy. He believes that it is only possible to examine the human being and his nature only if he is considered as an emanation of the deity, as having had his origin in God. Then, however, man lowered himself increasingly; yet through the Mystery of Golgotha, he has gained the possibility of ascending once again to the deity in order once more to unite with God. From God into the world and back to God—this is how one could describe the path that Origen perceived as his own. Basically, something like this also underlies the Dionysian writings, and then was passed on to such personalities as John Scotus Erigena. But there were many others like him.

One could say that it is a sort of historical miracle that posterity came to know the writings of John Scotus Erigena at all. In contrast to other texts of a similar nature from the first centuries that have been completely lost, Erigena's writings were preserved until the eleventh, twelfth, a few even until the thirteenth century. At that time, they were declared heretical by the Pope; the order was given to find and burn all copies. Only much later, manuscripts from the eleventh and thirteenth century were rediscovered in some obscure monastery. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, people knew nothing of John Scotus Erigena. His writings had been burned like so many other manuscripts⁵ of a similar content from that period. From Rome's point of view the search was more successful in the case of other manuscripts: all copies were fed to the flames. Yet, of Erigena's works, a few copies remained.

Now, considering the ninth century and also taking into account that in John Scotus Erigena we have an expert in the wisdom and insights of the first Christian centuries, we must conclude the following. He is a characteristic representative of what extended form an earlier age, from the time preceding the fourth century, into later periods. One could say that in these later times, all knowledge had ossified in the dead Latin language. All the wisdom of the spiritual world that had been alive earlier became ossified, dogmatized, rigid, and intellectualized. Yet, in people like Erigena lived something of the ancient aliveness of direct spiritual knowledge that had existed in the first Christian centuries and was utilized by the most enlightened minds to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha.

For a time, this wisdom had to die out in order for the intellect of man to be cultivated from the first third of the fifteenth century until our era. While the intellect as such is a spiritual achievement of the human being, initially it turned only to the material realm. The ancient wealth of wisdom had to die so that the intellect in its shadowy nature could be born. If, instead of immersing ourselves in a scholarly, pedantic manner into his writings, we do so with our whole being, we will notice that through Scotus Erigena something had spoken out of soul depths other than those from which people spoke later on. There, the human being had still spoken out of mental depths that subsequently could no longer be reached by human soul life. Everything was more spiritual, and if human beings spoke intellectually at all, they spoke of matters in the spiritual realm.

It is extremely important for one to scrutinize carefully what the structure of Erigena's knowledge was like. In his mighty work on the divisions of nature that has come down to posterity in the manner I described, he divided what he had to say concerning the world in four chapters. In the first, he initially speaks of the uncreated and the created world (see outline below). In the way Erigena believed himself able to do it, the first chapter describes God and the way He was prior to His approaching something like the creation of the world.

Ancient Legacy

The Human Being

John Scotus Erigena clearly describes this in the way he learned through the writings of Dionysius. He describes by means of developing the most refined intellectual concepts. At the same time, he is aware that with them he only reaches up to a certain limit beyond which lies negative theology. He therefore merely approaches the actual true being of the spirit, of the divine. Among other topics, we find in this chapter the beautiful discourse about the Trinity, instructive even for our age. He states that when we view the things around us, we initially discover existence as an overall spiritual quality (see above). Existence embraces everything. Now, we should not attribute existence as possessed by things to God. Yet, looking upward to existence transcending existence, we cannot but speak summarily of the deity's existence.

Likewise, we find that things in the world are illuminated and permeated by wisdom. To God, we should not merely ascribe wisdom but wisdom beyond wisdom. But when we proceed from things, we arrive at the limit of wisdom-filled things. Now, there is not only wisdom in all things. They live; there is life in all things. Therefore, when Erigena calls to mind the world, he says: I see existence, wisdom, life in the world. The world appears to me in these aspects as an existing, wisdom-filled, living world. To him, these are three veils, so to speak, that the intellect fashions when it surveys all things. One would have to see through these veils, then, to see into the divine-spiritual realm. To begin with, Erigena describes these veils: When I look upon existence, this represents the Father to me; when I look upon wisdom, it represents the Son to me; when I look upon life, it represents the Holy Spirit in the universe.

As you can see, John Scotus Erigena certainly proceeds from philosophical concepts and then makes his way up to the Christian Trinity. Inwardly, proceeding from the comprehensible, he still experiences the path from there to the so-called incomprehensible. Indeed, of this he is convinced. Yet, from the way he speaks and presents his insights we can see that he has learned from Dionysius. Precisely when he arrives at existence, wisdom, and life, which to him represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he would really like to have these concepts dissolve in a general spiritual element into which the human being would then have to rise by transcending concepts. However, he does not credit the human being with the faculty of arriving at a state of mind that goes beyond the conceptual.

In this, John Scotus Erigena was a product of the age that developed the intellect. Indeed, if this age had understood itself correctly, it would have had to admit that it could not enter into the realm transcending the conceptual level.

The second chapter then describes something like a second sphere of world existence, the created and the creating world (see above). It is the world of the spiritual beings where we find the angels, the archangels, the Archai, and so on. This world of spiritual beings, mentioned already in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. is creative everywhere in the world. Yet this hierarchical world is itself created; it is begun, hence created, by the highest being and in turn is active creatively in all details of existence surrounding us.

In the third chapter, Erigena then describes as a third world the created world that is noncreating. This is the world we perceive around us with our senses. It is the world of animals, plants, and minerals, the stars, and so on. In this chapter, Erigena deals with almost everything we would designate as cosmology, anthropology, and so forth, all that we would call the realm of science.

In the fourth chapter, Erigena deals with the world that has not been created and does not create. This is again the deity, but the way it will be when all creatures, particularly all human beings, will have returned to it. It is the Godhead when it will no longer be creating, when, in blissful tranquility—this is how John Scotus Erigena imagines it—it will have reabsorbed all the beings that have emerged from it.

Now, in surveying these four chapters, we find contained in them something like a compendium of all traditional knowledge of the schools of wisdom from which Scotus Erigena had come. When we consider what he describes in the first chapter, we deal with something that can be called theology in his sense, the actual doctrine of the divine.

Considering the second chapter, we find in it what he calls in terms of our present-day language the ideal world. The ideal is pictured, however, as existing. For he does not describe abstract ideas but angels, archangels, and so forth. He pictures the whole intelligible world, as it was called. Yet it was unlike our modern intelligible world; instead it was a world filled with living beings, with living, intelligible entities.

As I said, in the third chapter Erigena describes what we would term science today, but he does so in a different way. Since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, who, after all, lived later, we no longer possess what was called cosmology or anthropology in Scotus Erigena's age. Cosmology was still described from the spiritual standpoint. It depicted how spiritual beings direct and also inhabit the stars, how the elements, fire, water, air, and earth are permeated by spiritual beings. What was described as cosmology, was indeed something different. The materialistic way of viewing things that has arisen since the middle of the fifteenth century did not yet exist in Erigena's time, and his form of anthropology also differed completely from what we call anthropology in our materialistic age.

Here, I can point out something extraordinarily characteristic for what anthropology is to John Scotus Erigena. He looks at the human being and says: First, man bears existence within himself. Hence, he is a mineral being, for he contains within himself a mineral nature (see outline above). Secondly, man lives and thrives like a plant. Third, man feels as does the animal. Fourth, man judges and draws conclusions as man. Fifth, man perceives as an angel.

It goes without saying that in our age this would be an unheard-of statement! When John Scotus Erigena speaks of judgment and conclusions, something that is done, for instance, in a legal court where one pronounces judgment over somebody—then, so he says, human beings do this as human beings. But when they perceive, when they penetrate the world in perception then human beings do not behave as human beings but as angels! The reason for pointing this out is that I am trying to show you that for that period anthropology was something different from what it is for our present age. For it is true that you could hardly hear anywhere, not even in a theological seminar, that human beings perceive as angels. Therefore, one is forced to conclude that our science no longer resembles what Erigena describes in the third chapter. It has turned into something different. If we wanted to call Erigena's science by a word that is no longer applicable to anything existing today, we would have to say that it was a spiritual doctrine of the universe and man, pneumatology.

Now to the fourth chapter: This contains, first of all, Erigena's teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha and the doctrine concerning what the human being has to expect in the future, namely, entrance into the divine-spiritual world, hence, what in modern usage would be called soteriology. “Soter,” after all, means savior; the teaching of the future is eschatology. We find that Erigena here deals with the concepts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the emanation of Divine Grace, man's path into the divine-spiritual, world, and so on.

There is one thing that truly holds our attention, if we study attentively a work such as the De divisione naturae by John Scotus Erigena about the divisions of nature. The world is definitely discussed as something that is perceived in spiritual qualities. He speaks of something spiritual as he observes the world. But what is not contained in this work? We have to pay attention, after all, to what is not included in a universal science such as Erigena is trying to establish there.

In John Scotus Erigena's work, you discover as good as nothing of what we call sociology today, social science, and things of that kind. One is almost inclined to say it appears from the way Erigena pictures human beings that he did not wish to give mankind social sciences, no more so than any animal species, say the lion, the tiger, or any bird species, would come out with a sociology if it produced some sort of science. For a lion would not talk about the way it ought to live together with the other lions or how it ought to acquire its food and so on; this is something that comes instinctively. Just as little could we imagine a sociology of sparrows. Surely sparrows could reveal any number of the most interesting cosmic secrets from their viewpoint, but they would never produce any teaching about economics, for sparrows would consider this a subject that goes without saying, something they do because their instinct tells them to do it.

This is what is remarkable: Because we discover as yet nothing like this in Erigena's writings, we realize that he still viewed human society as if it produced the social elements out of its instincts. With his special kind of insight, he points to what still lived in the human being in the form of instincts and drives, namely, the impulses of social living. What he describes transcends this social aspect. He describes how the human being had emerged from the divine, and what sort of beings exist beyond the sense world. Then, in a form of pneumatology, he shows how the spirit pervades the sensory world, and he presents the spiritual element that penetrated into the world of the senses in his fourth chapter on soteriology and eschatology. Nowhere is there a description, however, of how human beings ought to live together. I should say, everything is elevated above the sensory world. It was generally a characteristic of this ancient science that everything was elevated beyond the sense world.

Now, if we contemplate writings such as John Scotus Erigena's teaching in a spiritual scientific sense, we discover that he did not think at all with the same organs humanity thinks with today. We simply do not understand him if we try to understand him with the thinking employed by mankind today. We understand him only when, through spiritual science, we have acquired an idea of how to think with the etheric body, the body that, as a more refined body, underlies the coarse sensory corporeality.

Thus Erigena did not think with the brain but with the etheric body. In him, we simply have a mind which did not yet think with the brain. Everything he wrote down came into being as a result of thinking with the etheric body. Fundamentally speaking, it was only subsequent to his age that human beings began to think with the physical body, and only since the beginning of the fifteenth century did people think totally with the physical body. It is normally not recognized that during this period the human soul life has truly changed, and that if we go back into the thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh centuries, we encounter a form of thinking that was not yet carried out with the physical but with the etheric body. This thinking with the etheric body was not supposed to extend into later ages when, dialectically and scholastically, people discussed rigid concepts. This former thinking with the etheric body, which certainly was the form of thinking employed during the first Christian centuries, was declared to be heretical. This was the reason for burning Erigena's writings. Now, the actual soul condition of a thinker in that age becomes comprehensible.

Going back to earlier times, we find a certain form of clairvoyance in all people. Human beings did not think at all with their physical body. In past ages, they thought with their etheric body and carried on their soul life even with the astral body. There, we should not speak of thinking at all, since the intellect only originated in the eighth century B.C., as I have pointed out. However, certain remnants of this ancient clairvoyance were retained, and it is particularly true of the most outstanding minds that with the intellect, which had already come into being, they tried to penetrate into the knowledge that had been handed down through tradition from former ages. People tried to comprehend what had been viewed in a completely different manner in past times. They tried to understand, but now had to have the support of abstract concepts such as existence, wisdom, life. I would say that these individuals still knew something of an earlier spirit-permeated insight and at the same time felt quite at home within the purely intellectual perception.

Later on, when the intellectual perception had turned into a shadow, this was not felt anymore. Earlier, however, people felt that in past ages insights had existed that permeated human beings in a living way out of spiritual worlds, it was not something merely thought up. Erigena lived in such a divided state. He was only capable of thinking, but when this thinking arrived at perception, he sensed that there was something of the ancient powers that had permeated the human being in the ancient manner of perception. Erigena felt the angel, the angelos, within himself. This is why he said that human beings perceive as angels. It was a legacy from ancient times, extending into his age of intellectual knowledge, that made it possible for a mind like Scotus Erigena's to say that man perceives like an angel. In the days of the Egyptian, Chaldean, and the early ages of the Hebrew civilization, nobody would have said anything else but: The angel perceives within me; as a human being, I share in the knowledge of the angel. The angel dwells within me, he cognizes, and I take part in what he perceives.

This was true of the era when reason did not yet exist. When the intellect had appeared, it became necessary to penetrate this older knowledge with reason. In Scotus Erigena, however, there still existed an awareness of this state of permeation with the angel nature.

Now, it is a strange experience to become involved in this work of Erigena's and to try and understand it completely. You finally arrive at a feeling of having read something most significant, something that still dwells very much in spiritual regions and speaks of the world as something spiritual. But then, in turn, the feeling arises that everything is basically mixed up. You realize that with this text you find yourself in the ninth century when the intellect had already brought much confusion. And this is truly the case. For if you read the first chapter, you are dealing with theology. But it is a theology that is certainly secondary even for John Scotus Erigena, a theology which evidently points back to something greater and more direct. I shall now speak as if all these matters were hypotheses, but what I now develop as a hypothesis can be established by spiritual science as a fact. A condition must once have existed, and we look back on it, when as yet theology was not addressed in such an intellectual manner but was considered to be something one delved into in a living way. Without doubt, it was that kind of theology the Egyptians spoke of, those Egyptians of whom the Greeks—I mentioned it above—report that Egyptian sages told them: You Greeks are like children;⁶ you have no knowledge of the world's origin, we do possess this sacred knowledge of the world's beginnings.

Obviously, the Greeks were being referred to an ancient, living theology. Thus, we have to say: During the time of the third post-Atlantean period, which begins in the fourth millennium and ends in the first millennium B.C. in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in the year 747 B.C., there existed a living theology. It now needed to be penetrated by Erigena's intellect. It was obviously present in a much more vital form to the personality who must be recognized as Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius had a much more intense feeling for this ancient theology. He felt that it was something that existed but could no longer be approached, that becomes negative as one tries to approach it. Based on the intellect, so he thought, one can only arrive at positive theology. Yet, with the term, negative theology, he was really referring to an ancient theology that had disappeared.

Again, when we consider what appears in the second chapter as the ideal world, we could believe that it is something modern. That, however, is not the case, That ideal world actually is identical with a true idea of what appears in the ancient Persian epoch, just as I described it in my Occult Science, hence in the second post-Atlantean period. Among Plato and the Platonists, this ancient Persian living world of angels, the world of the Amshaspands, and so on, had already paled into the world of ideals and ideas due to a later development. Yet, what is actually contained in this ideal world and is clearly discernible in Scotus Erigena goes back to this second ancient Persian age.

What appears in Erigena's book as pneumatology, as a kind of pantheism is not vague and nebulous such as is frequently the case today, but a pantheism that is alive and spiritual, though dimmed in Erigena's writing. This pneumatology is the last remnant, the very last vestige filtered out of the first post-Atlantean, ancient Indian period.

And what about the fourth chapter? Well, it contains Erigena's living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of humanity. We hardly speak of this anymore today. As an ancient tradition, it is still mentioned by theologians, but they know of it only in rigidified dogmas. They even deny that man could attain such insight through living knowledge. But it did originate from what was thus cultivated as soteriology and eschatology. You see, the theology of former times was handed over, as it were, to the councils; there, it was frozen into dogmas and incorporated into Christology. It was not to be touched anymore. It was viewed as impenetrable to perception. It was removed, so to speak, from what was carried out in schools by means of knowledge. As it was, exoteric matters were already being preserved like nebulous formations from ancient times. But at least the activities in schools were to be linked with thoughts that emerged in the age of thinking. They were to be connected, after all, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of mankind. There, one spoke of the Christ being's rule among human beings; one spoke of a future day of judgment. The concepts that people could come up with were used for that.

Thus, we see that Scotus Erigena actually records the first three chapters as though they had been handed down to him. Finally, he applies his own intellect to the fourth chapter but in such a manner that he speaks of things that far surpass the physical, sensory world, yet have something to do with this world. We realize that he took pains to apply the intellect to eschatology and soteriology. After all, we know the kind of scholarly disputes and discussions Scotus Erigena was involved in. For example, he was involved in discussions of the question whether in Communion, that is, in something that was related to the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings confront the actual blood and the actual body of Christ. He took part in all the discussions of human will, its freedom and lack of freedom in connection with divine grace. Hence, he honed and schooled his intellect in regard to everything that was the subject of his fourth chapter. This is what people discussed then.

We could say that the content of the first three chapters was an ancient tradition. One did not change it much but simply communicated it. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, was a living striving; there, the intellect was applied and schooled.

What became of this intellect that was schooled there? What happened to the concepts of soteriology and eschatology arrived at by people like Scotus Erigena in the ninth century? You see, my dear friends, since the middle of the fifteenth century this has become our science, the basis of the perception of nature. Once, people employed the intellect in order to consider whether bread and wine in the Sacrament are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. They pondered whether grace is bestowed on man in one way or another. This same intellect was later used to consider whether the molecule consists of atoms and whether the sun's body consists of one form of substance or another, and so on. It is the continuation of the theological intellect that inhabits natural science today. Precisely the same intellect that stimulated Scotus and the others who were involved with him in the dispute over Communion—and the discussions were indeed very lively in those days—survived in the teachings of Galileo and Copernicus. It survived in Darwinism, even, say, in Strauss's materialism. It has lived on in a straight line. You know that the old is always preserved alongside the new. Therefore, the same intellect that in David Friedrich Strauss hatched the book The Old and the New Faith, which preaches total atheism, occupied itself in those days, with soteriology and eschatology; it continues in a straight line.

We could therefore say that if this book had to be written today based as much on modern conditions as Scotus Erigena based what he wrote on the conditions of his age, then, here (referring to outline above), total atheism would not appear, but rather our natural science. For, naturally, complete atheism would contradict the first chapter. In the ninth century soteriology and eschatology still appeared there, for then the intellect was applied to other things. But here, (see p. 281), materialistic science would emerge today. History reveals to us nothing else but this. Now, we can perhaps see what becomes evident from the whole conception of this work.

Basically, what is listed here (outline above) would have to appear in a different sequence. The third chapter would have to read: world view of the first post-Atlantean age. The second chapter, would have to read: world view of the second post-Atlantean age, and the first chapter: world view of the third post-Atlantean age. In the sense of Scotus Erigena—who lived in the fourth post-Atlantean age that only came to an end in the fifteenth century—the last chapter applies to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The sequence (in the outline) would therefore have to be: III, II, I, IV. This is what I meant when I said earlier that one receives the impression that things are actually mixed up. Scotus Erigena simply possessed bits of the ancient legacy but he did not list them in accordance with their sequence in time. They were part of the knowledge of his age, and he mentioned them in the order in which they were most familiar to him. He listed the nearest at hand as the highest; the others appeared so nebulous to him that he considered them to be inferior.

Yet, the fourth chapter is nevertheless most remarkable. Let us try to understand from a certain viewpoint what it should actually be. Let us go back into pre-Christian times. If we were to seek among the Egyptians a representative mind such as Scotus Erigena was for the ninth century, such a person would still have known something concerning theology in a most lively way. He would have had even more alive concepts of the ideal or angelic world, of the sphere that illuminates and permeates the whole world with spirit. He would still have known all that and would have said: In the very first age, there once existed a human world view that beheld the spirit in all things. But then, the spirit was abstractly lifted up into the heights. It became the ideal world, finally the divine world. Then, the fourth epoch arrived. It was supposed to be even more spiritualized than the theological epoch. This Greco-Latin period was really supposed to be more spiritualized than the third epoch. And above all, the fifth which then followed, namely our time, would have to be an even more spiritualized era, for with materialistic science in place of soteriology or eschatology it would have to be listed in fourth place, or we would have to add a fifth listing with our natural science, and the latter would have to be the most spiritual view.

Yet, in fact, my dear friends, matters are buried. We hear Scotus Erigena saying that man exists as a mineral being, lives and thrives as a plant, feels as an animal, judges and draws conclusions as a human being, perceives as an angel—something Erigena still knew from ancient traditions. Now, we who aspire to spirit knowledge would have to go even further. We would have to say: Right, human beings exist as mineral beings, live and thrive as plants, feel as animals, judge and draw conclusions as human beings, perceive as angels and, sixth, human beings behold—namely, imaginatively, the spiritual world—as archangels. When we speak of the human being since the first third of the fifteenth century, we would have to ascribe to ourselves the following. We perceive as angels and develop the consciousness soul by means of soul faculties of vision—to begin with, unconsciously, but yet as consciousness soul—as archangels.

Thus, we face the paradox that in the materialistic age human beings actually live in the spiritual world, dwelling on a higher spiritual level than they did in earlier times. We can actually say: Yes, Scotus Erigena is right, the angel experience is awakening in man, but the archangel experience is also awakening since the first third of the fifteenth century. We should rightfully be in a spiritual world.

In realizing this, we could really look back also to a passage in the Gospels that is always interpreted in a most trivial way, namely, the one saying: The end of the world is near and the kingdoms of heaven are at hand. Yes, my dear friends, when we have to say of ourselves that in us the archangel is developing vision so that we can receive the consciousness soul, then there results a strange view of this approach of the heavens. It appears that it is necessary to revise such conceptions of the New Testament once more from the standpoint of spiritual science. These views are very much in need of revision, and we really have two tasks: First, to understand whether our age is not actually meant to to be different than the age when Christ walked on earth and whether the end of the world of which Christ spoke might not be something we have behind us already? This is the one task we confront. And if it is true that we have the so-called end of the world behind us and we therefore already face the spiritual world, then we would have to explain why it has such an unspiritual appearance, why it has become so material, arriving finally at that terrible, astounding life that characterizes the first third of the twentieth century? Two mighty and overwhelming questions place themselves before our soul. We shall continue speaking about that tomorrow.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Charles the Bald, 828–877, king of the Franconians, emperor from 875–877.
• 3. Dionysius the Areopagite: connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Had strong influence on medieval mysticism.
• 4. Origen, around 185–254, Greek Church Father in Alexandria, later presbyter in Caesarea; basis of his philosophical theology: De principiis (“Peri archon”). Under Justinian I, during the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople in 553, his teachings were condemned as heretical.
• 5. After the Church had forbidden the reading of Scotus Erigena's texts, all editions were ordered burned in 1225.
• 6. These words are reported by Plato in Timaios, 22 B.C.

Yesterday, we concluded with two significant questions resulting from considering the position of a personality such as John Scotus Erigena. In him, we discover a world view, dating from the first centuries of Christianity that throws its light into the ninth century. Based on everything we have learned recently, we can say that the manner of perception, the whole way of thinking, differed in the first centuries A.D. from what it was later on. As we already know, a great change occurred in the fourth Christian century. From the middle of that century onward, people simply thought much more rationally than they had done earlier. One could say that until that time all perception, all forming of concepts had sprung far more from a form of inspiration than later on when human beings became increasingly conscious of the fact that they themselves were working with thoughts. What we have found to be the consciousness of human beings prior to the fourth century A.D. is still echoed in statements such as that by Scotus Erigena that man makes judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but perceives as an angel. This idea Scotus Erigena brings up as an ancient legacy, as a kind of reminiscence, was acknowledged by anyone who thought at all prior to the fourth century A.D. It never occurred to people in those days to attribute to the human being thoughts that transmit knowledge or perception. They ascribed those to the angel working within man. An angel inhabited the body of human beings; the angel perceived, and human beings shared in this knowledge.

Such a direct consciousness had faded away altogether after the fourth century. In men like Scotus Erigena it emerged once again, drawn forth from the soul with effort, as it were. This proves that the whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of these centuries. That is why it is so difficult for people today to turn their minds back to the mode of thinking and conceiving prevalent in the first centuries after Christ. Only with the help of spiritual science can this be done again. We have to arrive once more at views that will truly correspond to what was thought in the first centuries A.D.

Already in the days of John Scotus Erigena controversies such as the one over Communion and man's predestination began. These were unmistakable indications of the fact that what was earlier more like an inspiration people did not argue about had now moved to the level of human debate. This came about because, as time went on, many things were simply no longer understood at all.

Among the things that were no longer understood, for example, is the beginning of the Gospel of St. John in the form generally known. If we take this beginning of the Gospel of John seriously, it actually states something that is no longer present in subsequent centuries in the general consciousness of those who profess Christianity. Consider that this Gospel starts with the words: “In the beginning was the Word”—and then it says further that through the Logos all things were made, that is, everything came into being that belongs among created things, and nothing was created except through the Logos.

If we take these words seriously, we have to admit: They signify that all visible things, all the things of the world, came into being through the Logos and that the Logos is therefore the actual creator of all things. In the Christian thinking after the fourth century A.D. the Logos, rightly identified with Christ in the sense of the Gospel of John, was certainly not regarded as the creator of all visible things. Instead, Christ is contrasted with the Creator as the Father, as God the Father. The Logos is designated as the Son, but the Son is not considered the Creator; it is the Father Who is made into the Creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the Gospel of St. John. You cannot take this Gospel seriously and not regard Christ as the Creator of all things visible, and instead view the Father God as the Creator. You can see, my dear friends, how little this Gospel was taken seriously in later Christian times.

In our mind, we have to place ourselves in the whole mode of thinking of the first Christian centuries, which, as I have said, experienced a change at the point in time indicated above. This way of thinking was in turn structured on the basis of insights into the spiritual world left behind from ancient pagan times. In particular, we have to understand clearly how people viewed the Last Supper, which then continued in the Christian Sacrifice of the Mass. We have to understand the view concerning Communion, the main content of which is contained in the words: “This is my body”—pointing to the bread—and “This is my blood”—pointing to the wine. This content of Communion was truly comprehended during the first Christian centuries; it was even understood by people who were by no means educated but simply gathered together in remembrance of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion. But what did people actually mean by that? They referred to the following.

Throughout antiquity, people were in possession of a religious doctrine of wisdom. Fundamentally speaking, the further back we go in time, the more we find this religious teaching of wisdom based on the being of the Father God. When we consider the religions of very ancient times, preserved in decadent form in later religious faiths, they exhibit in all instances a certain worship of what had remained behind from the ancestor of a tribe or a people. In a sense, human beings worshiped the ancestral father of a tribe. You know from Tacitus' Germania¹ how even those tribes who then invaded the Roman empire and made possible the new civilization, definitely retained such memories of tribal deities although in many cases they had already changed to a different form of worship, namely, to that of local gods—something I have mentioned in the public lectures of the last course.² They believed that while generation after generation had passed since a certain ancient ancestor had lived who had established the tribe or nation, the soul, the soul-spiritual element of this tribal father, still held sway in the most recent generations.

This presence was believed to be connected with the physical community of the bodies in the tribe. After all, these bodies were all related to each other. They all had the same ancestry. The common blood flowed through their veins. The body and the blood were one. As people looked up in religious devotion to the soul-spiritual element of the tribal father, they also experienced the presence of the deity to whom the tribal father had returned, the god through whom this ancestral father now affected the whole tribe or nation by means of his soul-spiritual nature. The rule of this deity was seen in the bodies, in the blood that ran down through the generations. A profound mystery was sensed in the mysterious forces of the body and the blood.

In those ancient pagan times, people actually beheld the forces of the deity in what held sway in the body and circulated in the blood. Therefore, it is possible to say that when a follower of such an ancient world view saw an animal's blood or, what was more, human blood run out, he beheld in this blood the corporeality of the deity. In the bodies of his race or tribe, which were built up by the blood, he beheld the forms, the image, of the deity. People today no longer have any idea of how the divine-spiritual was worshiped then at the same time as the material substance.

Truly, through the blood of the generations flowed the power of the deity; through the bodies of the generations the deity formed its image. The soul and spirit of the ancestor rose up to this deity and hence worked upon the descendants with divine power and was worshiped as the ancestral god. Not only in regard to these ancient beliefs, but above all in regard to actual truth, the elements working in the human body depend on the forces of the earth. As you know, the body's origins lie in much more ancient times but the forces of the earth are active in the human body as it is today—containing the mineral kingdom—and in the blood.

In the human blood, for example, not only those forces are active that enter the human being through foods but also those that are effective in the whole planet earth. For instance, due to the fact that a person lives in a region rich in red soil, hence a region possessing certain geological characteristics and certain metallic inclusions in the soil, an effect proceeds from the earth to the blood. In turn, the formation, the body, of man is dependent on the earth. The body develops one way in warmer, another way in colder regions of the earth. The corporeality and the elements active in the blood depend on the forces working in the earth. This truth, which we are approaching once again today through spiritual scientific research, was immediately clear to people in antiquity due to their instinctive perception. They know that the earth forces pulsate in the blood.

Today we say that when we connect a telegraph machine in station A by wire to one in station B, we connect the machines one-sidedly. We transmit the electrical current through the wire but the circuit must be closed. It is closed when we make the so-called ground connection. You probably know that if we have a telegraph machine at one station, we guide the wire over the telegraph poles. Yet the circuit is then not closed and it must be closed. We transmit the current into the plate sunk into the ground at one station and do the same at the other station but do nothing more. We could run a different wire there, but we do not do that; we mount an earth-wire plate on both ends of the wire, and the earth takes care of the rest. We know this today as a result of science. We have to presume that electricity, the electric current, works within the earth.

Now people in antiquity knew nothing of electricity and electric currents. Instead, they know something about their blood. They stood on the earth and knew that something was in the earth that also lived in the blood. They looked at the matter differently; they did not speak of electricity but of an earthly element that dwelled in their blood. We no longer know that the earth's electricity lives in the blood. We only speak out of attempts to grasp the matter outwardly through mathematical and mechanistic conceptions. This is why human beings linked their conception of God to the earth's body as such. They realized that the divine element worked in the blood and in the body through the earth. This was what appeared in the concept of the Father God because people considered the primal ancestor, the father, of the tribe or their folk as the point of departure for the influence of the divine element. The primal ancestor was believed to be working through the earth as his means, and the effects of the earth in the blood and the whole human body were seen to be the effects of the divine.

Now these people of old had still another conception. They said, The human being is not only affected by the earthly element. It would be fine if only the earth influenced mankind, but that is not the case. The neighbor of the earth, the moon, works together with the earth's forces. Therefore, they said, it really is not the earth alone but earth and moon together that are effective. With this combination of earth and moon forces, they now linked conceptions of not only one uniform deity of the earth, but many subordinate deities who were then present in the pagan world. All the conceptions that existed of the deity, the elements that affected the human being through the body and blood, all these were the primal source that fed any view of God in this ancient period.

It is not surprising that all search for insight turned in antiquity to the earth, the moon, and the earth's influences and therefore people had to figure out what affected the earth. Thus, a most sophisticated form of science was developed. An echo of this science of the Father God still influenced the first three books by John Scotus Erigena I spoke about yesterday. Basically though, he was not really familiar any more with this primal wisdom, for he lived as late as the ninth century, but bits of this science had been handed down and been preserved. They referred to the insight that the Father God, Who was not created but creates, dwells in everything surrounding the human being on earth, that the other deities, who have been created but also create, live in it as well. They are then the various entities of the hierarchies. Furthermore, the visible world is spread out around man, the created as well as the noncreating. Finally, human beings are to await the world in which the deity as a noncreating and not created, hence, as a resting divinity, holds sway and receives all else into its bosom. This is what is contained in Scotus Erigena's fourth book.

As I have told you, this fourth book deals mainly with soteriology and eschatology. It presents the history of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection and the gifts of grace, but also the end of the world and the entering into the resting Godhead. The first three chapters of the great book by Scotus Erigena clearly show us a reflection of ancient world views, for basically only the fourth chapter is really Christian. The first three chapters are permeated with a number of Christian concepts but what predominates in them really dates from ancient pagan times. We also find this unchanged pagan wisdom in the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries. We can say that through nature, through what the human being saw in the creatures surrounding him, he beheld the region of the Father God. He saw a world of ideals behind nature; he saw certain forces in nature. He also saw the rule of the Father God in the sequence of generation, in the development of mankind in individual tribes and nations.

In the first Christian centuries, another insight had joined this knowledge, which has been almost completely lost. The first Christian Church Fathers referred to something their later critics thoroughly eradicated. They said it was true that the Father God worked in the element flowing in the blood through the generations and expressed in the bodies, but He did so in constant conflict and together with His opponent powers, the nature spirits. This was a particularly vivid conception in the first Christian centuries, namely, that the Father God had never been quite successful in exerting His influence exclusively. Rather, He was waging a constant battle with the nature spirits who rule in any number of things in the outer world. Therefore, these first Christian Church Fathers said, The ancients of pre-Christian times believed in the Father God, but they really could not distinguish Him from the nature spirits, they actually believed in a kingdom of the Father God that included the domain of nature. They believed that the whole visible world has its source in it. This, however, is not true, so they said. All these spiritual beings, these various nature deities, do work together in nature, but first of all they crept into the things of the earth. Now, these earthly things we see around us with our senses, the things that have come about on earth, neither originate from these nature spirits nor from the Father God Who actually expressed His creative being only in the metamorphoses preceding the earth. What we see as earth does not originate from the Father God nor from the nature spirits. It comes from the Son, from the Logos, whom the Father God let spring forth from Himself so that the earth might be created by the Logos. And the Gospel of St. John, a mighty, significant monument was written in order to indicate: No, it is not as the people of old believed; the earth was not created by the Father God. The Father God made the Son come forth from Him; and the Son is the creator of the earth.

This is what the Gospel of John was supposed to state. This was basically what the Church Fathers of the first Christian centuries struggled for. This then became so hard to grasp for the developing human intellect that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Everything the intellect creates is positive theology and does not penetrate into the regions containing the actual mysteries of the universe. We can enter into them only if we negate all predicates, if we do not speak of the existence of God but of God's existence transcending existence, if we do not refer to the personality but the personality transcending personality. Hence, human beings only enter into them if they transpose everything into its negative. Then, through negative theology, he takes hold of the actual secret of existence. So Dionysius and his successors, such as John Scotus Erigena, who was already completely imbued with the intellect, did not believe that the human being was at all capable of explaining these mysteries of the universe with human intellect.

Now, what is implied by saying that the Logos is the creator of everything? We need to recall what was present in all the ancient pre-Christian times and endured in diminished form until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. People believed that the deity works through the blood and through the body. This led them to believe that when the blood flows through the veins of the human being or the animals, it is really taken away from the gods. It is the rightful possession of the gods. Therefore, human beings can approach the gods if they return blood to them. The gods really wish to keep the blood for themselves; humans have taken possession of it. In turn, human beings must give the blood back to the gods, hence the blood sacrifice of ancient times.

Then came Christ and said: This is not what counts; this is not the way to approach earthly things. They do not originate from those gods who desire the blood. Look upon what works in the human being prior to the earth's influence on him; take bread, something that nourishes human beings, and look at how they initially partake of it. They partake of it by means of the sense of taste. The food in human beings goes to a certain point before it is transformed into blood. For it is only changed into blood after having passed through the walls of the intestines into the organism. Only there does the earth's influence begin; as long as the food has not been taken hold of by the blood, the earth's influence has not yet begun. Therefore, do not view blood as something corresponding to the god; behold that in the bread before it turns into blood and in the wine before it enters the blood. There is the divine element; there is the incarnation of the Logos. Do not look upon the element that flows in the blood, for that is an ancient legacy from the Moon age, the pre-earthly time. Before it turns into blood, food has to do with what is earthly in the human being. Therefore, do away with the conceptions of blood, body, and flesh. Instead, turn your thinking to what has not yet become blood nor flesh; direct your minds to what is prepared out there on earth, to what is of the earth without the moon having had an influence on it, to what comes from the sun's influence. For we behold the things through the light of the sun; we eat bread and drink wine, and in them we eat and drink the force of the sun. The visible things have not come about through the Father God, they have come into being through the Logos.

With this, the whole realm of human thought was directed to something that could not be attained from the whole of nature in the way people in the past had done. It could be attained only by looking upon what the sun lets shine forth upon the earth. Human thinking had been turned to something purely spiritual. Human beings were not supposed to extract the divine element from the physical things of the earth; they were supposed to behold this divine element in the purely spiritual, the Logos. The Logos was contrasted to the ancient conceptions of God the Father. That is, people's minds were directed toward a purely spiritual element. In pre-Christian times, people beheld the deity only through what was in a manner of speaking, organically brewed up in them and then arose within them somewhat like a vision. They did indeed behold the divine arising out of the blood. Now they sought to grasp it in the purely spiritual element. They were to view the visible things around them as a result of the Logos and not of what had only slipped into them, as the result of a god who had been creative in pre-earthly times.

Only by thinking in this manner do we actually approach the concepts of the first Christian centuries. Human beings had been told not to use any force other than that of their consciousness to attain the concepts with which to arrive at the comprehension of the deity. Human beings were being directed toward the spirit. Therefore, what could be said to them? They could be told: Formerly, the earth was so powerful that it bestowed upon you the concepts of the divine. That has ceased. The earth no longer gives you anything. Through your own efforts you must come to the Logos and to the creative principle. Up to now, you have basically worshipped something that was creative in pre-earthly conditions; now you must revere the creative principle in the earthly realm. But you can grasp this only through the power of your I, your spirit.

The first Christians expressed this by saying: The end of the world is near. They meant the end of the earth condition that bestows insights on man without his working on these insights with his consciousness. In fact, a profound truth is expressed in these words concerning the end of the world, for human beings had formerly been children of the earth. They had given themselves up to the forces of the earth. They had relied on their blood to give them their knowledge. This, however, was no longer possible, The kingdoms of the heavens drew near, the kingdoms of the earth ceased to be. Henceforth, man can no longer be a son of the earth. He has to turn into the companion of a spiritual being, a being that has come down to earth from the spiritual world, the Logos, the Christ.

The end of the world was prophesied for the fourth century A.D.: the end of the earth, the beginning of a new kingdom, the dawn of that age when man is to experience himself living as spirit among spirits. This is probably the most difficult to picture for people of our present age, namely, that our present manner of dwelling as human beings would not have been considered by people of the early Christian centuries as living in an earthly manner. It would have been seen as life in the spirit realm, after the destruction of the earth as it was when it still bestowed faculties upon the human being. If we properly understood the first Christians' way of thinking, we would not say that they superstitiously believed in the end of the world, which did not take place. As the first Christians saw it, this end did occur in the fourth century A.D.

The way we live today would have been considered by the first Christians as the New Jerusalem, the kingdom where the human being lives as spirit among spirits. However, they would have said: According to our view, the human being has actually entered heaven, but he is so worthless that he does not realize it. He believes that in heaven everything overflows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits against whom he has to defend himself. The first Christians would have said: Formerly, these evil spirits were contained in the things of nature; now they have been let loose, flit about invisibly, and human beings must withstand them.

Hence, in the sense of the first Christian centuries, the end of the world definitely did occur, but people simply did not comprehend this. It was not understood that instead of the god dwelling in the earth, a god whose presence is announced through events on the earth, now the supersensory Logos was present who must be recognized in the supersensory realm and to whom human beings must adhere by means of super-sensory faculties. Now, assuming this, we can comprehend why in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, a feeling of the end of the world was present again in civilized Europe. Again, people awaited the world's end. They did not know what the first Christians had meant by it. Out of this frame of mind of anticipating the end of the world, which spread over all of civilized Europe during these centuries, something developed that caused people to seek Christ in a more physical manner than they ought to have looked for him. People should realize that we are to find the Logos in the spirit, not based on nature's phenomena. This search for the Logos in the spirit is something that these people, who once again were in a mood of expecting the end of the world, did not understand. Instead, they set about this search in a more materialistic way. Thus, this mood gave rise to the Crusades, the material quest for Christ in his tomb in the Orient. People adhered to Christ in this mood of the world's end, in the misunderstood mood of the end of the world.

However, Christ was not found in the Orient. People received approximately the same answer his disciples had received when they sought him tangibly in his tomb—He whom you seek is no longer here—for He must be sought in the spirit.

Now, in the twentieth century, once again a mood of the world's end prevails—and these phenomena will increase—although people have become so lethargic and indifferent that they do not even notice this anticipation of the end of the world. But the man who did speak of this mood of the world's end in his Decline of the West³ made a significant and noticeable impression, and this frame of mind will become increasingly prevalent.

Actually, we do not need to speak of the end of the world. It has already ended in the sense that humanity can no longer find the spirit based on nature; it is a matter of realizing that we live in a spiritual world. Humanity's error of not knowing that we live in a spiritual world has brought misfortune over us. It causes wars to be bloodier and bloodier. It is becoming increasingly evident that human beings act as if possessed. Indeed, they are possessed by the evil forces who confuse them, for their speech no longer expressed the inherent content of their I. They are as though possessed by a psychosis. This psychosis is much talked about but little understood.

What the first Christians meant by the end of the world, and what they understood by it, did take place. The new age is here, but it must be recognized. People must realize that when the human being perceives, he does perceive as an angel, and when he becomes conscious of his own self, he becomes self-aware as an archangel. The significant point is that the spiritual world has already descended and human beings must become conscious of it. Many have thought that they take the Gospel seriously. Yet, although the Gospels clearly say that all things that were made, hence, all things under consideration should not be explained based on their earthly forces but originated through the Logos, people professed the Father God. He should be acknowledged as one with the Christ but as that aspect of the Trinity that was active until the earth was formed, whereas the actual ruler of the earth is the Christ, the Logos.

These matters could hardly be comprehended anymore in the ninth century when Scotus Erigena was active. This is why, on the one hand, his book about the divisions of nature is so great and significant. On the other hand, as I told you yesterday, this is why it is chaotic as well. This is why you only begin to find your way in it when you view it from the spiritual scientific viewpoint as we have done yesterday and today.

Well, as I said, in the fourth chapter, Erigena speaks of the uncreated entity that is not creating. If we understand the true meaning of what Scotus Erigena describes here, namely, the resting deity in which everything unites, then the necessary step has been taken. The world that is described in the preceding three chapters has come to an end. The world of the resting Godhead, the noncreated and noncreating being, is here.

Insofar as it is nature, the earth is declining. I have often called attention to the fact that this is the case by indicating that even geologists say nowadays that by and large, nothing new originates anymore on the earth. Certainly, as an aftereffect, plants develop, and so forth, plants, animals, and human propagate. But the earth as a whole has turned into something other than what it was. It is becoming fragmentized; it is splitting. The earth as a whole is already in a state of disintegration as far as its mineral kingdom is concerned.

The great geologist, Suess,⁴ expressed this in his work The Countenance of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde) by saying that we walk around on the corroding crust of the earth. He points to certain regions on earth where this corrosion is evident. He stresses that in the past this was different. This is what the world view and conception of life in the first Christian centuries referred to, though not based on facts of nature but on the moral facts of humanity's evolution.

Indeed, it is true that since the beginning of the fifteenth century we live even more in the resting Godhead than did Scotus Erigena. This Godhead awaits our attainment of Imagination and Inspiration through our own efforts. Then we will be able to recognize the world around us as a spiritual world. We will perceive that we are indeed in a spiritual world that has thrown off the earthly one. This deity awaits our realization that we are living after the end of the world and that we have arrived in the New Jerusalem.

It is indeed a strange spiritual destiny for human beings that they dwell in the spiritual world and neither know it nor wish to know it. There is no substance in any of the interpretations aiming at representing true Christianity as mixed up with some half-baked conceptions of an end of the world, which, after all, did not occur and was only meant symbolically, and so on. What we find in the writings of Christianity must be comprehended in its true meaning. It must be grasped in the right way. There must be clarity concerning the fact that the early Christian views referred to a world that had already changed after the fourth century A.D.

The teachings in the first Christian centuries stood in awe of the abundant wisdom of paganism, and the Christian Church Fathers attempted to connect it with the secret of Golgotha. Matters were actually viewed the way I described it today. Yet, it was not believed that mankind could understand them offhand. This is why the secrets of ancient time were preserved in dogmas meant only to be believed, not to be understood. The dogmas are by no means superstition or untruth. The dogmas are true, but they must be comprehended in the right way. They can only be understood, however, if this comprehension is sought for with the faculty that has developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century.

When Scotus Erigena lived, human reason was still a force. Scotus Erigena still sensed that the angel within him comprehended. After all, this human intellect was still a force in the best minds of that period. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we have only the shadow of this reason, this intellect. Since that time, we have developed the consciousness soul. Yet we still retain the shadow of the intellect. When a person develops his concepts today, he is indeed far from having any idea that an angel is comprehending something within him. He simply thinks: I am figuring something out concerning the things I have experienced. He certainly does not talk about the presence of a spiritual being that is perceiving, much less of a still higher spiritual being, which he is by virtue of his self-awareness. The faculty with which we try to know things is only the shadow of the intellect that had developed for the Greeks, for example for Plato and Aristotle, and even for the Romans and that had still been alive for Scotus Erigena in the ninth century A.D.

But this is the point, my dear friends. We no longer need to be misled by the intellect; this insight can help us to progress. Today, people follow a shadow, the reasoning or intellect within them. They allow themselves to be misled by it instead of striving for Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, which in turn would lead once again into the spiritual world that actually surrounds us. It is really beneficial that the intellect has become like a shadow. Initially, we established external natural science with this shadowlike intellect. On the basis of this intellect we have to work further, and God rests so as to allow us to work. The fourth stage is completely here today. We just have to become conscious of it. If we do not become aware of this fact, nothing can develop further on earth. For what the earth has received as a legacy is gone; it is no more. New things must be inaugurated.

An individual such as Spengler beholds the fragments of the old civilizations. After all, they were prepared in sufficient numbers. In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the mood of the imminent end of the world prevailed. Then came the Crusades. They really accomplished nothing new, for people sought in the material realm something that should have been sought in the spirit. Now, because the Crusades had brought no results, the Renaissance came, so to speak, to the rescue of mankind. Greek culture was again disseminated in what prevails today as education. Greek culture was present again but not as something new. The mathematical and mechanistic concepts of external nature developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century were the only new elements. But the ruins of antiquity were there, too, and they are crammed into our young people in the secondary schools. They then form the basis of civilization. Oswald Spengler encountered these fragments of the Renaissance. Like erratic blocks, they float on the sea that is intent on producing something more. Yet if you merely look upon these floating ice blocks, you behold the decline. For what has been retained from the past is characterized by a mood of decline, and nobody can galvanize our modern education. It is perishing. Out of the spirit, through primal creation, a different civilization must be created for the fourth stage is here.

This is how Scotus Erigena must be understood, who brought along his wisdom—already difficult to understand for him, I would say—from the Irish isle, from the mysteries that had been cultivated in Ireland. This is how we must interpret Scotus Erigena's work. Thus, not only the primal knowledge that can be attained through spiritual science, but also the documents of former times express this meaning if we are willing really to understand them, if we are willing finally to free ourselves from the Alexandrianism of the modern philosophic science that calls itself philology. For we must admit that the way things are handled today, we do not see much of either philology or philosophy. If we observe the methods of cramming and the way examinations are conducted in our educational institutions, very little is present of philo, of love. That has to emerge from a different direction, but we are in need of it once again.

It was my intention, first of all, to present the figure of Scotus Erigena to you. Secondly, I wanted to point out that the ways to properly grasp the buried primordial wisdom have yet to be sought. Nowadays people pay no attention to the fact that the Gospel of St. John clearly states that the Logos is the creative principle, not the Father God.

• 1. Publius Cornelius Tacitus, around A.D. 55 until 120, Roman historian and consul. His work, De origine et situ germanorum, is the oldest surviving source concerning the geography and ethnography of the Germanic peoples.
• 2. Contained in Die Naturwissenschaft und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung der Menschheit seit dem Altertum, six lectures, 1921. GA 325, 1969.
• 3. Oswald Spengler, 1880–1936, philosopher of history and culture.
• 4. Eduard Suess, 1831–1914, geologist. Das Antlitz der Erde, 3 vol., 1885–1909.

In the course of the last few days we had occasion to refer once again to the turning point in Western civilization in the fourth century A.D. with the example of John Scotus Erigena. In the present, when so many things are supposed to change, it is particularly important to understand clearly what really happened then to the human soul constitution. For it is a fact that we too are living in an extraordinarily significant moment in humanity's evolution; it is necessary for us to pay heed to the signs of the times and to listen to the voices of the spiritual world, so that out of the chaos of the present we may find a path into the future.

In the fourth century A.D., changes took place in the souls of those belonging to the leading nations and tribes, just as in our century changes in part have begun to develop, in part will still occur. And in John Scotus Erigena we have observed a personality who in a certain way was influenced by the aftereffects of humanity's world view prior to the fourth century A.D.

We shall now call to mind other things that also make evident this change of character. As far as can be done in a more outward manner, we will consider from this standpoint how the study of nature developed, in particular people's views of health and illness. We shall confine ourselves, first of all, to historical times. When we ask what the views concerning nature, particularly human nature in connection with health and illness were, and look back into the early Egyptian period, we can for the first time speak of any similarity between these ancient views and ours now. Yet, in regard to health, illness, and their natural causes, these ancient Egyptians held opinions still differing significantly from ours. The reason was that they thought of their relationship with nature quite differently from the way we think of it today. The ancient Egyptians certainly were not fully aware that they were gradually separating from the earth. They pictured their own bodies—and they naturally started by considering what we call “body” in an intimate connection with the forces of the earth. We have already mentioned in the last lecture how such a concept arises, how it is that the human being pictures himself in a certain sense closely bound inwardly to the earth through his body. I referred to the ancient soul forces in order to illustrate this. It was altogether clear to the ancient Egyptians that they had to see themselves as part of the earth, similarly to how the plants must be seen as belonging to the earth. Just as it is possible to trace the course of the sap or at least the earth's forces in plants more or less visibly, so people in ancient Egypt experienced the working of certain forces that, at the same time, held sway in the earth. Therefore, the human body was seen as belonging to the earth.

This could only be done because a view of the earth prevailed that was quite different from the view prevalent nowadays. The ancient Egyptians would never have thought of representing the earth as a mineral body the way we do it today. In a sense, they pictured the earth as a mighty organic being, a being not organized in quite the same way as an animal or man, but still, in a certain respect, an organism; and they considered the earth's masses of rock as a skeleton of sorts. They imagined that processes took place in the earth that simply extended into the human body.

The ancient Egyptians experienced a certain sensation when they mummified the human corpse after it had been discarded by the soul, when they tried to preserve the shape of the human body by mummification. In the formative forces proceeding from the earth and forming the human body, they beheld something like the will of the earth. They were trying to give permanent expression to this will of the earth. These Egyptians held views concerning the soul that seem somewhat alien to a person of today. We shall now try to characterize them.

It must be emphasized that when we go back to early Egyptian times, and even more so to the ancient Persian and Indian epochs, we find that, based on instinctive old wisdom, the doctrine of reincarnation—the return of the essential human entity in successive earth lives—was widespread. We are mistaken, however, in assuming that these ancient people were of the opinion that what we know as soul today is what always returns. Especially the Egyptian concept demonstrates that such a view did not exist. Instead, it must be pictured like this: The soul-spiritual being of man lives in spiritual worlds between death and a new birth. When the time approaches for this being to descend to the physical earth, it works formatively in the human body, in what comes through heredity from the successive generations. On the other hand, these ancient people did not think that what they bore in their consciousness during life between birth and death was the actual psycho-spiritual being that lives between death and a new birth and then shapes the human corporeality between birth and death. No, these people of antiquity pictured things differently. They said: When I find myself in the waking state from morning until evening, I know absolutely nothing of the soul-spiritual matters that are also my own affairs as a human being. I must wait until my own true being, which worked on me when I entered into earthly existence through birth, appears to me in half-sleep or in image-filled sleep, as was the case in these ancient times.

Thus, the ancient human being was aware that in his waking state he was not meant to experience his actual soul being; instead, he was to look upon his true soul entity as upon an external picture, something that came over him when he passed into the frequently described dreamlike, clairvoyant conditions. In a certain sense, the human being in former times experienced his own being as something that appeared to him like an archangel or angel. Only beginning in ancient Egypt, people started to think of this inner human essence as belonging directly to the soul.

If we try to characterize how the ancient Egyptians pictured this, we have to say the following. They thought: In a dream image, my soul-spiritual being appears to me in its condition between death and a new birth. It shapes the body for its use. When I look at the form of the body, I see how this soul-spirit being has worked like an artist on this body. I see much more of an expression of my soul-spiritual being in my body than if I look within. For that reason I shall preserve this body. As a mummy, its form shall be retained, for in it is contained the work the soul has done on the body between the last death and this birth. That is what I retain when I embalm the body and in the mummy preserve the image on which the soul-spiritual being has worked for centuries.

By contrast, the ancient Egyptians considered the experiences of the human being in the waking state between birth and death differently: This is really like a flame kindled within me, but it has very little to do with my true I. My I remains more or less outside my soul experiences in the waking state between birth and death. These soul experiences are actually a temporal, passing flame, enkindled in my body through my higher soul being. In death, they are extinguished once again. Only then does my true soul-spirit being shine forth, and I dwell in it until the new birth.

It is true that the ancient Egyptians imagined that in the life between birth and death they did not properly attain to an experience of the soul element. They viewed it as something that stood above them, enkindled their temporal soul element and extinguished it again; they saw it as something that took from the earth the earth's dust to form the body. In the mummy, they then tried to preserve this bodily form.

The ancient Egyptians really placed no special value on the soul element that experiences itself in the waking state between birth and death, for they looked beyond this soul nature to a quite different soul-spirit essence, which ever and again forms new bodies and passes through the period between death and a new birth. Thus, they beheld the interplay of forces between the higher human element and the earth. They really directed their attention to the earth, for to them, the earth was also the house of Osiris. Inner consciousness was something they overlooked.

The development of Greek culture, which began in the eighth century B.C., consisted precisely in man's placing an ever increasing value on this soul element that lights up between birth and death, something the ancient Egyptian still viewed as enkindled and subsequently dying flame. To the Greeks, this soul element became valuable. But they still had the feeling that in death something like an extinction of this soul element took place. This gave rise to the famous Greek saying I have characterized often from this viewpoint: "Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades." This saying was coined by the Greeks as they looked upon the soul element. To them, the latter became important, whereas it had been less significant for the ancient Egyptians. This development is connected with the view of health and illness held by the ancient Egyptians.

They thought that this soul-spiritual element, which does not really enter properly into human consciousness between birth and death, builds up the human body out of the earth elements, out of the water, the air, the solid substances of the earth, and the warmth. And since the ancient Egyptians believed that this human body was formed out of the earth, they set great store by keeping it pure. During the golden age of Egyptian culture, maintaining the body in a pure state was therefore something that was especially cultivated. The Egyptians thought very highly of this body. Hence, they felt that when the body became ill, its connection with the earth was in some way disturbed, in particular its relationship to the earth's water, and this relationship had to be restored. Therefore, there were hosts of physicians in Egypt who studied the relationship of the earthly elements to the human body. Their concern was to maintain people's health and, when it was disturbed, to restore it by means of water cures and climatic treatments. Already in the heyday of Egyptian civilization, specialized physicians were at work, and their activity was principally directed at the task of bringing the human body into the proper relation with the earth's elements.

Beginning with the eighth century B.C., particularly in Greek civilization, this changed. Now, the consciously experienced soul element became really important. People did not see it anymore in as close a connection with the earth as people in ancient Egypt had done. For the ancient Egyptians, the human body was in a sense something plantlike that grew out of the earth. For the Greeks, the psycho-spiritual element was the factor that held together the earth elements; they were more concerned with the way these elements in the body were held together by man's soul and spirit. On this basis developed the scientific views of Greece. We find them especially well expressed by Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician and contemporary of Phidias, Socrates, and Plato.¹ This view of the importance of the human soul element, which becomes conscious of itself between birth and death, is already clearly developed in Hippocrates, who lived in the fourth century B.C.

We would be very much mistaken, however, if we believed that this soul-spiritual element lived in Greek consciousness in the same way we experience it in our consciousness today. Just reflect on how poor, how abstractly poor this thing is that modern man calls his soul! When people speak of thinking, feeling, and willing, they picture them as quite nebulous formations. It is something that no longer affects the human being substantially. It had a substantial effect on the Greeks, for they had an awareness that this psycho-spiritual being actually holds together the elements of the body and causes their interplay. They did not have in mind an abstract soul element as people do today. They had in mind a full, rich system of forces that gives shape above all to the fluid element, bestowing on it the human form. The Egyptians felt: The soul-spirit being that finds its way from death to a new birth gives form to this fluid element. The Greeks felt: What I experience consciously as my soul element, this is what shapes the water; it has a need for air and then develops the circulatory organs in that form. It causes the conditions of warmth in the body and also deposits salt and other earthly substances in the body.

The Greeks actually did not picture the soul separately from the body. They imagined it molding the fluid body, bringing about the presence of air through inhaling and exhaling. They pictured the soul causing the conditions of warmth in the body, the body's warming and cooling processes, the breathing and movement of the fluids, the permeation of the fluids with the solid ingredients—actually representing only about 8% of the human body. The Greeks pictured all this in full vitality. They attached special importance to the shaping of the fluids. They imagined that in turn a fourfold influence was at work in these fluids due to the forces active in the four elements, earth, water, air, and warmth. This is how the Greeks pictured it.

In winter, human beings must shut themselves off from the outer world to a certain extent, they cannot live in intimate contact with it. They must rely on themselves. In winter, above all the head and its fluids make themselves felt. There the part of the fluids that is most waterlike works inwardly in the human being. In other words, for the Greeks this was phlegm or mucus. They believed all that is mucous in the human organism to be soul-permeated and particularly active in winter. Then came spring, and the Greeks found that the blood made itself felt through greater activity; the blood received greater stimulation than in winter. This is a predominantly sanguine time for human beings, emphasis is placed on what is centralized in the arteries leading to the heart and is active in the movement of fluids. In winter, it is the movement of the phlegm in the head, hence, this is the reason why the human being is then particularly inclined to any number of diseases of the mucous fluids. In spring, the blood circulation is especially stimulated.

The Greeks pictured all this in such a way that matter was not separated from the soul aspects. In a sense, blood and phlegm were half soullike, and the soul itself with its forces was something half physical in moving the fluids.

When summer approached, the Greeks imagined that the activity of bile (they called it yellow gall), which has its center in the liver, is particularly aroused. The Greeks still had a special view of what this is like in the human being. For the most part, people have lost this view. They no longer see how, in spring, the skin is colored by the blood's stimulation. They no longer notice the peculiar yellow tinge coming from the liver where this so-called yellow bile has its center. In the rosy flush of spring and the yellowish tinge of summer, the Greeks saw activities of the soul.

When autumn came, they said: Now, the fluids having their center in the spleen, the fluids of black bile, are particularly active. In this way, the Greeks pictured in the human being movements and effects of fluids that were directly under the influence of the soul. Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks considered the human body by itself, apart from the whole of the earth. Thus, they came closer to the inner soul configuration of the human being as it is expressed between birth and death.

As this civilization progressed further, however, particularly as the Western element, the Latin-Roman element, gained ground, this view, which we find especially in Hippocrates who based his medical science on it, was to a certain extent lost. Hippocrates held that the soul-spiritual nature of man manifesting between birth and death causes these mixtures and separations of the fluids. When these do not proceed as the soul-spiritual influence intends them to go, the human being encounters illness. The soul-spiritual element actually always strives to make the activities of the fluids run their normal course. This is why the physician has the special task of studying the soul-spirit nature and the effect of its forces on the activities of the fluids in addition to observing the illness. If the activity of the physical body somehow tends to cause an abnormal mixture of fluids, then the soul element intervenes. It intervenes to the point of a crisis, when the outcome in the struggle between corporeal and soul-spiritual elements hangs in the balance. The physician must guide matters in such a way that this crisis occurs. Then, at some point in the body it will be evident that the bad fluid combination is trying to come out, to escape. Then it is the physician's task to intervene in a proper way in this crisis, which he has introduced in the first place, by removing the fluids that have accumulated in the way described above and that are resisting the influence of the soul-spiritual element. The physician accomplishes this either by means of purging or by bloodletting at the right moment.

Hippocrates' manner of healing was of a quite special kind and connected with this view of the human being. It is interesting that such a view existed that pictured an intimate relationship between the soul-spirit element as expressed between birth and death and the system of body fluids. Things changed, however, when the Latin-Roman influence continued this development.

This Roman element had less inclination for a full comprehension of the form and the system of fluids. This can be clearly seen in the case of the physician Galen² who lived in the second century A.D. The system of fluids that Hippocrates saw was no longer so transparent to Galen. You really have to picture it like this: Today, you watch how a retort in a chemistry laboratory is heated by a flame underneath, and you see the product of the substances inside. For Hippocrates, the effect of the soul-spiritual element in the fluids of the body was just as transparent. What took place in the human being was to him visible in a sensory-supersensory way. The Romans, on the other hand, no longer had a sense for this vivid view. They no longer considered the soul-spiritual element that dwells in man in its connection to the body. They turned their glance in a more abstract, spiritual direction. They only understood how the soul-spiritual being can experience this spirit within itself between birth and death.

The Greeks looked at the body, saw the soul-spiritual in the mixing and separating of the fluids and, to them, the sensory view in its clarity and vividness was the main thing. To the Romans, the essential thing was what a man felt himself to be, the feeling of self within the soul. To the Greeks, the view of how phlegm, blood, yellow, and black bile intermingle, how they are, in a manner of speaking, an expression of the earthly elements of air, fire, water, earth in the human being became something they saw as a work of art. Whereas the Egyptians contemplated the mummy, the Greeks looked upon the living work of art. The Romans had no sense for this, but they had an awareness for taking a stand in life, for developing inner consciousness, for allowing the spirit to speak, not for looking at the body but for making the spirit speak out of the soul between birth and death.

This is connected with the fact that at the height of Egyptian civilization, four branches of knowledge were especially cultivated in their ancient form: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. In contemplating the heavenly element that formed the human body out of the earth, the Egyptians imagined that this body is molded in its spatial form according to the law of geometry; it is subject to the influences of the stars according to the laws of astrology. It is involved in activity from within according to the laws of arithmetic and is inwardly built up harmoniously according to the laws of music—music here conceived not merely as musical tone elements but as something that lives in harmonies in general. In the human being. as a product of the earth, in this mummified man, the Egyptians saw the result of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The Greeks lost sight of this. The Greeks replaced the lifeless, mummified element, which can be comprehended by means of geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music, with the living soul element, the inner forming, the artistic self-development of the human body.

This is why we note in Greek culture a certain decline of geometry as it had existed among the Egyptians. It now became a mere science, no longer a revelation. The same happened with astrology and arithmetic. At most, the inner harmony that forms the basis of all living things remains in the Greek concept of music.

Then, when the Latin element came to the fore, the Romans, as I said, pictured this soul-spiritual being as it is between birth and death together with the inner spirit now expressing itself not as something that could inwardly be seen but inwardly experienced, taking its stand in the world through grammar, through dialectics, and through rhetoric. Therefore, during the time when Greek culture was passing over into Latin culture, these three disciplines flourished. In grammar, man was represented as spirit through the word; in rhetoric, the human being was represented through the beauty and forming of the word; in dialectics, the soul was represented through the forming of thought. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music continued to exist, but only as ancient legacies turned science. These disciplines, which in ancient Egypt had been very much alive, became abstract sciences. By contrast, the arts attached to man—grammar, rhetoric, dialectics—took on new life.

There is a great difference between the way a person thought of a triangle in ancient Egypt prior to Euclid and the way people thought of it after Euclid's time. The abstract triangle was not experienced in earlier times the way it was conceived later on. Euclid signified the decadence of Egyptian arithmetic and geometry. In Egypt, people felt universal forces when they envisaged a triangle. The triangle was a being. Now, all this became science, while dialectics, grammar and rhetoric became alive.

Schools were now established in accordance with the following thinking: Those people who want to be educated have to develop the spiritual potential in their already existent soul-spiritual human nature. As the first stage of instruction, they must master grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Then, they have to go through what remains only as a traditional legacy but forms the subjects of higher education: geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. These then were the seven liberal arts, even throughout the Middle Ages: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, geometry, astrology, arithmetic, and music. The arts that came more to the fore were grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics; the arts that were more in the background, conceived by the ancient Egyptians in a living manner as they stood on a relationship to the earth, were the subjects of higher learning.

This was the essential development between the eighth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. Look at Greece in the fourth century or in the third or fifth centuries. Look at modern Italy. You find everywhere in full bloom this knowledge of the human being as a work of art, as a product of the soul-spiritual element, of life of the spirit through dialectics, rhetoric, and grammar. Julian Apostate³ was educated in approximately this way in the Athenian school of philosophers. This is how he saw the human being.

Into this age burst the beginning of Christianity. But by then all this knowledge was in a certain sense already fading. In the fourth century it had been in its prime, and we have heard that by John Scotus Erigena's time only a mere tradition of it existed. What lived in the Greeks based on the view I have just characterized, then was transmitted to Plato and Aristotle who expressed it philosophically. When the fourth century B.C. drew near, however, people understood Plato and Aristotle less and less. At most people could accept the logical, abstract parts of their teachings. People were engrossed in grammar, rhetoric, dialectics. Arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music had turned into sciences. People increasingly found their way into a sort of abstract element, into an element where something that had formerly been alive was now to exist only as tradition. As the centuries passed, it became still more a tradition. Those who were educated in the Latin tongue retained in a more or less ossified state grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. Formerly a person would have laughed if he had been asked whether his thinking referred to something real. He would have laughed, for he would have said: I engage in dialectics; I do not cultivate the art of concepts in order to engage in anything unreal. For there, the spiritual reality lives in me. As I engage in grammar, the Logos speaks in me. As I engage in rhetoric, it is the cosmic sun that sends its influences into me.

This consciousness of being connected with the world was lost more and more. Everything became abstract soul experiences, a development that was completed by Scotus Erigena's time. The ideas that had been retained from earlier times—from Plato and Aristotle—were only comprehended more or less logically. People ceased to find any living element in them.

When the Emperor Constantine⁴ made Rome the ruling power under the pretext that he wished to establish the dominion of Christianity, everything became entirely abstract. It became so abstract that a person like Julian Apostate, who had been educated in the Athenian school of philosophy, was silenced. With an aching heart, he looked at what Constantine had done in the way of ossifying concepts and ancient living ideas, and Julian Apostate resolved to preserve this life that had still been evident to him in the Athenian schools of philosophers.

Later on, Justinian ruled from Byzantium, from Constantinople, which had been founded by Constantine.⁵ He abolished the last vestiges of these Athenian philosophers' schools that still possessed an echo of living human knowledge. Therefore, the seven wise Athenians—Athenians they were not, they were a quite international group, men from Damascus, Syrians, and others gathered from all over the world—had to flee on order of Justinian. These seven wise men fled to Asia, to the king of the Persians,⁶ where philosophers had had to escape to already earlier when Zeno, the Isaurian,⁷ had dispersed a similar academy. Thus we see how this knowledge, the best of which could no longer be comprehended in Europe, the living experience that had existed in Greece, had to seek refuge in Asia.

What was later propagated in Europe as Greek culture was really only its shadow. Goethe allowed it to influence him and as a thoroughly lively human being, he was seized with such longing that he wished he could escape from what had been offered to him as the shadow of Greek culture. He traveled to the south in order to experience at least the aftereffects.

In Asia, people who were capable of doing so received of Plato and Aristotle what had been brought across to them. This is why during the sixth century Aristotle's work was translated based on the Asian-Arabic spirit. This gave Aristotle's philosophy a different form.

What had in fact been attempted here? The attempt had been made to take what the Greeks had experienced as the relationship between the soul-spiritual element and the body's system of fluids, what they had seen in full physical and soul-spiritual clarity and formative force, and to raise it up into the region where the ego could be fully comprehended. From this originated the form of science tinged with Arabism, which was especially cultivated in the academy of Gondishapur⁸ throughout the whole declining age of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This form of science was brought in later centuries by Avicenna⁹ and Averroes¹⁰ by way of Spain into Europe and eventually exerted a great influence on people such as Roger Bacon¹¹ and others. It was, however, a completely new element that the academy of Gondishapur meant to bestow on mankind in a manner that could not endure by way of the translation of Aristotle and certain mystery wisdom teachings, which then continued in directions of which we shall talk another time.

Through Avicenna and Averroes, something was introduced that was to enter human civilization with the beginning of the fifteenth century, namely, the struggle for the consciousness soul. After all, the Greeks had only attained to the intellectual or rational soul. What Avicenna and Averroes brought across, what Aristotelianism had turned into in Asia, so to speak, struggles with the comprehension of the human I, which, in a completely different way, has to struggle upward through the Germanic tribes from below to above—I have described this in the public lectures here during the course.¹² In Asia, on the other hand, the I was received like a revelation from above as a mystery wisdom. This gave rise to the view that for so long provoked such weighty disputes in Europe, namely, that man's ego is not actually an independent entity but is basically one with the divine universal being. The aim was to take hold of the ego. The I was supposed to be contained in what the Greek beheld as the being of body, soul, and spirit.

Yet, people could not harmonize the above with the I. This is the reason for Avicenna's conception that what constitutes the individual soul originates with birth and ends with death. As we have seen, the Greeks struggled with this idea. The Egyptians viewed it only in this way—the individual soul is enkindled at birth, extinguished at death. People were still wrestling with this conception when they considered the actual soul element between birth and death, the true soul element. The I, on the other hand, could not be transitory in this manner. Therefore, Avicenna said: Actually, the ego is the same in all human beings. It is basically a ray from the Godhead which returns again into the Godhead when the human being dies. It is real, but not individually real. A pneumatic pantheism came about, as if the ego had no independent existence but was only a ray of the deity streaming between birth and death into what the Greeks viewed as the soul-spiritual nature. In a manner of speaking, the transitory soul element of man is ensouled with the eternal element through the ray of the Godhead between birth and death. This is how people imagined it.

This shows to some extent how people of that age struggled with the approach of the I, the consciousness of the ego, the consciousness soul. This is what occurred in the span of time between the eighth century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., the middle of which is the fourth century A.D. People were placed in a condition where the concrete experience, which still dwelled in the mixing and the separating fluids and beheld the soul element in the corporeal being, was replaced. A purely abstract state of mind, directed more toward man's inner being, replaced this vivid element of perception.

It is indeed possible to say that until the fourth century A.D., Greek culture predominated in Romanism. Romanism only became dominant when it had already declined. In a sense, Rome was predestined to exert its activity only in its dead element, in its dead Latin language, in which it then prepared the way for what entered human evolution in the fifteenth century. This is how the course of civilization must be observed. For, once again, we are now faced with having to seek the way toward knowing of the approach of spiritual revelations from the higher worlds. Once again, we must learn to struggle, just as people struggled then.

We must be clear about the fact that what we possess as natural science came to us by way of the Arabs. The knowledge we have acquired through our sciences must be lifted up to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. In a certain sense, however, we must also steel our faculties by means of observing the things of the past, so that we acquire the strength to attain what we need for the future. This is the mission of anthroposophical spiritual science. We must recall this again and again, my dear friends. We should acquire quite vivid perceptions of how differently the Greeks thought about soul and corporeal aspects. It would have sounded ridiculous to them if one had listed seventy-two or seventy-six chemical elements. They perceived the living effect of the elements outside and of the fluids within.

We live within the elements. Insofar as the body is permeated by the soul, the human being with his body lives within the four elements the Greeks spoke about. We have arrived at the point where we have lost sight of the human being, because we can no longer view him in the above manner and focus only on what chemistry teaches today in the way of abstract elements.

• 1. Hippocrates, 460–377 B.C., known already in antiquity as the greatest physician.
  
  Phidias, 500–435 B.C., Greek sculptor in Athens, master of classical style.
  
  Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher, pupil of Socrates.
  
  Socrates, 470–399 B.C., moral philosopher in Athens, developed Socratic dialog to teach his students to think for themselves.
• 2. Galen, A.D. 129–199, outstanding physician in the days of the Roman emperors; personal physician to Marc Aurel. In his writings, he tried to compile all medical knowledge of antiquity.
• 3. Julian Apostate, A.D. 332–363, nephew of Constantine the Great, Roman emperor from A.D. 361–363.
• 4. Constantine I., the Great, A.D. 288–337, Roman Emperor from A.D. 306–337. Made Christianity the state religion in 324.
• 5. Justinian I, see note 8, Lecture IV.
• 6. “... to the king of the Persians ...”: Chosrau Nurshivan (king from A.D. 531–580) invited the sages from all over the world, particularly those versed in medicine, to Persia. He is frequently considered the founder of the academy of Gondishapur.
• 7. Zeno the Isaurian, A.D. 426–491, Byzantine emperor from A.D. 474–491, closed the school of philosophers in Edessa in 487.
• 8. Gondishapur (Djundaisabur), city founded by the king of the Sassanides, Shapur I (242–272). It was the cultural center of the kingdom for a long period.
• 9. Ibn Sina Avicenna, 980–1037, Persian philosopher and physician, author of over 100 books.
• 10. Ibn Roshd Averroes, 1126–1198, Arabian philosopher and universal scientist. Physician from Cordova. Following Aristotelianism, he attempted to combine philosophy and faith. His rational faith led to his banishment.
• 11. Roger Bacon, around 1216–1294, English Franciscan, called doctor mirabilis on account of his comprehensive knowledge. He included natural scientific perceptions in his theological manner of thought.
• 12. See note 2 to Lecture XVI.

The writings of John Scotus Erigena emanate from a mode of thinking which shines over from the first centuries of Christendom into the 9th century. The mental process, the whole life of thought and idea in those first centuries of Christendom was different from what it came to be later on. A great and fundamental change occurred in the 4th century of our era. From the middle of the 4th century onwards, the thinking of men consisted to a far greater extent in an exercising of the reasoning faculty. Until that time, all knowledge and all mental life sprang far more from a kind of inspiration than later on when, with increasing consciousness, men began to work out their own thoughts for themselves. Now the kind of consciousness that was natural before the 4th century still echoes on in sayings like that of John Scotus Erigena—that man forms judgments and draws conclusions as a human being but knows as an Angel. This idea—which springs up in John Scotus Erigena as a kind of reminiscence, as a heritage from an earlier form of knowledge—was a fact acknowledged by anyone who thought at all in the days before the 4th century of our era. It never occurred to men in those days to attribute thoughts to the human being as such. Thoughts were attributed to the Angel working within the human being. An Angel indwelt the body of a man; the Angel was the knower and the human being shared in the knowledge.

Consciousness of these things died away altogether after the 4th century and in men like John Scotus Erigena it flashed up once again, was drawn forth as it were with effort from the soul. This very fact indicates that man's whole way of looking at the world had changed in the course of that century. And that is why it is so difficult for us today to understand the mode of thinking of the first centuries of Christen' dom. Indeed, this understanding can only come from Spiritual Science. It is a question of forming true and really adequate conceptions of the thought and outlook of men in those early Christian times.

The Eucharistic controversy, as it is called, had already appeared on the scene in the days of John Scotus Erigena, and discussion was rife on such subjects as predestination. This is an unmistakable indication of the fact that what was previously more of the nature of inspiration, removed altogether from the domain of controversy, had now been drawn into the sphere of discussion and debate. But as the centuries took their course, many things were no longer understood at all, as, for example, the first verses of the Gospel of St John in the form in which they are commonly rendered. If we read the first verses of this Gospel carefully, we find a statement that has been overlooked altogether by adherents of the Christian Faith throughout subsequent centuries. Think of the first verses of the Gospel of St John: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. And then: ‘All things were made by him [i.e.: by the Logos]; and without him was not anything made that was made.’

If these words are taken literally, their purport is quite clear: namely, that all things visible were made by the Logos, that the Logos, therefore, is the creator of the things of the world. In the Christian mind after the 4th century, the Logos—rightly identified with the Christ in the sense of St John's Gospel—is not regarded as the creator of things visible, but the Father God is substituted for the Logos. The Logos is known as the Son, but the Father, not the Son, is conceived as the creator. This doctrine has persisted through the centuries and completely contradicts the words of the Gospel of St John. One cannot take this Gospel literally and maintain at the same time that the creator of things visible is the Father God and not the Christ.

And now we must try to understand the kind of thinking in which such a fundamental change came about in the 4th century. In the early Christian centuries, thought was based upon the knowledge of the spiritual world that had survived from ancient paganism. We must try to understand the attitude of men living in the first centuries of Christendom to teachings such as those now living on in the form of the Eucharist. The essence of the Eucharist is, as we realise, contained in the words: ‘This is My body’ (the bread); ‘this is My blood’ (the wine). There was a real understanding of this mystery in those early centuries, even among men who were by no means learned but whom the Eucharist drew together in simple devotion to Christ. What did such a mystery really signify to these men?

Teachings of religious wisdom permeated the whole of antiquity. The further we go back in time, the more deeply was this teaching founded upon the nature of the Father God. When we study the religious beliefs of very ancient times—beliefs which then survived in decadent form—we find everywhere that veneration was paid to the element flowing down from the primal ancestor of a tribal stock. In his Germania, Tacitus speaks of the peoples who, having found their way into the Roman Empire, became the founders of the new civilisation, and of how they still harked back in remembrance to these tribal deities, although to some extent they had already adopted a different form of worship, the worship of Gods of locality. The conception, therefore, was that generation after generation had passed by since the existence of an ancient ancestor who had founded the tribal stock, and that the soul and spirit of this father of the tribe still held sway, down to the very latest generation. Men thought: the bodies of all who constitute the tribal stock are under this ancestral sway. These bodies are all related, they have one common origin. One common blood flows through the veins of them all. The body and the blood are one. And in revering the soul and spirit of the father of the tribe, men felt the sway of the Divinity behind this tribal ancestor whose soul and spirit worked upon and through them as a people. They beheld the sway of this Divinity in the bodies, in the blood flowing through the generations and they felt the presence of a mystery in the forces of the body and of the blood.

In the days of ancient paganism men had a real perception of the forces of the Divinity ruling in the body and flowing through the blood. Whenever an adherent of that ancient view of the world saw blood flowing from animals or from human beings, he saw in the blood the body of the Godhead and in the bodies that were built up by this blood, the bodies of the members of the tribe, the form, the image of the Godhead. People of today have no longer any real conception of how the Divine-Spiritual in those times was worshipped in this material form.

And so, the power of the Godhead flowed through the blood of the successive generations. The Godhead shaped His image in the bodies of the generations. The soul and the spirit of the father of the tribe had been in the presence of the Godhead and as the primal ancestor he then worked with divine power upon and through his progeny. The father of the tribe was worshipped as the divine ancestor.

Now it must be remembered that the forces working in the body of man are of the nature of the forces of the Earth. This is not merely an ancient belief but an actual truth for, as you know, the origin of the human physical body lies in still more ancient times, and now, when the physical body has the mineral kingdom within it, the forces of the Earth are working in the body and in the blood of man.

In human blood there work not only the forces introduced with the foodstuffs but the forces that are active in the planetary body of the Earth as a whole. If a man lives in a region where the soil is red, or its geological constituents include certain metallic substances, his blood is influenced by the Earth. Again, the bodily form of the human being is itself affected by the Earth. In warmer zones the human body is not the same as in colder zones. The bodily nature and the forces working in the blood are fundamentally influenced by the forces of the Earth. This truth—which can only be revealed today by spiritual investigation—was a matter of course in the instinctive knowledge possessed by the men of old. They knew that the forces of the Earth pulsate in the blood. When we today connect the telegraphic apparatus in station A by means of a wire with the telegraphic apparatus in station B, this is only one part of the connection. The current of electricity must be led through the wire. But the current must be ‘circuited’, as we say. You know quite well how this is done—simply by sinking plates in the Earth. The Earth does the rest. This has been discovered today by modern science. We presuppose that the electric current works in the Earth. In olden times men knew nothing about electricity or electric currents, but on the other hand they knew something about their blood. Standing on the Earth they knew: there is something in the Earth which also lives in the blood. They did not speak of electricity but of an earthly force living in their blood. We no longer know that Earth-electricity is living in the blood. We are content to rely on mathematical formulae and the science of mechanics. But the men of old connected their picture of the Godhead with the very body of the Earth. They felt the sway of the Godhead in the blood, in the body, in the Earth. It was their picture of the Father God. This picture of the Father God was based upon the principle of the primal ancestor of the tribe, which the people conceived as the initial focus of the forces of the Godhead. But the Earth was the medium through which this Godhead manifested and the forces of the Earth in the blood, in the whole human body, were held to be workings of the Godhead.

Now another conception too was associated with this picture of the Father God in the days of antiquity. Men said to themselves: Every' thing would be well if the earthly forces only were working upon the being of man, but this is not the case. The Moon is working in the neighbourhood of the Earth. In short, the Earth is not working alone, but together with the Moon. And with this mingling of Earth and Moon forces there was associated the idea not only of one single Godhead of the Earth but of the many subordinate gods of paganism. All the forces working upon body and blood were woven into this ancient conception of the Godhead.

No wonder that all striving for knowledge in those times was directed to the forces of the Moon and of the Earth. A subtle and intricate body of knowledge grew up, a ‘science’ as it were of the Father God, and we have an echo of this in the first three sections of the great work of John Scotus Erigena, On the Division of Nature. He himself no longer possessed the knowledge in its real form, for he lived in the 9th century after Christ. None the less his books contain fragments that are a direct heritage from primeval wisdom, fragments in which we read that in all material existence there lives the Father God—creating but not created—and the other Divinities who both create and are themselves created. These other Divinities are the Beings of the Hierarchies.

I he visible world spread around the human being is created and does not create, and man is to look forward to a world wherein the Godhead rules as the Godhead at rest—neither creating nor created but receiving all things into himself. Such is the substance of the fourth section of the work of John Scotus Erigena.

This fourth section treats of soteriology and eschatology. It speaks of the history of the Christ Jesus, of the Resurrection, of the gifts of the Divine Grace, of the ending of the world and the return to the Godhead at rest. The first three sections, particularly, echo the conceptions of antiquity for, as a matter of fact, the thoughts become genuinely Christian only when we reach the fourth. The first three sections contain (Christian thoughts, but are derived, in essence, from ancient paganism. And so, it was among the Church Fathers of the first centuries of Christendom. Their conceptions were relics of the ancient era of paganism. Let me put it in these words: In Nature, in the created world around him, man gazed upon the region of the Father God. Behind Nature he saw an Ideal world. He beheld the workings of certain forces in nature; and in the succession of the generations, in the development of humanity itself in the different races and peoples he saw the ruling of the Father God.

Now in the first centuries of Christendom there was added to this conception another sphere of knowledge which has been entirely lost. The earliest Church Fathers spoke as follows, although such doctrines have been exterminated altogether by their later exponents. They said: The Father God has worked in the blood flowing through the generations and in all that has shaped itself into the bodies of men, but the Father God has been engaged in perpetual warfare with the powers who oppose him, namely the Nature Spirits. The minds of men during the first centuries of Christendom were imbued with the idea that the Father God had never succeeded in working alone but had been obliged to wage perpetual warfare against the Nature Spirits ruling in the things of the outer world. The teachings of the earliest Church Fathers were to the effect that in the pre-Christian era men believed in the Father God but could not distinguish him from the Nature Spirits. What these men of old really believed in was the whole world of the Father God combined with the kingdom of Nature. It was from this that they conceived the visible world to have proceeded. But, said the Church Fathers, this is an error. All these different Nature Gods are working in Nature but at a certain stage they insinuated themselves into the things of the Earth. The things of the Earth we perceive with our senses, the things that are outside us, that have become earthly, do not proceed from these Nature Spirits, nor from the Father God who worked creatively only in the metamorphoses of pre-earthly existence. The Earth we see proceeded not from the Father God and not from the Nature Spirits, but from the Son, from the Logos whom the Father God sent forth in order that He (the Logos) might create the Earth. And the Gospel of St John is there as a token and a memorial that the Earth is not, as the ancients believed, created by the Father God. The Father God sent forth the Son, and the Son is the creator of the Earth.

It was for the upholding of the teaching contained in the first verses of the Gospel of St John that the early Fathers of the Christian Church were fighting. So difficult was it for the growing faculty of human intellect to understand this teaching that Dionysius the Areopagite preferred to say: Whatsoever is created by the human intellect is Affirmative Theology, but Affirmative Theology does not penetrate into those regions where the real mysteries of the world are contained. These regions can only be attained by the negation of all predicates, by speaking of God not as essentia but as super-essentia, by speaking not of personality, but of super-personality. In other words, when everything is negated, then, through Negative Theology alone can the real mystery of existence be fathomed. But neither Dionysius the Areopagite nor a successor like John Scotus Erigena (who was already permeated by the forces of intellect) believed that human reason was in any way capable of explaining these mysteries of world existence.

And now try to think what is implied by the assertion that the Logos is the creator of the world. Think of what was present all through pre-Christian antiquity but had grown somewhat dim at the time of the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. Men said to themselves: The Godhead works through the blood, through the body. And they associated with this the conception that when the blood runs in the veins of human beings or of animals, the Gods have been deprived of it. The blood, they said, is the lawful possession of the Gods. Therefore, we can draw near to the Gods if we give the blood back again to them. The Gods desire the blood for themselves. Men have taken possession of it and it must be given back again to the Gods. Hence the blood sacrifice in the days of antiquity.

But now came the Christ Who taught that the things of the Earth have not proceeded from the Gods who desire the blood for themselves. Christ directed the minds of men to all that works in their being before the forces of the Earth work upon them. Think of the bread—the substance wherewith man is nourished. He takes bread into his body. It is a means of nourishment and passing through the organism reaches a certain point before it is transformed into the forces of the blood. But it is not changed into blood until it has passed through the whole digestive tract. Only then do the forces of the Earth begin to work. As long as the foodstuff has not passed over into the blood, the earthly forces have not begun to work. Christ, therefore, taught men to see God not in the blood but in the bread before the bread becomes flesh, and to see God in the wine before the wine passes into the blood. There is the Divine, there is the incarnate Logos. Look not upon what flows in the blood, for what flows in the blood is a heritage of man from the Moon period, from pre- earthly time. Away, therefore, with the conceptions of the blood, of the body, of flesh. Turn your minds to what is not yet blood and not yet flesh, to what is prepared on the Earth around you without the influence of the Moon; turn your minds to what comes from the Sun! For we see things through the light of the Sun and when we eat the bread and drink the wine we receive in them the powers and forces of the Sun. Things visible exist not through the Father but through the Logos—the Son. Such was the message of Christ.

Here, you see, the mind of man is turned not to the kind of knowledge derived by the ancients from Nature, but in the direction of the Sun, to the forces poured down by the Sun to the Earth. Instead of deriving his conceptions of the Divine from physical, earthly things, man must behold the Divine in the Spiritual, in the Logos. The Logos superseded those ancient conceptions of the Father God. In other words, the mind of man was directed to the Spiritual. In pre-Christian times man had perceived the Divine with forces generated in his own organic being and these forces then arose within him in the form of vision. A vision of the Divine also proceeded from the blood. But now man must seek for the Divine in acts of purely spiritual contemplation. He must regard the things visible around him as having proceeded from the Logos, not from those beings who subsequently had insinuated themselves into the Earth as a result of the activity of a God who had created in pre-earthly existence.

Only in the light of this knowledge can we begin to understand the ideas and mental outlook of those who lived in the first centuries of Christendom. All that I have been describing was an indication to men that their conceptions of the Divine must be drawn from the forces of their consciousness alone, and from no other source. Men were directed to the Spiritual and the time had now come when it was possible to say to them: In the days of the old dispensation the Earth was so powerful that it was the source of your conception of the Divine. But those days have passed away. The Earth can no longer give you anything. Your own forces and your own forces alone must lead you to the Logos, the creative principle. Hitherto you have worshipped only the Godhead who created in pre-earthly existence; now you are to revere the principle that is creative in earthly existence. And this must be done through the power of your Ego, of your Spirit.

The early Christians, therefore, were wont to say: The end of the world is at hand. They meant the downfall of that Earth from which man drew his knowledge without conscious effort. To speak of this ‘world ending’ was to voice a profound truth, because hitherto the human being had been a son of the Earth, had relinquished himself to the forces of the Earth, relying upon his blood to give him knowledge. But this era had passed away. The kingdom of Heaven had drawn near, the kingdom of Earth had come to an end. Man was not, nor could he be henceforth, a son of the Earth. He must make himself a companion of I he Spiritual Being Who had come down to the Earth—of the Logos, of the Christ. And so, this downfall of the world was prophesied for the 4th century of Christendom. It signified the downfall of the Earth and the dawn of that kingdom in which man would feel himself dwelling as a Spirit among Spirits—it is our own time. The modern mind will find it exceedingly difficult to realise that in the first centuries of Christendom men did not look upon their existence as earthly, but as an existence within the kingdom of the Spirit after the Earth, as it had been when men drew their powers from its sources, had come to an end. Nobody who has ever really understood the thought-life of the earliest Christians will say that their belief concerning the end of the world was superstition because it did not come to pass. In the form in which the early Christians held this belief it did actually come to pass. The early Christians would have regarded the condition in which man lives as a Spirit among Spirits as the ‘new Jerusalem’. Only they would have said: We hold that man has entered already into the kingdom of Heaven, but he is so sinful that he knows it not; he imagines that Heaven flows with milk and honey, that there are no evil spirits in Heaven against which he must protect himself. The early Christians would have said: Hitherto these evil spirits were within the things of Nature; now they have been released and are whirling in their hosts invisibly around the human being who must guard against them.

In the sense of early Christian thought, then, there had been a world ending. But it was not realised that in place of the God indwelling the Earth, the God who proclaimed his being in the events of Earth, there had come the supersensible Logos Who must be known in the Supersensible and to Whom men must aspire with supersensible forces. If we recognise this we shall find that over the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries too, there hovered another mood, another feeling of a world ending. Once again men were expecting the downfall of the world. They did not yet understand the thoughts of the early Christians but out of this mood which spread over the whole of civilised Europe in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries there came the urge to seek the path to Christ in a more material form than that in which it should properly have been sought. Men ought to have recognised that the Logos must be found in the Spirit and not in the phenomena of the natural world. This finding of the Logos in the Spirit was not understood by men who once again were imbued with the feeling of world ending, and they sought to find the Logos by a more material path.

Out of this feeling grew the mood which gave rise to the Crusades. Men set out to find the Christ in His grave in the East, and to hold fast to him in the throes of this misinterpreted feeling that the downfall of the world was at hand. But the Christ was not to be found away yonder in the East. Those who had sought to find Him visibly in the tomb were told: He Whom thou seekest is not here. Seek for Him in the Spirit.

And now, in the 20th century—and it will be so increasingly in the days to come—there is again the same mood of world downfall, albeit in their lethargy and indifference men no longer give heed to it. Nevertheless, the writer of The Decline of the West [Oswald Spengler] has made a deep and perceptible impression upon his time. This mood of world downfall will become more and more widespread.

Yet in truth one need not speak of the downfall of the world. World ending there has been, in the sense that the Spiritual can no longer be derived from the source of Nature. The question now is for man to realise that in very truth he is living in a spiritual world. An error is responsible for the loss of the direct knowledge that he is living and moving in a spiritual world. This is the error that has brought calamity upon us and that will make the bloodshed of wars more and more terrible. Human beings are as if possessed—possessed by the evil powers who cast their minds into confusion; and they no longer speak as if they were voicing what lives in the Ego. They are possessed as by a psychosis—a psychosis much talked about, but little understood.

The downfall of the world conceived by the first Christians has come about and the new era is upon us. But the new era must be recognised and understood. It must be realised that in very truth when the human being ‘knows’, he knows as an Angel; when he becomes conscious in his own true being, he is conscious as an Archangel. The spiritual world has come down to us and it is only a question of being conscious of it. That is the all-important thing. Many people imagine that they take the words of the Gospel literally and in all earnestness. Yet in spite of the unequivocal statement in the Gospel of St John that all created things are not to be explained on the basis of their sub-earthly forces but as having been created by the Logos, in spite of this, men have adhered to the Father God who is, indeed, to be recognised as one with the Christ but as that Person of the Trinity who was creative until the Earth took shape. The true Regent of the Earth is Christ—the Logos.

Understanding these things was hardly possible any longer in the days of John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century of our era. And that explains why his book On the Division of Nature is on the one hand so grand and significant but on the other so chaotic that Spiritual Science alone can help us to make anything of it.

As I have said, in the fourth section John the Scot speaks of the Being who is not created and does not create. If we really understand John Scotus Erigena when he speaks of the Godhead at rest, of the Godhead to whom all things return and in whom they are united, then we have the further stage. The world that is described in the first three sections of the work has come to an end. The world of the Godhead at rest—the Being who is not created and does not create—is upon us. The Earth is going towards its end—in so far, that is to say, as the Earth is Nature. I have reminded you many times that even our geologists today are saying that nothing more is really coming into being on the Earth. It is, of course, quite true that plant life continues; animals and human beings continue to come into existence through propagation. But the Earth, taken as one great whole, is not the same as it once was. It is breaking up, falling to pieces. In its mineral sphere the Earth is already disintegrating. The eminent geologist Suess makes this statement in his book Decline of the Earth. He says that we are moving about on the disintegrating ashes of the Earth. He speaks of a certain region where this is clearly evident and shows that it was not so in earlier epochs. Such was the view of the world and of life in the first centuries of Christendom—derived, of course, not from the natural but from the moral facts of human evolution.

We have been living since the beginning of the 15th century more within the ‘Godhead at rest’ than did John Scotus Erigena. The Godhead at rest is waiting until we are active enough to attain to Imagination and Inspiration wherewith we may see the world around us as a spiritual world, knowing that we are verily within that spiritual world from which the earthly world has been cast off, that we are living after the world ending has come to pass and that the new Jerusalem is with us.

Truly it is a strange destiny of men that living in the spiritual world they know it not, nor are willing to know it. All interpretations which present true Christianity as if it were bristling with inadequate ideas, such as that of a world ending which has not come to pass and is merely a figure of speech, all such interpretations are empty and futile. It is only a question of understanding the real meaning of the Christian writings. We must realise that the conceptions of men during the first centuries of Christendom related to a world that was altogether different after the 4th century.

The Church fathers of the early Christian centuries tried to bring the teachings of the old pagan wisdom into connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, but they did not believe that, to begin with, men would be capable of understanding them. Therefore, they preserved the mysteries of olden times in the form of dogmas which were to be matters of belief, but which men were not supposed to understand. These dogmas are not superstitions or untruths. They are, after all, quite true in themselves, only they must be understood in the right way, namely, by the application of those faculties and forces which have been developing in man since the time of the 15th century.

Since the middle of the 15th century the Consciousness Soul has been developing. When a man is evolving his thoughts and concepts today he is altogether lacking in any realisation that in his acts of knowledge he is an Angel. He will say: But I am simply thinking about the things I have experienced. And most certainly he will not say that in his ‘knowing’ he is a spiritual being, nor that in self-consciousness he is a yet higher spiritual being. Men seek for knowledge today with the shadow of that kind of intellect which lived among the Greeks, in Plato and in Aristotle, nay even among the Romans, and was still alive, to some extent, in a man like John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.

The very fact that we need no longer allow ourselves to be led astray by the intellect can be a help to us. Today men are running after a shadow—after the shadow that is their intellect. They allow themselves to be misled by this intellect instead of striving to attain Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition which will lead them into the spiritual world. The fact that the intellect has faded into shadow is good in itself. But with shadowy intellect we have evolved our natural science and this sphere of knowledge must now be worked upon further. The Godhead has come to rest in order that we ourselves may labour. The fourth condition is upon us. It only remains for men to become conscious of it. And if they do not, then nothing new can come into being on the Earth, for what the Earth once received as a heritage has passed away. The new has to be created.

A man like Spengler saw the ruins which still remain of bygone civilisation. They lie before us clearly enough. The frame of mind in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries was that of a world doomed. Then came the Crusades—achieving nothing because men were seeking in the material world for what ought to have been sought in the Spirit. And when the Crusades failed, the Renaissance came as a kind of makeshift. Greek culture was brought to light once again and is still being offered to human beings in the form of education. Greek culture is there, but it did not come to light in the Renaissance as a new thing. The only new thing that has come into being since the beginning of the 15th century consists of the mathematical and mechanical conceptions we apply to outer Nature. But the ruins of antiquity are forever with us. They are inculcated into the minds of the young in the form of their academic training and so constitute the basis of civilisation. Oswald Spengler gazed at these ruins of the Renaissance. Like great erratic blocks they float across the ocean of life that is travailing to give birth to something new. If we have eyes only for these floating blocks, then we see nothing but downfall. Nobody can galvanise our civilisation in the form in which it exists today. It is going to pieces, falling into ruin. A new civilisation must be brought into being from out of the Spiritual by a primal power of creation, for the fourth condition is upon us. This is the sense in which we must interpret the writings of John Scotus Erigena, whose wisdom—which he himself found difficult to under' stand—was drawn from the Mysteries still cultivated in Ireland.

What I have told you here is not only the result of Spiritual Science. Ancient documents tell us exactly the same, that is, if we really understand them and shake off Alexandrian influences in the form of science that goes by the name of philology. One cannot help saying that in their modern form these things show few traces either of real philology or real philosophy. In our methods of ‘cramming’ and in our examination schedules today there is exceedingly little room left for the ‘philo’. That must be brought from somewhere else, but we stand in dire need of it.

In this lecture I wanted first of all to speak of John Scotus Erigena and, secondly, to show you the paths along which we can come to an understanding of the now faded wisdom of antiquity. The Gospel of St John states quite clearly: The Logos, not the Father God, is the creative principle. But facts like this pass by unheeded in our time.

A lecture published in The Golden Blade, 1990. Also known as: The Influence of the Planets on Man, The Ego and the Sun, or Atomism. It is the thirteenth of seventeen lectures in the volume Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

The civilisation of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—the period of the development of the Mind Soul in humanity—was directed from the Greek Mysteries. In other words: the indications upon which the culture of the human mind was based issued from the Mystery-Sanctuaries which existed here and there in Asia Minor and Southern Europe. Now the secret of man's connection with the Sun was an essential part of these Mystery-teachings. From the book Theosophy we know that the Ego lights up within the Intellectual or Mind Soul and enters into possession of its full, inner force during the age of Consciousness, or Spiritual Soul.

Now because the Ego of man was destined from a certain point of view to be awakened during the age of the culture of the mind or intellect, it was quite natural that the Mysteries of that age should have been concerned with the secrets of the Sun and their connection with the human Ego. In the book Riddles of Philosophy it is said that the Greek's life of thought consisted in an actual perceiving of the outer world. The Greek's thought was at the same time a perception, just as we today have a perception of colours or sounds. The thoughts and conceptions of the Greek were not brought into being merely by inner activity of the soul, but they were born as it were from the objects themselves. In this respect Goethe's thinking undoubtedly possessed qualities in common with Greek thought. This is quite clear from his famous conversation with Schiller. Schiller stated that Goethe's conceptions were not perceptions, but ideas, and to this Goethe retorted that he actually saw his ideas before him, that he perceived them objectively.

The life of thought in Greece was associated with a very definite inner experience which arose when men looked at the world around them. They regarded the substance of the ideas which thus lit up before them as being the creation of the Sun. With the rising Sun they beheld the appearance in space of the life of ideas, and this life of ideas passed away again with the setting Sun. Men have now quite lost the faculty of perceiving and experiencing spirituality in the world around them. When the Sun rises they see only the phenomena of light and colour which there appear. And it is the same when the Sun sets in the red glow of evening. The Greeks felt that the world of ideas came to them at sunrise and passed away from them at sunset. They felt that in the darkness of the night they were bereft of the world of ideas. And when they looked at the sky, which seems to us to be blue, but for the colour of which the Greeks used a word which simply meant “darkness”, they felt that their world of ideas came to an end at the boundaries of visible space. Beyond this world of space the Greek divined the existence of other worlds—the worlds of the thoughts of the Gods, which he connected with light. These worlds seemed to him to be concentrated in the living Sun, and to withdraw during the night into the spaces of the dark firmament. Without some insight into this entirely different world of perception and experience, we cannot understand the further evolution of man's life of soul. This faculty of inwardly living perception functioned for a certain period of time, but then the most advanced representatives of the human race, those who still received their training in the Greek Mysteries, began to feel that their power to perceive the spiritual radiations from the living Sun in cosmic space was waning, and they saw salvation in the Mystery of Golgotha, inasmuch as the impulse coming from the Mystery of Golgotha made it possible for them to rekindle the light within their own being. And they tried now to experience the light by entering in spirit into the events connected with the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now the intellect alone can give us no real knowledge of what has really come to pass in the life of humanity through the ages. A great and far-reaching metamorphosis took place in man's life of soul and must never be forgotten when we are studying the course of evolution. We who have been living in the era of the development of the Consciousness Soul since the beginning of the fifteenth century have in our inner, intellectual activity, only a shadowy reflection of the spirituality which pervaded the life of the mind in the fourth Post-Atlantean period of civilisation. And the task before us is to awaken a faculty of the soul which will quicken in this shadowy intellect of ours a living understanding of the universe. The shadow-intellect that is characteristic of all modern culture has fettered man to the Earth. He has eyes only for earthly things, particularly when he allows himself to be influenced by the claims of modern science. In our age it never occurs to man that his being belongs, not to the Earth alone, but to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. Knowledge of our connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that is what we need above all to make our own.

We take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and build up a conception of the Universe in line with the conditions of this earthly life. But the picture of the Universe thus arising has been evolved by simply transferring earthly conditions to the world beyond the Earth. By means of spectro-analysis and other methods—admirable as they are in their way—a conception of the Sun has grown up which is really modelled wholly upon earthly conditions. Everyone is familiar with the appearance of luminous, incandescent gas, and this picture is then transferred to the Sun in the heavens. But we must learn to think of the Sun in the light of Spiritual Science. The Sun which the physicist believes to be a luminous body of gas out in cosmic space is spiritual through and through. The Sun receives the cosmic light and radiates it to the Earth, but the Sun is not physical at all. It is spiritual in its whole nature and being. The Greek was right when he felt that the Sun was connected with the development of his Ego, for the development of the Ego is associated with the intelligence and the faculty of forming ideas. The Greek conceived the rays of the Sun to be the power which kindled and quickened his Ego. His was still aware of the spirituality of the Cosmos, and to him the Sun was a living being, related to the human Ego in an absolutely concrete way. When a man says ‘ I ’ to himself, he experiences a force that is working within him, and the Greek, as he felt the working of this inner force, related it to the Sun. The Greek said to himself: Sun and Ego are the outer and inner aspects of one and the same being. The Sun out there in space is the Cosmic Ego. What lives within me is the human Ego.

As a matter of fact, this experience still comes to those who have a deeper feeling for Nature. The experience is not nearly as vivid as it was in the days of Greece, but for all that it is still possible to become aware of the spiritual forces indwelling the rays of the Sun in springtime. There are people here and there who feel that the Ego is imbued with a new vigour when the rays of the Sun begin to shine down upon the Earth with greater strength. But this is a last faint echo, an outward shell of an experience that is dying out altogether in the abstract, shadowy intellectualism prevalent in every branch of civilised life today. The task before us is to begin once again to realise and understand the connection of the being of man with super-earthly existence.

If we study and compare many things that are to be found in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able to understand the way in which the Sun is related to the Ego, and we shall also realise that the forces which stream down to the Earth from the Sun and from the Moon are entirely different in character and function. In a certain respect, Sun and Moon stand in polar antithesis. The forces streaming from the Sun enable the human being to become the bearer of an Ego. We owe to the rays of the Sun the power which moulds the human form into an image of the Ego. The forces which determine the human form from outside, even during the period of embryonic life, are the active forces of the Sun. While the embryo is developing in the mother's body, a great deal more is happening than modern science dreams of. Modern science is of the opinion that the forces all originate from the fertilised germ, but the truth is that the human embryo merely rests there in the body of the mother and is given form by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are, of course, associated with the Moon forces which are also working but in a different way. The Moon forces work above all in the inner, metabolic processes. We may therefore say: the Sun forces give form to the human being from outside. The Moon forces radiate outwards from within the metabolic process; they are centrifugal forces. This does not contradict the fact that these Moon forces are working, for instance, in the shaping and moulding of the human countenance. The Moon forces stream out from a centre in the metabolic system and work as it were by attraction upon the forming of the human face, differentiating the features, but there is an interplay between these Moon forces and the Sun forces. The organism that is connected with procreation is subject to the Sun forces. The whole being of man is involved in this way in the interplay between the forces of the Sun and the forces of the Moon.

A distinction must be made, however, between the Moon forces that work in the inner processes of metabolism in man, and the forces that originate in the metabolic processes itself. The Moon forces stream into the metabolic process, but this metabolic process has forces of its own as well. And these are earthly forces. The substances and forces in the vegetable and other foodstuffs work in the human being by virtue of their own inherent nature. They work here as Earth forces. Metabolism is primarily an outcome of the working of Earth forces. If the substances of the foodstuffs were merely to unfold their own forces within the human organism, there would be nothing but a chaotic play of forces in man. The fact that these forces work without intermission to renew and upbuild the being of man, is due not to the Earth at all, but to the Moon. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the Moon, and from without inwards by the Sun. Because the rays of the Sun are received through the eye into the head-organisation. The Sun forces work within the organism as well, but for all that they are still working from outside.

And so on the one hand the development and evolution of the Ego of man is dependent upon the forces of the Sun. Without the Sun, man could not be an Ego being living on the Earth; on the other hand there could be no such thing as propagation, there could be no human race without the Moon. It is the Sun which places man as an individual on the Earth, and it is the Moon that charms down the human race to Earth—the human race conceived here as one whole. The human race as the physical product of the generations is a product of the Moon forces which have worked in the generative process. As an individuality, however, man is the product of the Sun forces.

If, therefore, we want to understand the human being and the human race as a whole, we cannot do so by studying merely those conditions which obtain on the Earth alone. The efforts of geologists to understand the being of man by investigating the nature of the Earth are all in vain. Man is not primarily a creation of the Earth. He receives his shape and form from the Cosmos; he is an offspring of the world of the stars, above all of Sun and Moon. From the Earth are derived only those forces which are contained in the substances of the Earth. These forces work outside the human being and also within him when they are introduced into his organism either through eating or drinking. But within the organism they are received into the realm of forces of a super-earthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means an affair of the Earth alone. They are through and through an affair of the world of stars. This is the kind of knowledge that we must struggle to reach once more.

Think of the human being as he stands there before us in his physical body. This physical body takes in the foodstuffs from the outer world and the forces of the foodstuffs continue to work within the body. But the physical body is permeated by the astral body and in the astral body the Moon forces are actively at work. The Sun forces too play into the astral body. The etheric body is there in the middle, between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces of foodstuffs, we find that, to begin with, they are active in the physical body and are then taken hold of by the astral body in which the influence of Sun and Moon are working. But between the physical body and astral body the etheric body is fulfilling its functions. The forces in the etheric body come, not from the Earth but from all directions of cosmic space. The products of the Earth, the substances which exist in the solid liquid or aeriform condition, are taken in by the human being and worked upon by the forces of Sun and Moon. But forces streaming in from all directions of cosmic space are also working in the human organism. The forces contained in the foodstuffs themselves come from the Earth, but from cosmic space the etheric forces stream in. These etheric forces also take hold of the foodstuffs and work upon them in such a way that they become inwardly responsive to light and also to warmth. We say, therefore: the human being is part of the Earth because he has a physical body. His etheric body relates him to the whole environment of the Earth. Through his astral body he is involved in the weaving forces of Sun and Moon.

Now these influences of the Sun and Moon in the astral body are modified and differentiated in a high degree as they work upon the ‘upper’ man. By ‘upper’ man I mean, in this case, the part of the organism that is encircled and permeated by the bloodstream which passed upwards from the heart in the direction of the head. The ‘lower’ man, then, comprises the other part of the organism—that part which lies below the heart.

Thus we have the upper part of man, including the head and everything that is organically connected with the head. The formation of this part of the organism is dependent, mainly, upon the Sun's influences. Its most important period of development is during embryonic life. The Sun's influences work upon the embryo in a very special way, but these influences continue to be active when the human being is born and is living in the physical world between birth and death. The astral influences working upon that part of the human organism which lies above the heart—speaking very roughly, for it would be necessary to go into more precise detail if we were describing the blood circulation—these astral influences are then modified by the influences of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

The planet Saturn circles round the Sun and sends forces to the Earth. These forces of Saturn work in the whole astral body of man, but above all in the part of the astral body which corresponds to the ‘upper’ man. They stream into the astral body, pervade it, and are the essential factor in bringing about a proper connection between the astral body and the physical body. When, for instance, a man cannot sleep properly, that is to say, when his astral body will not leave or come down again properly into his etheric and physical bodies or in some other way is not rightly connected with the physical body—this is due to an irregularity in the working of the Saturn forces. In other words, Saturn is the heavenly body which, by way of the human head, promotes and is responsible for setting up the proper relation of man's astral body to his etheric body and his physical body. And it is the Saturn forces too which mediate the connection of the astral body to the Ego, because of Saturn's relation to the Sun. Saturn's relation to the Sun is expressed in space and time inasmuch as Saturn accomplishes its orbit around the Sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being, the relationship of Saturn to the Sun is expressed in the connection of the Ego with the astral body and in the way in which the astral body is membered into the whole human organism. The connection of Saturn with the upper part of the astral body was regarded as a factor of great importance in ancient times. In the Egypto-Chaldean period, three or four thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Teachers and Sages of the Mysteries judged a human being according to his relation to Saturn—which was revealed by the date and time of his birth. For these Sages knew quite well that the position of Saturn in the heavens at the time of man's birth enabled his astral body either to function regularly or irregularly in his physical body. Knowledge of these influences played a very important part in olden days. But the onward progress of evolution is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we have to become free of these forces and influences.

Please do not misunderstand me This does not mean that Saturn is not working in us nowadays. Naturally the Saturn forces work in us, just as they worked in the Ancients, but we must now learn to make ourselves free and independent of them. And do you know how we can make ourselves free? Nothing is worse than to give oneself over to the shadowy intellectualism of our age. If we do that, the Saturn forces run riot within us and give rise to the so-called nervous troubles that are so very prevalent in our time. When a man suffers from ‘nerves’ as we say, it is because his astral body is not properly connected with his physical organisation. This lies at the basis of the morbid nervous symptoms which are so common nowadays. Our striving should be to unfold real vision, to attain Imagination. If man can achieve nothing better than the forming of abstract concepts and ideas, nervous symptoms are bound to increase in severity, because this intellectual activity tends to alienate him from the influences of Saturn, which are still at work within his being. His astral body will be torn away from his nerves, and he will be driven more and more into a state of nervous tension and excitability. The nervous complaints of our age must be recognised in their cosmic aspect, for they are caused by an irregular working of the Saturn forces.

Just as Saturn works chiefly in the upper part of the astral body and in the whole astral body inasmuch as the astral body is connected with the organism as a whole through the nervous system, so is Jupiter active in thinking.

When a man thinks, one part of his astral body is active. It is pre-eminently the Jupiter forces in the astral body which strengthen the thinking faculty, and Jupiter is responsible for permeating the human brain with astral forces.

Now the influences of Saturn continue throughout the whole of man's life. The beginning of a human life may really be said to consist of the first three periods of ten years. This is the period of growth, for as a matter of fact the activity of the growth forces does not wholly cease until after the thirtieth year. And our whole life and our health depend on how our astral body has developed during the thirty years. Saturn needs thirty years to complete its orbit around the Sun and this has its exact parallel in the life of man.

The development of the faculty of thinking takes place essentially during the first twelve years of life. Again we find the parallelism in the orbit of the planet Jupiter.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so has Mars to do with speech.

Mars works upon a still smaller part of the astral body than that with which Jupiter is concerned in connection with the thinking of man. And the development of the forces which finally express themselves in speech, is dependent upon the working of Mars within our being. Man learns to utter the first sounds of speech in a period which corresponds approximately to half the time required by Mars to complete its orbit around the Sun.

We see, then, that the development of faculties situated primarily in the region of the human head is connected with the Saturn forces, the Jupiter forces, and the Mars forces. The forces of the three outer planets, therefore, work on within the astral body through the life of man. The Sun is connected more directly with the Ego, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are concerned respectively with the behaviour and functioning of the astral body in the human organism, with the faculty of thinking and with the faculty of speaking.

The Sun is connected with the Ego. And then we come to the inner planets, as they are sometimes called, the planets which are nearer the Earth and lie between the Earth and the Sun, whereas Saturn, Jupiter and Mars lie on the other side of the Sun. The forces of these inner planets are likewise connected with the being of man. We will take Mercury to begin with.

Like the Moon, the centre, from which the Mercury forces work, lies in the inner being of man, and it is only in connection with the forming of the human countenance that Mercury works from outside. The Mercury forces work in the part of the human organism that lies below the region of the heart. From there these Mercury forces stream into the human organism. The working of the astral body in the breathing and circulatory functions of the human organism is regulated by Mercury. Mercury acts as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in the being of man. The Mercury forces act as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic functions in the human organism. Because this is so, the Mercury forces intervene, as do the Moon forces, in the metabolic processes as a whole, but only in so far as the metabolic process is subject to rhythm and reacts in turn upon the rhythmic functions.

We come next to Venus. Venus works pre-eminently in the etheric body of man. The cosmic forces chiefly active in the etheric body, therefore, are those of Venus.

Then we come again to the Moon. The Moon forces in the human organism work in polar antithesis to the Sun forces. From within outwards the Moon forces lead substance over into the realm of the living and are therefore connected with procreation. The Moon stimulates not only the inner, reproductive processes of the organism, but the procreative process as well. Thus we have:

You see now in what way processes in the human organism are dependent upon the Cosmos. On the one side man is bound up with the earthly forces through his physical body. And on the other side he is bound up with his whole cosmic environment through the etheric body. The cosmic forces, however, work in different ways in his being as we have heard. This differentiation originates in the astral body in which the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon are contained. By way of the Ego, the Sun works in man. Suppose that as the result of his earlier incarnations a man has within his being forces which predestine him to be a thinker in the earthly life upon which he is entering. He prepares for his descent to the Earth and—since Jupiter takes a definite time to complete his orbit—he will choose a moment for his birth when the rays of Jupiter pour directly down upon him.

In this way the heavenly constellations provide conditions into which a human being may be born—conditions which are determined by his previous earthly lives.

In the age of the Consciousness Soul, of course, it is the task of man gradually to make himself free of these conditions. But he must free himself from them in the right way.

In speaking of the Saturn influences, I said that it is a question of trying to replace shadowy intellectualism by real Imagination. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds indications are given which, if they are followed, can make us independent of the cosmic forces, although none the less these cosmic forces continue to work in our being.

Man is born on Earth into conditions determined by a constellation in the heavens, but he must equip himself with forces which make him independent of this constellation. It is to this kind of knowledge—a knowledge of man's connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that our civilisation must attain. Man must learn to realise that the forces of heredity described by modern science are not the only forces at work in his organism. To imagine such a thing, my dear friends, is the purest nonsense. It is pure nonsense to think that the maternal organism contains those forces which are then transmitted by heredity and so build up a heart, a liver and the other organs. There would be no heart in the human organism if the Sun did not build it into the organism of man, neither would there be a liver if Venus did not place it into the organism. And so it is with each single organ. Their presence in the human organism is due to the working of cosmic forces.

These are the things that humanity must once again learn to understand. Man must realise that the mysteries of his being cannot be explained by a science which deals merely with earthly phenomena. Around man live other creatures—and they too are not merely creatures of the Earth. It appears, to begin with, as if the minerals were entirely earthly in their nature. But in the minerals, too, changes have taken place which were due to the forces working in the cosmic environment of the Earth. The crystallised forms of the metals are all due to the play of forces from beyond the Earth. The metals were given shape and form at a time when the Earth's forces were not yet working in their full strength, but when cosmic forces were working in the Earth. The healing forces contained in the minerals, above all in the metals, are connected with the way in which these metals were formed within the Earth by the working of cosmic forces.

In the first epoch of Post-Atlantean times, when the ancient Indian civilisation was at its prime, man felt and knew himself to be a citizen of the whole wide universe. Although he had not yet developed the forces which modern humanity is so proud to possess, he was in the true sense of the word, MAN. By the time of the Chaldean epoch, however, man's attention had already begun to be diverted from the Sun. He had become a kind of amphibium—a creature who is thankful when the rays of the Sun pour down upon it, and when it need not always be confined to its dark burrows in the pound. But in our time one cannot say that man even resembles a creature like the mole, for he is really much more like an earthworm who has eyes at most for what has first been sent out into space from the Earth and comes back again as rain. This is really all that men see in the way of forces from beyond the Earth. But this the earthworms also see! In his materialism today man has become an earthworm. He must rise above this earth state, but he can only do so by realising and knowing his connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth.

Our task therefore, is to raise ourselves above the earthworm state into which our civilisation has fallen, and bring a new spiritual life into being.

Also known as: A Picture of the Earth's Future Development Lecture 14 of 17 from the lecture series: Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

This is a time when a great deal of attention, ranging from serious science to science-fiction, is being devoted to “outer space.” There is speculation on various levels about visitants from other worlds. Behind it all there may be an instinctive feeling—true in itself though often distorted in expression—that the apparent isolation of man on earth is not final; that man is not alone in the universe. We are therefore reprinting here a lecture (first published in English in the quarterly, “Anthroposophy,” for Easter, 1933, and long out of print) in which Rudolf Steiner spoke, briefly and enigmatically, of the need to recognise and welcome certain beings, “not of the human order,” who since the seventies of the last century have been descending from cosmic spheres into the realm of earth-existence, bringing with them “the substance and content of Spiritual Science.”—The Editors.

This unmistakably indicates that it is high time for man to discover how he can receive new impulses into his life of soul, and we will turn our attention today to certain great cosmic events with which we are already familiar from other points of view.

Most of you will have read the book An Outline of Occult Science, and will have realised that one of the great events in earthly evolution was the separation of the moon from the earth. The moon as we see today, shining towards us from cosmic space, was once united with the earth. It then separated from the earth and now circles around it as its satellite. We know what incisive changes in the whole sweep of evolution are connected with this separation of the moon from the earth. We must go far back in time, before the Atlantean deluge, to find the epoch when the moon departed from the body of the earth.

Today we will confine our attention to what came to pass on earth in connection with the being of man, and with the kingdoms of Nature around him, as a consequence of the separation of the moon from the earth. From the lectures on colours we have learnt that minerals—that is to say, the coloured mineral substances—actually derive their different hues from this relationship of the moon to the earth. Recognition of this fact enables us to make these cosmic events part of an artistic conception of existence. But other matters of the greatest significance come into consideration here. Man's being is the product of preceding metamorphoses of earth-existence—namely, the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of evolution, during which no mineral kingdom existed. The mineral kingdom as we know it today came into being for the first time during the Earth period. Mineral substance, therefore, became part of man's being only during this Earth period. During the stages of Saturn, old Sun and old Moon, man had nothing mineral within him at all. Nor was his constitution adapted for existence upon the earth. By his very nature he was a being of the cosmos. Before the separation of the moon, and before the mineral substances with their many colours came into being, man was not adapted for earthly existence.

Let me put it in this way. It was a very real question for the Spiritual Beings who guide earthly evolution as to what must happen to man. Should he be sent down to the earth or be left to pass his existence in a realm beyond the earth? It can be said with truth that the separation of the moon, with the consequent changes in the earth and in the being of man, was the outcome of a decision on the part of the Spiritual Beings who guide and direct the evolution of humanity. It was because this coarse moon-substance was sent out of the earth that man's organism developed in such a way as to make it possible for him to become an earthly being. Through this event—through the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into the earth—man has become an earthly being, existing in the sphere of earthly gravity. Without earthly gravity, he could never have become a being capable of freedom. Before the separation of the moon he was not, in the real sense a personality. He was able to become a personality because of the concentration of the forces that were to build his body. And this concentration of forces was the result of the separation of the moon and the incorporation of the mineral kingdom into earthly existence. Man became a personality, and freedom was henceforward placed within his reach.

The evolution of man upon the earth since the separation of the moon has proceeded through many different stages. And we may say that if nothing else had happened except this departure of the moon from the earth, it would still have been possible for man to draw out of his organism, out of his body and soul, pictures such as arose in ancient, clairvoyant vision. Nor was man deprived of this faculty by the separation of the moon. He still envisaged the world in pictures, and if nothing else had happened, he would be living in a world of pictures to this day. But evolution went on. Man did not remain fettered to the earth. He received an impulse for evolution in the other direction—an impulse which actually reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

Even when long ages ago the human being, as ‘metabolic man,’ became subject to the force of earthly gravity, he was adapted as ‘head man’ for a cosmic existence. In effect, the intellect began to evolve. The old clairvoyant pictures densified into the forms of intellectual consciousness, as it was until the epoch of the fourth century after Christ. It was then for the first time that the human intellect began to grow shadowy. This process has been increasingly rapid since the fifteenth century, and today, although the intellect is an altogether spiritual faculty in man, its existence is not rooted in reality. It has only a picture-existence. When the man of today thinks merely with his intellect and faculty of reason, his thoughts are not rooted in reality at all. More and more they move about in a shadowy existence which reached its climax during the nineteenth century. And today man is altogether devoid of the sense for reality. He lives within a spiritual element, but is at the same time a materialist. His thoughts—which are spiritual but yet merely shadow-thoughts—are directed entirely to material existence.

Thus the second great process or event was that man became more spiritual. But the spiritual substance once derived from matter no longer ensouls him. His nature has become more spiritual, but with his spiritual faculties he thinks only about material existence.

You know that the moon will one day reunite with the earth. By the astronomers and geologists, who live in a world of abstractions, this reunion of the moon with the earth is placed thousands and thousands of years ahead. But this is mere illusion. In reality it is by no means so very far distant. Humanity as such is becoming younger and younger. Human beings are coming to a point when their development of body and soul will proceed only up to a certain age in life. At the time of the death of Christ, of the Event of Golgotha, human beings in general were capable of development in body and in soul until the 33rd year of life. Today this development is possible until the 27th year. In the fourth millennium a time will come when men will be capable of development only until the 21st year. In the seventh millennium the bodily nature will be capable of development only until the 14th year of life. Women will then become barren. An entirely different form of earthly life will ensue. This is the epoch when the moon will again approach the earth and become part of it.

It is high time for man to turn his attention to such mighty events of the realm of existence beyond the earth. He must not go on dreaming, vaguely and in the abstract, of some form of Divinity, but he must begin to be alive to the great happenings that are connected with his evolution. He must know what it means to say that the moon once left the earth and will enter the earth again.

Just as the separation of the moon was a decisive event, so too will be its re-entry. It is true that as human beings we shall still be inhabiting the earth, although birth will no longer take place in the ordinary way. We shall be connected with the earth by other means than through birth. We shall, however, have evolved in a certain respect by that time. And we must learn to connect what is happening today—I mean the fact that the intellect is becoming more and more shadowy—with what will one day be a great event in earthly evolution—the re-entry of the moon into the substance of the earth.

If the intellect continues to become even more spectral than it is already, if men never resolve to receive into their being what can now flow to them from spiritual worlds, then they will inevitably be absorbed into the shadowy grey-ness of their intellectual life.

What is this shadowy intellect? It cannot understand the real nature and being of man. The mineral world is the only realm which the shadowy human intellect is to a certain degree capable of understanding. Even the life of the plant remains enigmatical; still more so the life of the animal; while human life is altogether beyond the grasp of the mind. And so man goes on his way, evolving pictures of existence which in reality are nothing but a great world-question. His intellect cannot begin to grasp the real nature of plant or animal, and least of all that of the human being. This state of things will continue if man fails to listen to what is being given to him in the form of new Imaginations, in which cosmic existence is pictured to him. The living wisdom that Spiritual Science is able to impart must be received into his shadowy, intellectual concepts and thoughts, for only so can the shadow-pictures of the intellect be quickened to life.

This quickening to life of the shadow-pictures of the intellect is not only a human but a cosmic event. You will remember the passage in the book Occult Science dealing with the time when the human souls ascended to the planets and afterwards descended once more to earth-existence. I spoke of how the Mars-men, the Jupiter-men and the others descended again to earth. Now an event of great significance came to pass at the end of the seventies of last century. It is an event that can be described only in the light of facts which are revealed to us in the spiritual world. Whereas in the days of old Atlantis human beings came down to the earth from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so on—that is to say, beings of soul were drawn into the realm of earth-existence—since the end of the seventies of last century, other Beings—not of the human order—have been descending to the earth for the purposes of their further development. From cosmic realms beyond the earth they come down to the earth and enter into a definite relationship with human beings. Since the eighties of the nineteenth century, super-earthly Beings have been seeking to enter the sphere of earth-existence. Just as the Vulcan-men were the last to come down to the earth so now Vulcan Beings are actually coming into the realm of earthly existence. Super-earthly Beings are already here, and the fact that we are able to have a connected body of Spiritual Science at all today is due to the circumstance that Beings from beyond the earth are bringing the messages from the spiritual world down into earth-existence.

But, speaking generally, what is the attitude adopted by the human race? The human race is behaving, if I may put it so very shabbily to these Beings who are appearing from the cosmos and coming down—slowly and by degrees, it is true—to the earth. The human race does not concern itself with them; it ignores their existence. And it is this which will plunge the earth into tragic conditions, for in the course of the next centuries more and more Spiritual Beings will be among us—Beings whose language we ought to understand. And this is possible only if we try to grasp what comes from them: namely, the substance and content of Spiritual Science. They want to give it to us and they want us to act in the sense of Spiritual Science. Their desire is that Spiritual Science shall be translated into social behaviour and action on the earth.

I repeat, then, that since the last third of the nineteenth century Spiritual Beings from the cosmos have been coming into our own sphere of existence. Their home is the sphere lying between the moon and Mercury, but they are already pressing forward into the realm of earth-existence and seeking to gain a foothold there. And they will be able to find it if human beings are imbued with the thought of their existence. This can also be expressed as I expressed it just now, by saying that our shadowy intellect must be quickened to life by the pictures of Spiritual Science. We are speaking of concrete fact when we say: Spiritual Beings are seeking to come down into earth-existence and ought to be willingly received. Catastrophe after catastrophe must ensue, and earthly life will fall at length into social chaos, if opposition is maintained in human existence to the advent of these Beings. They desire nothing else than to be the advance-guards of what will happen to earth-existence when the moon is once again united with the earth.

Today people may consider it comparatively harmless to elaborate only those automatic, lifeless thoughts which arise in connection with the mineral world and the mineral nature of plant, animal and man. Materialists revel in such thoughts which are—well—thoughts and nothing more. But try to imagine what will happen if men go on unfolding no other kinds of thoughts until the time is reached in the eighth millennium for the moon-existence to unite again with the earth. These Beings of whom I have spoken will gradually come down to the earth. Vulcan Beings, ‘Supermen’ of Vulcan, ‘Supermen’ of Venus, of Mercury, of the Sun, will unite with this earth-existence. But if human beings persist in nothing but opposition to them, earth-existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years.

It will be quite possible for the men of earth, if they so wish, to develop a more and more automatic form of intellect—but that can also happen amid conditions of barbarism. Full and complete manhood, however, cannot come to expression in such a form of intellect, and men will have no relationship to the Beings who would fain come towards them in earth-existence. And all those Beings of whom men have such an erroneous conception because the shadowy intellect can only grasp the mineral nature, the crudely material nature in the minerals, plants and animals, nay even in the human kingdom itself—all these thoughts which have no reality will in a trice become substantial realities when the moon unites again with the earth. And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.

This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom. These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science. All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.

The earth will be surrounded—as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts—with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent. And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures. He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter.

This is a destiny that is very emphatically part of human evolution upon the earth, and it is quite well known today by many of those who try to hold humanity back from the knowledge of Spiritual Science. For there are men who are actually conscious allies of this process of the entanglement of earth-existence. We must no longer allow ourselves to be shocked by descriptions of this kind. Such facts are the background of what is often said today by people who out of old traditions still have some consciousness of these things and who then see fit to surround them with a veil of mystery. But it is not right any longer for the process of the earthly evolution of humanity to be veiled in mystery. However great the resistance, these things must be said, for, as I constantly repeat, the acceptance or rejection of spiritual-scientific knowledge is a grave matter for all mankind.

I have been speaking today of a matter upon which we cannot form a lukewarm judgment, for it is part and parcel of the very texture of cosmic existence. The issue at stake is whether human beings will resolve in the present epoch to make themselves worthy to receive what the good Spirits who want to unite with men are bringing down from the cosmos, or whether men intend to seek their future cosmic existence within the tangled, spider-brood of their own shadowy thoughts. It is not enough today to speak in abstract terms of the need for Spiritual Science. The only thing to do is actually to show how thoughts become realities. Dreadfully abstract theories are hurled at men today, such, for example, as “Thoughts become things,” or similar phrases. Abstract statements of this kind altogether fail to convey the full and concrete reality. And the concrete reality is that the intellectual thoughts evolved inwardly by men today will in time to come creep over the earth like a spider's web wherein human beings will be enmeshed, if they will not reach out to a world lying beyond and above their shadowy thoughts and concepts.

We must learn to take in deepest earnestness such matters as were indicated at the conclusion of my lectures on the nature of colours, when I said that the science of colour must be lifted out of the realm of abstract physics into a region where the creative fantasy and feeling of the artist who understands the real nature of colour go hand-in-hand with a perception of the world illumined by Spiritual Science. We have seen how the nature of colour can be understood, how that which modern physics, with its unimaginative charts, casts down into the Ahrimanic world, can be lifted into the sphere of art, so that there can be established a theory of colours—remote, it is true, from the tenets of modern science, but able to provide a true foundation for artistic creation, if man will only receive it into his being.

And there is another thought, too, that must be taken very seriously. What do we find today all over the civilised world? Young students go into the hospitals or to universities to study science, and the constitution of the human being is explained to them. By studying the corpse they learn about the bones and the rest of the organism. By a series of abstract thoughts they are supposed to be able to acquaint themselves with the nature of man's being. But in this way it is only possible to learn something about the mineral part of the human organism. With this kind of science we can only learn about the part of man's being which has a significance from the time of the separation of the moon until its return, when the shadowy thoughts of modern times will become spidery creatures having a concrete existence.

A form of knowledge must develop which produces quite a different conception of the being of man, and it can be developed only by raising science to the level of artistic perception. We shall realise then that science as it is today is capable of grasping only the mineral nature, whether in the mineral kingdom itself or in the kingdoms of plant, animal and man. Even when applied to the plant kingdom, science must become a form of art, and still more so in the case of the animal kingdom. To think that the form and structure of an animal can be understood by the means employed by anatomists and physiologists is nonsense. And so long as we fail to realise that it is nonsense, the shadowy intellect cannot be transformed into a living, spiritual comprehension of the world. What is taught to young students today in so abstract a form in the universities must be transformed and must lead to a really artistic conception of the world. For the world of Nature itself creates as an artist. And until we realise that Nature is a world of creative art which can be understood only through artistic feeling, no healing will come into our picture of the world.

In the torture-chambers of mediaeval castles, people were shut into what was called the ‘iron virgin,’ where they were slowly spiked with iron teeth. This was a physical and more tangible procedure than that to which students in our day have to submit when they are taught anatomy and physiology and are told that in this way they are acquiring knowledge of the nature of man—but fundamentally it is the same kind of procedure. All that can be understood of the nature of man by such methods derives from an attitude of mind which is not unlike the attitude of those who were not averse from applying tortures in the Middle Ages. Students learn about the human being as he is when he has been dismembered—they are taught only about the mineral structure in man, about that part of his being which will one day be woven into the network of spider-like creatures extending over the earth.

It is a hard destiny that power should lie in the hands of men who regard the truest thoughts as absurdities and who scorn the impulses that are most inwardly and intimately bound up with the well-being of human evolution, with the whole mission of humanity in the world. It is a tragic state of things and we dare not shut our eyes to it. For it is only by realising the depth of such a tragedy that men will be brought to the point of resolving, each in his own place, to help the shadowy intellect to admit the spiritual world that is coming down from above in order that this intellect may be made fit for the conditions of future times. It is not right for the shadowy intellect to be driven down into an order of existence lower than that of the plants, into the brood of spidery creatures that will spread over the earth. Man's being needs to have reached a higher level of existence when, in the eighth millennium, women will become barren and the moon will unite once again with the earth. The earthly must then remain behind, with man directing and controlling it from outside like an object which he need not carry over with him into cosmic existence. Man must so prepare himself that he need not be involved in what must inevitably develop upon the surface of the earth in this way.

From pre-earthly existence man has descended to this earthly life. His birth from woman began with the departure of the moon, but this physical form of birth is only a passing episode in the great sweep of cosmic evolution and will be replaced by another. It is the phase which was destined to bring to man the feeling and consciousness of freedom, the self-completeness of individuality and personality. It is a phase by no means to be undervalued. It was necessary in the whole cosmic process, but it must not remain forever unchanged. Man must not give way to the easy course of assuming the existence of an abstract God, but bring himself to look concretely at things that are connected with his evolution. For his being of soul-and-spirit can only be inwardly stimulated when he really understands the nature of the concrete realities connected with the great epoch towards which his successive earthly lives are leading him.

That is what a true Spiritual Science tells us today. The human will is threatened with being deprived of spiritual impulses and with becoming involved in the spidery web that will creep over the earth. There are men in existence who imagine that they will gain their ends by promoting their own spiritual development and leaving the rest of their fellow-beings in a state of ignorance. But the vast majority live in complete unawareness of the terrible destiny that awaits them if they lend themselves to what an ancient form of spiritual knowledge called the “sixteen paths to corruption.” For just as there are many ways in which the shadowy intellect may be directed to the impulses and knowledge coming from the spiritual world, so naturally there are many ways in which varieties of the shadowy intellect will be able to unite with the spider-beings who will spin their web over the earth in times to come. Intellect will then be objectivised in the very limbs and tentacles of these spidery creatures, who in all their wonderful inter-weavings and caduceus-like convolutions will present an amazing network of intricate forms.

It is only by developing an inner understanding for what is truly artistic that man will be able to understand the realm that is higher than mineral existence—that realm of which we see an expression in the actual shaping and form of the surfaces of things in the world.

Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was a most significant discovery. The pedants of his day regarded it as dilettantism, and the same opinion prevails today. But in Goethe, clarity of insight and intelligence was combined with a faculty of vision which perceived Nature herself as an active expression of artistic creation. In connection with the animal world, Goethe only reached the point of applying this principle of metamorphosis to the forms of the vertebras and cranial bones. But the process whereby the forms of a previous existence are transformed, whereby the body of the earlier life is transformed into the head of the subsequent life—it is only by an inner understanding of this wonderfully artistic transformation of the radial bones into the spherical that we can truly perceive the difference between the head and the rest of the human structure. Without this insight we cannot perceive the inner, organic connection between the head and the rest of the human body.

But this is a form of art which is at the same time science. Whenever science fails to become art, it degenerates into sophistry a form of knowledge that hurls mankind into calamity so far as his cosmic existence is concerned. We see, therefore, how a true Spiritual Science points to the necessity for artistic insight and perception. This faculty was already alive in Goethe's soul and comes to expression in his hymn in prose, entitled Nature, written about the year 1780, and beginning: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her ...” The ideas are woven together so wonderfully that the hymn is like the expression of a yearning to receive the Spirit from the cosmic All.

It can be said with truth that the development of the thoughts contained in Goethe's hymn to Nature would provide a dwelling-place for the Beings who would fain come down from the cosmos to the earth. But the barren conceptions of physiology and biology, the systematising of plant-life and the theories that were evolved during the nineteenth century—all the thoughts which, as I showed in the lectures on colour, have really nothing to do with the true nature of the plants—can awaken no real knowledge, nor can they get anywhere near the being of man. Hence the body of knowledge that is regarded today as science is essentially a product of Ahriman, leading man on towards earthly destruction and preventing him from entering the sphere which the Beings from beyond the earth have been trying to place within his reach since the last third of the nineteenth century.

To cultivate Spiritual Science is no abstract pursuit. To cultivate Spiritual Science means to open the doors to those influences from beyond the earth which have been seeking to come down to the earth since the last third of the nineteenth century. The cultivation of Spiritual Science is in very truth a cosmic event of which we ought to be fully conscious.

And so we survey the whole span of time from the separation until the return of the moon. The moon which, as we say, reflects the sunlight back to us, is in truth deeply connected with our existence. It separated itself from the earth in order that man might become a free being. But this period of time must be utilised by man in such a way that he does not prepare the material which, with the re-entry of the moon into the earth-sphere, would combine with the moon-substance to produce that new kingdom of which I have tried to give you a graphic picture.

Now and then there arises in human beings of our time a kind of foreboding of what will come about in the future. I do not know what meaning has been read into the chapter in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche writes of the ‘ugliest man’ in the ‘valley of death.’ It is a tragic and moving passage. Nietzsche, of course, had no concrete perception of the valley of death into which existence will be transformed when the spidery brood of which I have spoken spreads over the earth. Nevertheless, in the picture of this valley of death in Nietzsche's imagination there was a subconscious vision of the future, and within this valley of death he placed the figure of the ‘ugliest man.’ It was a kind of foreboding of what will happen if men continue to cultivate shadowy thoughts. For their destiny then will be that in hideous shape they will be caught up by the forces of the moon-existence as it comes down into the sphere of the earth and will become one with the brood of spidery creatures of which I have been speaking.

What purpose would be served by keeping these things secret today, as many people desire? To keep them secret would be to throw sand into the eyes of men. Much of what is spread over the world today under the name of spiritual teaching is nothing but a process of throwing sand into men's eyes so that no single event in history can be understood for what it really is. How many people realise today that events of fundamental and incisive importance are taking place? I have already spoken of these things. But how few are prepared really to enter into them! People prefer to shut their eyes to what is happening and to think that, after all, the events are not really of such great significance. Nevertheless, the signs of the times are unmistakable and must be understood.

This was what I wished to say in regard to the way in which the being of man upon the earth is connected with the cosmos.

• 1. Three lectures on Das Wesen der Farben, given at Dornach on May 6 – 8, 1921. Published in English as a book entitled “Colour” (new edition in preparation).