The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The information given in the 1914 course of lectures on life between death and rebirth¹ rounds out what I have been saying in preparation in the last few days and weeks. Today I particularly want to draw your attention to alternating states of life between death and rebirth, which are rather like the alternation between waking and sleeping we know during life between birth and death. Between birth and death we have the normal conscious awareness that makes us human beings only when awake. In sleep, conscious awareness is toned down; it is below the threshold of the waking state. It is at its dimmest level when we are fully asleep; we may perceive dream images which arise out of sleep and represent things remembered from life, or processes that take place in the organism. A similar change occurs during life between death and rebirth, except that everything is the other way round. Yesterday I spoke of the radically different way in which we experience life between death and rebirth. And this also applies to our states of conscious awareness.

Between death and rebirth we have experiences which show us the activities and will impulses of the I. This awareness of the I is essentially the norm when we are in the other world, just as the waking state is the norm here. We have seen that here on earth we have a physical body, ether body, astral body and I, whilst in the other world we have an I, a spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being, or at least the first beginnings of these. Between death and rebirth, therefore, the I is the lowest principle. Here, we are inwardly aware of our I when we are awake; there, the comparable level of consciousness gives awareness of the I in the activities and will impulses on which we look back, so they are like outside experiences; it is as if our actions shone back towards us from the earth.

This state changes into another. Here on earth we are able to speak of waking consciousness and sleep consciousness, with a subconscious state added on to our waking consciousness, as it were. Between death and rebirth we have the kind of consciousness I have just described and a kind of super consciousness, in which higher entities are conscious in us, or, we may say, higher entities fill our conscious mind.

When we are asleep on earth we go down to a kind of plant level of existence. Between death and rebirth we rise to a kind of Archangel consciousness, which is above our own level of consciousness. As I said, in the normal state we have the hierarchies behind us, as it were. In the state of super consciousness we literally move back towards them and live in them. We learn things from them that we would not otherwise know. If we were limited to the experiences of the I which shine out after us and at the same time are part of us, we would not gain experience of all the processes we shall need to build a new organism in our next life on earth. As it is, our normal state of consciousness alternates with a state where the knowledge of the Archangels and even the Archai enters into us; this then also comes to normal consciousness as a kind of memories, just as here on earth dreams come from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Between death and rebirth we thus have the form of consciousness I described yesterday and in between come super conscious states in which we gain knowledge from higher entities. This knowledge enables us to build exactly the kind of existence we shall need in our next life on earth.

You can see analogies between the life we have here between birth and death and the other life we live between death and rebirth. But we must also take note of the radical differences that exist between the two kinds of life. We shall gain a clearer picture if we also consider the element that mediates between the two, a higher principle that extends both to life on earth and to life between death and rebirth. As we go through life on earth we have, in the first place, the impressions we gain through the senses, and we have seen how impulses of will and activity become interwoven with them. For the moment, however, we need to consider the impressions of the outside world that are gained through the senses.

Try to visualize for a moment the sum total of sensory impressions you gain all the time you are awake in life on earth, with all the human senses involved in weaving a whole tapestry. We usually consider sensory impressions to be attached to objects. Thus objects and creatures present themselves in colours that impress the eye. Others produce sounds that impress the ear. Let us call to mind the whole world of sensory impressions and ask ourselves what they truly represent.

I have made it clear to you on more than one occasion that the fantastic world of moving atoms that physicists dream of is definitely not to be found behind our sensory impressions. No, behind the world we perceive with the senses lies something which is of the spirit. It is present in the world of the senses, though we are not directly aware of it when we have the tapestry before us in ordinary consciousness. In reality the tapestry presented to the senses contains the totality of all the spirits which in my Occult Science are collectively called the Spirits of Form. Anything which presents itself in space has form, and the coloured surface also gives objects form. In everything which we experience in space through the senses live the Spirits of Form, which in the Old Testament are called the Elohim.

We do, quite rightly, call the world that presents itself to the senses the world of phenomena.² This is only correct, however, in so far as at our ordinary level of consciousness we human beings perceive no more than these outer phenomena of the world. It is the “maya” of the Orient. But the moment our conscious mind wakes up and is able to perceive in images, this whole world of the senses is filled with, or, even better, transformed into, a world of flowing, moving images which also reveals the world of the Angels that is woven into it. This is also the world which inspires us when we are capable of Inspiration. It is then transformed into the world of Inspiration in which the Archangels are active. Later we also experience the world of Intuitions, when we advance from the world of the senses to the world of the Archai.

When we come to have the world of the Archai all around us, it will be possible to look back, with the help of this world, to the things we have gathered from higher hierarchies in earlier lives between death and rebirth. We then become aware of the spirits who are behind the Archai in this world. In the Bible they are called the Elohim, and in my Occult Science you’ll find them called “Spirits of Form”. Thus we are able to say that when we look out into the world through the senses, we are really looking into the world of the Spirits of Form (see table—world of the senses).

Having entered with heart and mind into the world of the senses, where we’d have to say that we move in the world of the Spirits of Form, let us now enter yet more deeply into the inner life, into a part of the inner world that is still closely bound up with the outside world, however, its function being to create an inner image of the outside world that we can bear in us as memory. In other words, we move on to the world of thought (see table).

In the first place this world of thoughts has image character. You’ll not feel the least temptation to consider the thoughts that are ordinarily alive in your conscious mind to be real. But there are hidden realities in that world, just as the realities of the Spirits of Form lie hidden in the world of the senses. In ordinary consciousness we have in the first place the fleeting inner thought forms we know so well. Again it is possible to find spiritual entities at work if we advance to higher knowledge through Imagination and Inspiration. These spiritual entities live in the phenomena that accompany the thoughts as they evolve in us.

You’ll remember what goes on in us when we are thinking; it has been described in earlier lectures. Processes are continually occurring that may be compared to the way salt dissolving in a glass of water disappears completely so that we can look right through the glass. If we let the water cool down a little it becomes cloudy and the salt slowly precipitates out. This kind of condensation process occurs when we think; it is a kind of mineralization. And the spiritual entities which are active in the element of thought are involved in this process of mineralization. We have always called them the Archai, powers of origin. We are therefore able to know that when we live in our thoughts, the Archai are with us, just as the Elohim, the Spirits of Form, are active in the processes of sensory perception.

The Spirits of Form can only be found in the outside world if we use imaginative perception. If we study that world in the normal state of consciousness we have today, we discover the “laws of nature”, which are abstractions. When we advance to imaginative perception we find not the abstract laws of nature which can be formulated as statements, but images, a life in images. These are not the kind of images of which I have spoken before, but images that cloud the images we gain when we behold the Elohim, condensing into them, as it were. There you have the Archai at work in the outside world. It is something we can observe in the outside world and also in the inner world.

At this point it may help to turn our attention not so much to the inner life but to one way in which life comes to outward expression. In our thoughts we relate to the outside world, with the secrets of that world revealed in our thoughts. Our thoughts are, however, part of the inner life. Yet they can be uttered and conveyed to others. Speech is one element in human life by which our thoughts are given outward expression.

Let us consider the world of speech. As I have said on a number of occasions, we do, of course, experience more of our world of speech than we do of the world of thought which flows into our speech. Will also enters into the element of thought, but this is something of which we have little awareness in ordinary consciousness. The human will does, however, flow strongly into our speaking, and this is something which can be realized in ordinary conscious awareness. Nevertheless, we know extraordinarily little about what really lives in our speech. In our present intellectual age, people perceive little more of what lives in speech sounds than some kind of signals referring to something else. The inner life of speech sounds has gone very much into the background in modern minds. All we can do is show the people of today that they can reflect on something which lives in the speech sounds and may be perceived to be a distinct, separate element in life.

Take a phrase like “wending our way”. The vowel sound in “wend” conveys a calmness as we proceed, with nothing to excite us. Compare this to “run” and you can feel the increased demand on your breathing in the vowel sound of this word, for your breathing goes faster when you run.³ There is a spiritual aspect to language, which has a genius of its own. Modern people are not much aware of the life in their language, but in earlier times, when people still had a real inner experience of sounds, the spirit was very much active and alive in language for them, and they were more conscious of this inner experience than of anything perceived with the senses or any part of the world of thought.

The Archangels live in the element of speech and language, just as the Archai live in our thoughts. This makes them the spirits who guide nations and who come into their own in the element of speech.

People are much more the product of their language than we think, just as they are also the product of their thoughts. Our human form comes entirely from the world around us, and we in turn pour form into the world around us through the will. Our life comes from the same region as our thoughts, which is the region of the Archai. The language we speak as members of a nation gives expression to physical qualities that limit us as human beings to a much greater degree than is the case with our thoughts. Thoughts are common to all humanity; languages differ. People are different when it comes to language; but as they belong to a large or small nation they nevertheless have their language in common with quite a number of other people.

When we go down to the level of the Angels—and this is something I have told you before—people relate to their Angels on an individual, one-to-one basis. This shows itself in two ways. Inwardly it does so when we give ourselves up to the inner life in such a way that we transcend it. In ordinary life a luciferic element may immediately come in, but still, we can transcend ourselves and have an objective inner experience by using our imagination. In many respects our imagination is as creative as language is, but it is individual; language is essentially based on an active imagination. People normally experience language only in an abstract way and are not aware of the genius of language spreading its wings. They also fail to notice that in their imagination—which becomes sheer fantasy if the luciferic element comes into it—an Angel passes through the life they have as individuals.

True poets or artists who have not grown cynical or superficial will know, of course, that a higher spiritual principle enters into them when they do creative work. This higher spiritual principle also takes us from one life to the next as our personal guardian spirit; it is our Angel. And it is certainly the thinking of our Angel which enters into our imagination when it is active in the regular way. Goethe made certain statements to indicate, without making much of it, that he was aware of an unconscious element coming in which was very real when he used his imagination.

If we do not go out of ourselves inwardly when awake but do so in sleep, entering the region where the imagination we use when awake has its roots, the principle which shows itself in our imagination when we are fully awake comes to expression at a more subconscious level in our dreams. Imagination can become sheer fantasy if a luciferic element enters into it, and in the same way our dreams may degenerate into all kinds of strange things, which we may even take for real, if influenced by ahrimanic elements. Dreams are essentially luciferic, but an ahrimanic element may enter into them. Yet when our dreams are “innocent”, as we may put it, and purely human, the Angel lives in them, the same Angel which is in us when we use our imagination and inwardly go beyond ourselves, as it were.

The world of language which is governed by the Archangel now dims down inwardly into a world that is halfway between feeling and thought: the world of ideas, or ideas with feeling quality (see table below). Imagination and dreaming dim down to become the world of feelings, and of the will element that lives in our feelings, so that we may also speak of feelings with will quality. Going further down from the Angel we come to the human I. Here we need to go out of ourselves much more intensely than we do when the Angel lives in us. This happens when we let our will impulses become actions in the outside world, as I said yesterday.

We are definitely out of ourselves when we dream, but only in mind and spirit. Nor do we go out of ourselves physically in our acts of will, but we set the physical body in motion, and the I actually has its basis in such will impulses. We are thus able to say: The will that lives in our actions leaves its mark on the outside world.

We have now gone all the way down to the physical world, where independent development comes only in acts of will. The I lives in the sum of all our actions, a sum that remains after death and on which we look back, as I have shown yesterday. Higher spiritual entities live in everything else in us—in our imagination and our dreams, in the world of speech and language, the world of thought and the contents of the senses. These higher entities are always in us. Thus we are able to look at everyday life and see how the human being relates to the cosmos.

Another way of coming close to the truths spiritual scientists are able to discover by using more highly developed faculties is the following. Take your own life in the physical world. You gain all kinds of impressions in this world and may even be able to remember them the next day. I am not saying that everybody remembers; for instance I am not sure if everybody who is sitting here tonight will be able to let the things heard in this lecture come alive in their minds tomorrow. Generally speaking, however, it is fair to say that the things we perceive around us with the senses live on in us as memories. To take us a step further, let me show this in a drawing.

The light-coloured lines are the world around us and the red line represents the human being. The world around us and anything we experience in it lives on in us as an inner world. In a sense this is quite an abstract experience to begin with, at least in so far as the outside world, which we experience merely in the way it presents itself on the outside, lives on in abstract inner experiences, thoughts and feelings which then give rise to will impulses. But we can certainly say—let us bring this to mind very exactly—that our inner life represents experiences gained between birth and death, or rather birth and the present moment.

Let us now turn our attention from those inner abstractions and images to our internal organs, which are physical and tangible—lung, heart, liver, and so on. We have these inside us as well. Out-and-out mystics will say that they are only interested in things of the soul and spirit, in the inner impressions they have of the world that surrounds them. Physical objects like those organs are far too lowly and unimportant to them. In saying so, they merely show how much they are caught up in materialism and fail to realize that seemingly material objects are in reality deeply spiritual. Our lungs and livers are just as spiritual as the inner experiences we have as a reflection of experiences gained in the outside world between birth and death. They may appear to be present as physical, material objects to our ordinary consciousness, but they are very much the fruits of the spirit.

As you sit quietly at home, the thought may come to mind: The human being has a physical body, ether body, astral body and I. This thought is something you have inside you. At one time it was something outside you.

You first came across it in a book, maybe, or in a lecture, that is, in the outside world—as in the drawing. You also have your lung, heart, liver, brain, and so on inside you, and they are in physical form. They, too, are the fruit of experiences. If we make a simple sketch of the human being and the various organs, the things inside are the outcome of everything we have lived through between death and rebirth—not their physical substance, of course, for that only comes with conception, birth, and so on, but their form and internal organization. You hear me talk, and this becomes an inner experience; in the same way your heart, lungs and liver are the outcome of experiences you had between death and rebirth. We are able to say: I have physical matter inside me that is organized in a particular way; this is the outcome of experiences I had between death and rebirth.

The soul qualities in me
are the fruit of experiences gained between birth and death.
The physical organization in me
is the fruit of my life between death and rebirth.

A materialist will of course say that all the organs in our bodies have been physically inherited from our ancestors, but he’d be utterly wrong. Physical substance is inherited, that is true, but the germ cell is not seen in its true light if it is considered in purely material terms. Fertilization is not a matter of the human individual being physically derived from the generations that went before, but of an empty space arising, with matter broken down in the human being and the whole universe built into the human being. Matter then pushes its way into the spiritual form; for lung, heart and liver are essentially spiritual forms. The organizing powers are, however, entirely shaped out of the whole universe, out of experience gained between death and rebirth. This is what we experience when our consciousness rises above the waking state and we come to the region of Archangels and Angels in the way I have described. Between death and rebirth human beings experience consciously, or rather in a state of super consciousness, the things which they then build into their organs.

Our organs are built in accord with our karma, which comes from our earlier lives on earth. It may seem that purely physical processes occur as generation succeeds generation, but in fact these are processes brought about by the whole universe.

The following is an analogy I tend to use when small-minded materialists come and say: “Do not speak to us of the whole universe being involved as a human being develops in the womb, and whatever you do, don’t take us out into the universe; kindly speak of the germ plasma continuing on through the generations.” We can deal with this by saying: Someone has a magnetic needle which points north and south. Someone else will come and say: “There are crazy physicists who say the whole earth is a magnet and the magnetic south pole of the earth is attracting this pole of the needle. But in fact the reasons for the magnetic needle pointing north and south lie in the needle itself. The earth has nothing to do with it!” This is more or less the kind of thing modern biologists are saying about the germ cell. They look only at the germ cell. But just as the whole earth is active in a magnetic needle, so the whole universe is active in the creation of the embryo. The part which the human being plays in this is, of course, at an unconscious level.

Seen in this light, the human individual is with the whole of his being connected with a material and a spiritual universe. We say: We make the outside world our inner world when we perceive it in ordinary conscious experience. Yesterday I said, from a certain point of view: When a human being goes through the gate of death, inner becomes outer, and outer becomes inner. Today I presented a different point of view to show that the way we have to approach anything that comes before birth, or conception, is to look for our inner physical life and the processes that prepare it in the outside world during life between death and rebirth: The outer becomes inner. Something we experience as spread out through the whole universe becomes deeply unconscious experience in our organs.

The nature of our internal organs is truly such that a whole cosmos is alive in them. If we merely consider those organs the way they are presented in ordinary anatomy and physiology, this is maya to a much higher degree than the maya we face in the world around us.

Looking into the world of the senses, I said, we can see as far as the Elohim. Looking down into the inner physical body, we have to go higher to find the reality that lives in us and creates our organs. You’ll remember that in my Occult Science higher entities are mentioned who are above the Spirits of Form. These do not only exist outside human beings but are also active inside them. We learn about them from the Archai when between death and rebirth we raise our level of consciousness to theirs and learn things from them which we then pour into our organization. We truly carry the world of the hierarchies through life in the way we are made inside. Today these things can be investigated. In older times people knew about them out of an instinctive clairvoyant consciousness. Those were the times when it was said that the human organism is a temple of the gods, and people sought to gain insight into the whole world by interpreting the inner human microcosm.

Isn’t it true that we know about the world which has been our own for as long as we have had conscious awareness here on earth from memory? We are able to reflect on everything we are able to recall from memory. We look inwards and find that the world we have known outside is inside ourselves, and we realize that the outside life has entered into the images we have inside us. Looking back in memory we understand again what we experienced before. Now if we look at our physical organization and understand it, we also understand the cosmic process. Our memories let us understand life’s experiences. Our whole human organization lets us understand the cosmic process, if we know how to look at it. And this is what anthroposophy is all about—to understand the human being in every way.

It means that anthroposophy is also cosmosophy, for just as we bring our life back to mind when we remember, so we bring the whole cosmic process, cosmosophy, to mind when we gain insight through anthroposophy. The two cannot be seen apart. Cosmosophy and anthroposophy belong together. The human being is to be found in the world, and the world in the human being.

This is also why it is not anthropomorphism to speak of human evolution in the same breath as evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on in my Occult Science. Cosmic evolution is something that is given, and human evolution is something that is given, for the further we penetrate the secrets of existence, the more do cosmos and human being come together; the more does it become apparent that the separation between cosmos and human being that exists for us on earth is mere maya. The human being belongs to the cosmos, and the cosmos to the human being, and each is to be found in the other.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a New Birth. Eight lectures given in Vienna in April 1914. English by A. Meuss. Bristol, Rudolf Steiner Press 1994.
• 2. “Phenomenon”, defined as “an immediate object of perception; something of which the senses or the mind take note directly”, derives from the Greek verb for “to shine, to appear”, which is also reflected in the German word for it—Erscheinung. Translator.
• 3. The two German words Rudolf Steiner was comparing were gehen and laufen. He went into considerable detail and this has been shortened. Translator.

To broaden the subject matter I have been presenting, let us start by looking back to a period of human evolution when the gaining of insight, as we know it today, was entirely different in character. We have spoken of this before, but a new light may be thrown on things that are already familiar because of the things that have been said in recent lectures.

Human perceptiveness has a completely different character today from the way it was in ancient Greek and Roman times. And the knowledge held in the Orient and in Africa before those times was of a completely different kind again than the insights that were so magnificently presented by the Greeks, made more abstract by the Romans and have in our day become more and more materialistic. At about the beginning of the 8th century BC the nature of human understanding became what essentially it still is today, though with modifications. Until now, we have more or less characterized the earlier way that went before it by saying: It was a kind of instinctive perception. Insight lived not in concepts but in images; these were not entirely like the dream images we see, yet they did not have the clear definition when they lived in human souls which they have in the modern world of concepts, but took more the form of images that passed through the conscious mind.

The contents were also different, relating more to the worlds in which human beings had their origin and in which they still lived, having separated only a little from them. During Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution, the human being was still wholly part of the rest of the world. And during earlier stages of Earth evolution, too, the human individual was not yet separate from the general content of the world but felt part of it. When people let go of the intellectual approach, where we use our brain to learn things, and do more or less as is done in certain oriental schools, where breathing processes are used to gain a kind of insight, a situation is created where the clean separation between self and world has disappeared. When people do yoga exercises, which belong to the past but can still be found today, they feel their individual nature to be reduced and subdued, so that they are like a breath in the world.

The nature of perceptiveness was like that in those earlier times, though people were also able to interpret their own inner physical body, in the way I spoke of yesterday, by using their image-based perception. Yesterday we considered how human beings take in the world around them today and retain it in ideas. This becomes an inner life out of which individuals are able to create an image of their world as it has been from birth to the present moment. The organs we have inside us—brain, lungs, liver—are content of the whole world. We can recall something we have experienced from memory and interpret its meaning, so that it lives in us as an idea. And in our internal organs we have the whole world inside us. Ancient wisdom consisted in interpreting the individual organs by relating them to the content of the whole world.

Essentially, the older kind of human understanding which existed until the 9th century BC was such that people gained insight into the content of the world by interpreting the internal physical and etheric nature of the human being. Of course, their view of those internal organs was different from that held by modern anatomists and physiologists. Every individual internal organ related to something in the outside world, yet the organ itself was experienced from inside. Thus the structure of the brain was seen in tremendous images and these in turn were related to the whole sphere of heaven, and people with this ancient way of understanding were able to gain an idea of the whole sphere of heaven, based on indications as to the structure of the brain gained through atavistic perception in images.

Essentially all the ancient wisdom about the world has come from such interpretations of the inner human being. It is not really possible, however, to say that the knowledge and understanding of those times was truly human by nature. True human understanding, which of course is not at all the dry, purely intellectual knowledge people often think it to be, is, after all, unthinkable without intelligence. The wisdom of old, however, was entirely without intelligence produced by human beings, and we cannot really call it “human” understanding. Human beings merely had part in the understanding which other entities had inside them. These were spirits belonging to the hierarchy of the Angels. An Angel would ensoul a human being and the old form of wisdom was really that of the Angel. The human individual merely had part in it by looking into the inner life of the Angel, as it were. This is also why people who had that ancient wisdom were rather vague as to how they got it. They simply said to themselves that it was something which was given to them, for it was the Angel who created insight in them; as they were unable to do this themselves.

Those were not the normal angelic spirits who accompany human beings through several lives on earth. They had luciferic character, for their disposition had remained at the earlier, moon level of development. Thus we are able to say that the ancient wisdom arose when spirits who should have gone through their normal human stage of development on the ancient moon let their soul powers enter into and ensoul human beings, and people would have part in the Angel’s experiences inside them, gaining an extraordinarily sublime insight in this way. The wisdom given to the angelic beings during the moon evolution was at a high level of perfection, but it was not really something which people could put to any real use on earth. People acted more or less out of instinct on earth, we might say they acted like a higher kind of animal. And into this creature shone the sublime wisdom which began to fade away towards the 8th century BC.

This wisdom—definitely luciferic the way it is presented above—really related only to anything that showed the human being to be a citizen of other worlds. With regard to their perceptions, therefore, human beings had not yet really come to earth. They felt themselves to be in higher spheres in their wisdom, and their actions on earth were instinctive.

There followed the development that goes hand in hand with the intellectual or mind soul. Human beings began to let the mind be active in them and evolve concepts. Greek civilization still had the angelic wisdom of earlier times but worked it through with human concepts. Plato’s⁴ wisdom makes such an impression on us because he was subjectively evolving concepts and ideas, but the old instinctive wisdom still shone into the process. His writings therefore are a marvellous combination of the highest wisdom and a way of thinking that was human and individual. Considering Plato’s mind and spirit it would be impossible to imagine him writing his philosophical works in a form other than that of dialogues, for the simple reason that he was definitely aware of a wisdom that had only been an indefinite feeling to earlier people. They would say: The wisdom simply exists; it comes to me and radiates into me. Plato found himself in a form of dialogue with the entity that brought wisdom into him. Experiencing this wisdom in dialogue he also preferred to express it through dialogue.

Soon, however, conceptual thinking became more prevalent. Aristotle⁵ already presented his knowledge in a complex of theories.

As the fourth post-Atlantean age progressed, a civilizatory element gained influence that may be described as follows: People felt that an ancient wisdom had filled human souls in times past. They felt that superhuman entities had come down and brought this wisdom to humanity. But they were also aware that this wisdom was becoming more abstract. They could not longer grasp it; it eluded them.

Roman civilization is characterized by a mind that made everything abstract. The Romans evolved a dry, abstract way of thinking that did not perceive in images and wanted to live only in the forms of the mind. With the Greeks we still feel that the figures of their gods, that is, the elemental principles in the world of nature, had an inner life. The Roman gods were stiff, abstract concepts. Logic gained the upper hand over the imaginative thinking that had still been widespread in ancient Greece. Anything the Romans still had by way of imagination actually came from Greece. The Romans introduced the prosaic, logical thinking that was later to give the Latin language the logical quality that was to govern civilization for ages to come.

One thing continued on, however—in a more living way through Greek culture and a slightly more dead way through Roman culture, into the Christian era and right into the Middle Ages—and that was the tradition of the ancient wisdom. This has persisted more than people are inclined to think today. The world that presented itself to the senses could not be immediately grasped with the mind, but people sought to grasp the traditional element in this way. The result was that an element which before had been luciferic, inwardly enlivening, gained an ahrimanic character that was also outwardly apparent, as a mask. In reality this is a luciferic element which continues by tradition. Romanism continued through the centuries; a strong Germanic element came into it, but the tradition survived and it was essentially luciferic. Its original character was lost because it streamed down into the realm of thought and became formulated in thoughts. We may say that in the Latin language, a luciferic element lives on in an ahrimanic way.

This luciferic element was still very much alive in Greek art. It then became more or less rigid and it is interesting to see how it extended into theology, which had to do with other worlds, yet had no real access to those worlds; all it had was the tradition. A spiritual stream that was essentially luciferic thus brought the ancient perception of other worlds into theology.

The Christian faith also got caught up in the meshes of this theology; it became theology. The language of Rome was made logical, the Christian faith theological. The true life of Christianity was submerged in a luciferic element that bore an ahrimanic mask. The personal and individual element was always there, but it was more instinctive. It was not able to unite fully with the element which came from above. It is particularly interesting to observe this when it was at its most striking, during the Renaissance. There we see a highly developed theology with concepts and ideas of other worlds but no perception. Everything took the form of tradition during the Renaissance. Romanism had preserved the original, ancient wisdom in a theology that had brought it down into the realm of ideas, where it lived on as a luciferic element. Those theologizing elements are still marvellously apparent in Raphael’s wall paintings in Rome, the Disputa, for instance.⁶ Profound wisdom, more or less living on in words, no longer offering perception, but holding true wisdom for those who are able to connect it with perception. We also admire the theology in Dante’s Divine Comedy,⁷ though we know that whilst Dante gained some of the old true perception—thanks to his teacher Brunetto Latini,⁸ as I have shown on another occasion⁹—most of the work represents the traditional, theologizing approach with a strong luciferic element in it. We can also see that the entities which brought the ancient wisdom into the theologizing element also brought the essence of Greek art into the art of the Renaissance, a Greek art that originally had soul quality before and had become more rigid, but still came down through tradition. Goethe¹⁰ was therefore able to perceive the resurrection of Greek art in the art of the Renaissance.

It has to be said that there is a powerful luciferic element in the theology and in the art that have come to us from the past. To be artistic, this art must look for elements that belong to other worlds, and it is not able to descend fully to the human level. Where it does so, it seems to us to have made a sudden leap down to the level of instinct. Looking at Renaissance life, we see that people had ideas of heaven—no vision any more—and were able to bring those ideas to life in their art in a truly marvellous way. Beneath this, however, we see Renaissance life deteriorate to the level of instincts. World history presents magnificent but sometimes also horrific scenes where Pope Alexander VI, for instance, or Leo X, are on the one hand great scholars, having ideas of the most sublime aspects of other worlds, yet on the other hand are unable, as Renaissance people, to let their personal life rise to that level, letting it degenerate to the life of instincts. It is a terrible thing to see those individuals develop a kind of higher animal life on the one hand, and spreading above this a heaven that is luciferic by nature, a heaven presented to human minds in a theology that is truly wonderful and at the same time also entirely luciferic.

With this, we are coming to an age when powers other than those older angelic spirits became involved in human evolution.

Humanity is halfway between the world of the angels and that of the animals. In past ages the human form was quite animal-like, but ensouled with the element I have just described. Without a clue as to the reality of this situation, modern geologists and palaeontologists are turning up ancient human remains that show receding foreheads and animal-like human forms and believe this shows that humans are related to animals. This is quite right if one considers only the outer physical form, but the more animal-like those forms become as we go back in time, the more are they ensouled with original wisdom. If all that modern geologists and palaeontologists are able to say about the remains dug up in some parts of Europe a few years ago is that these were human beings with low skulls, receding foreheads, prominent brows and eye-sockets, anyone who knows the true situation has to say: This human being, who may look animal-like today and to palaeontologists who see only the outer appearance may appear to have evolved from apes, was fully ensouled with an ancient, original wisdom. Another spiritual entity had that wisdom in the human being who merely had a share in it. In the past, therefore, human beings held within them a superhuman principle. They grew increasingly towards this as they evolved out of animal-like forms, finally to become a kind of super-animal which included all the different animal forms. This super-animal offered conditions where an ahrimanic entity that was very different from the usual angelic spirits was able to enter. The human being who combines intellectual thinking with an animal-like organization came to the fore at the time when the wisdom of old was fading and becoming tradition. From the 8th century BC, human evolution took a course, slowly at first, but progressively, where a kind of ahrimanic super-animal nature developed from inside which then also entered the human soul from the other side.

The spirit which meets with the luciferic spirit in the human being, as it were, may be said to be another one who sought to deflect human beings from the true path. The luciferic spirits may be said to be spirits of ire in the human soul who do not intend human beings to be glad to be on earth but draw them away from the earth, over and over again, always wanting to draw them up towards the superhuman. They want him to be an angel who does not have anything to do with the lower functions of the physical organism. It angers the luciferic spirits to see people walk the earth on their two feet who are connected to the earth through their lower functions. They want to strip all animal nature away from people. Today, at the present stage of human evolution, for example, they do not want to let individuals come to physical incarnation; they want to keep them up above in the life that passes between death and a new birth.

The ahrimanic spirits, on the other hand, may be called spirits of pain and suffering. They seek to achieve the human form for themselves but are unable to do so. Essentially these ahrimanic spirits suffer terrible pain. It is as if an animal were to feel dimly: You ought to come upright and be a human being—as if it wanted to tear itself apart inwardly. That is the terrible pain experienced by the ahrimanic spirits. It can only be relieved by approaching human beings and taking hold of their minds. This will cool the pain. These spirits therefore get their teeth into the human mind, digging their claws into it, boring themselves into it.¹¹ Ahrimanic nature involves something that is like painfully letting the human mind enter into you. Ahrimanic spirits want to unite with human beings so that they may come to their senses, as it were.

Thus the human being is the battle ground for luciferic and ahrimanic elements. It would be fair to say that the luciferic element is involved in anything to do with the arts and with abstract theology. The ahrimanic element is like something coming up from the world of matter that has gone through the animal world and painfully seeks to achieve human status, taking hold of the human mind; it is repulsed by the part of the human being that is higher than human nature; again and again it is thrown back, though it wishes to take the human mind for itself. Again and again this element wants to enter into human beings and make them go by the intellect alone, preventing them from developing the higher faculties of Imagination and Inspiration, seeking to keep humanity at their level, so as to ease their own pain.

Everything which has developed during the more recent ahrimanic age by way of materialistic science, a science that comes from the burning pain of material existence that is cooled in the human being, is ahrimanic by nature. We see this materialistic science arise as human beings evolve it. When people give their inner life to this science, Ahriman unites with them through it. Lucifer has a hand above all in the sphere of the arts; Ahriman has a hand in the development of mechanics, technology, anything that seeks to take the human intellect away from people and put it into machine tools and also the machinery of government. This alone has made the developments possible which have arisen mainly from the time of the Renaissance onwards. We might say that luciferic activity came to a kind of dead end during the Renaissance and that ahrimanic activity then took over. We can see how everything since then has gone in the direction of mechanization, and a science divorced from the realm of the spirit.

If the industrial technology and materialistic science which has evolved from Renaissance times and is entirely ahrimanic by nature is allowed to spread without there being any understanding of Christ, it will bind human beings to the earth and prevent them from reaching the Jupiter stage. Yet if we bring understanding of Christ, a new life of the spirit, and Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to what at present is mere discovery of the physical world, we will redeem ahrimanic nature. This redemption can be presented in images, as I have done in many different ways in my Mystery Plays. Humanity will however be overcome by Ahriman unless understanding of Christ, an understanding that is truly of the spirit and free from all theology, is able to develop. Materialistic science and industrial technology would condemn humanity to earthly death, that is, they would craft a completely different world in which human beings live on as a kind of petrified fossils for the edification of ahrimanic spirits, and this will happen unless spiritual understanding of Christ spreads through the mechanization of our age.

We are thus able to say that Lucifer has a hand in all traditional theology, all art that is stiff and mannered, anything by way of renaissance; Ahriman has a hand in all materialistic science divorced from the realm of the spirit and unable to find the spirit in the world of nature, and in all aspects of human activity that are mechanical and without inwardness. The luciferic angelic spirits who have survived till today on the basis of tradition are only interested in keeping people from actually doing anything at all. They want to keep them confined to the inner life. Human beings have become individuals, but these angelic spirits do not want human actions to flow out into life and activity, into a manifestation of human will impulses. They want to keep people in an introspective frame of mind, to look rather than take action, to be mystics and follow the wrong kind of theosophy. They like people to sit musing all day, pursuing a thread through all kinds of riddles of the world and unwilling to apply the things they have in mind to the real world outside. They want detached observation to lead to a science of the outside world. They are good at creating a science like the one of Father Secchi,¹² who was an excellent astrophysicist, being able to make observations using the microscope and telescope and record them, and who also had something that did not relate to this at all, a sublime wisdom greater than the wisdom of this earth and of the human mind that had been given to him by luciferic spirits. The luciferic spirits nurture this wisdom and in doing so tear the human soul and spirit away from earth existence. And however great our materialistic science may be, it comes to nothing, for it has no inner reality of the spirit. This is of no interest to the luciferic spirits.

These spirits also want art to be as lifeless and devoid of spirit as possible, so that no spirit may enter into the forms created. They want nothing but the revival of things that existed in the past. They make people hate any kind of new style that may truly arise out of the present day. They want to reproduce the old styles because they come from a time when things could still be taken from unearthly realms.

On the other hand it is ahrimanic nature not to let a style or anything of a spiritual nature develop but rather to create utterly prosaic, purpose-designed buildings, mechanize everything and let it serve industry, letting people attach no value to hand-made arts and crafts and merely produce models which machines can reproduce in endless numbers. In the same way Ahriman can manifest in an infinite number of examples in many human beings through the mystery of numbers.

The human beings of today are caught in the midst of this battle. They need to realize that anthroposophy enables them to find and perceive the spirit and is therefore the true gift of Christ. Holding on to this they can keep the balance between luciferic and ahrimanic elements and thus find their way. They have to fight the ahrimanic spirit, for otherwise they must fall to the luciferic spirit. It is important, however, to be watchful when they give themselves up to the streams of Ahriman, lest they fall into a world that is entirely mechanized. The luciferic spirits want to prevent human beings from taking action; they want to make them mystics, given up to thought, who will gradually cease to take an interest in life on earth and can in this way be made remote from this life. The ahrimanic spirits want to keep human beings very much to life on earth. They want to mechanize everything, that is, take it down to the level of the mineral world. If they succeeded they would reshape the world to suit themselves and prevent it from reaching the Jupiter stage. On the other hand they do not want to deprive people of the opportunity to act; on the contrary, they want them to be as active as possible, except that it should all be routine and according to programme. Ahriman is a real programme enthusiast. It is he who inspires people to have endless statutes. He is really in his element if he finds a committee busily engaged in setting up statutes: Paragraph one, two and three—in the first place this is to be done, in the second place something else, in the third place one member has those particular rights, and in the fourth place another member is to do one thing or another. Of course, the members will never think of respecting those rights and may well refuse to do what it says in the statutes. That is not the point, however. Once the statutes exist, it is a matter of acting in the spirit of Ahriman, always pointing to paragraph number such and such.

Ahriman wants people to be active, but within the system, with everything firmly laid down in paragraphs. People should really find a list of things to be done on their pillow when they wake up in the morning and carry it all out mechanically, thinking only with their legs, as it were and not their heads. Lucifer wants them to use their heads and pour their hearts into their heads; Ahriman seeks to make people think only with their legs, pour everything into the legs.

People are caught up in the battle. I am trying to give you a picture of something which essentially is already part of our culture. We see people whose idea of perfection is to sit on folded legs like a Buddha figure and introspectively rise to sublime levels, not using their legs at all, but their heads swelling as they enter into mysterious depths. In the Western world we see others who hardly know how to get more quickly from one office to another, from business to business on their legs, so that we get the impression that it is really quite unnecessary for them to carry a head on their shoulders, for essentially their heads are not involved in their doings. Those are the two extremes in our time—solitary figures sitting thinking with eyes closed so that they may not even see what they themselves are doing, and others who actually don’t need eyes, for they have strings that pull their legs, and at the other end of those strings are the different paragraphs, with people pulled along as if they were part of a mechanism.

Occasionally we see modern people rebel against the ahrimanic trend and complain of the bureaucracy, which is of course entirely ahrimanic, against standardization in education, and so on. But as a rule all that happens is that they slide even deeper into the situation from which they want to escape.

The only thing to take us out of it all it to direct the whole of our minds and hearts to the search for the spirit, to an understanding that brings true spirituality to our thinking, with the true spirit taking hold of the whole human being and not merely the head. This will overcome the ahrimanic element and in so doing redeem it. We are not saying anything against ahrimanic nature, nor against all the situations where keeping of records and making of statutes and paragraphs have their rightful place. But the spirit must enter into it all.

We cannot really avoid using the ahrimanic skills in the present age—taking shorthand, for instance, and using a typewriter. These are highly ahrimanic elements in our civilization. But we can also bring the spirit into it, and in this way raise such ahrimanic influences as stenography and typewriting into the sphere of the spirit, redeeming Ahriman in the process. It is only possible to do this if we bring the life of the spirit fully to mind. People who live as materialists today, using stenography and typewriters, get deeply caught up in the ahrimanic element. You see, it is not my purpose to preach reaction against these things; the demonic world that has come on us is not to be given a bad name; but the demons themselves need to be redeemed.

This may certainly also show itself in individual instances. Basically we may say that the ahrimanic elements which have entered into our civilization in more recent times really only pursue their ahrimanic skills because they are inclined that way. The things they write in shorthand or on typewriters might just as well stay unwritten. We usually know all about it and there is no need to put it down on paper. The content does not matter, for only the ahrimanic skill has some significance. Yet it will be good to have the things that are coming up in the science of the spirit laid down exactly, for it is necessary to express ourselves in a careful, accurate way. And in this respect the ahrimanic element will be able to serve the realm of the spirit well.

It will be of special importance that the modern science of the spirit enters fully into the different human sciences and advances them from natural sciences devoid of spirit to a truly consistent science of the spirit, with the individual sciences as chapters in a unified science of the spirit. This will deahrimanize them, and if details are handled in the right way we gradually come into the stream that I had to present to you today, developing it out of the polarity between the luciferic and ahrimanic elements.

Please do not think it is irrelevant to go into detail the way I have done today. It is good to enter into this to some extent, using the kind of images I have used today, with today’s luciferic individual sitting on crossed legs, and ahrimanic people who rush from office to office, a finger in every pie, and who really don’t need to use their heads to keep their busy lives going.

You may feel more comfortable if abstract ideas are presented to you rather than concrete images, but the modern, anthroposophical science of the spirit must relate directly to life and indeed call a spade a spade. This, after all, is the only way to develop sound, proper ideas and the right inner attitude.

This is what I wanted to add today. The next time we’ll try and use a different approach to the nature of the human being.

• 4. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC), Athenian philosopher.
• 5. Aristotle (384–322 BC), Greek philosopher, scientist and physician.
• 6. Raphael, or Raffaello Santi or Sanzio (1483–1520), Italian painter.
• 7. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), greatest Italian poet.
• 8. Brunette Latini (c. 1210–c. 1295), Florentine statesman, scholar and poet.
• 9. published in How can Mankind Find the Christ Again? (GA 187) Tr. F.E. Dawson, G. Hahn, O. D. Wannamaker. London: Rudolf Steiner Press.
• 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and statesman.
• 11. Phrase coined by Steiner
• 12. Father Angelo Secchi (1818–1878) Italian astronomer trained as a Jesuit, Professor of Physics, Washington, USA, and from 1849 director of the observatory at the Coliegio Romano.

Today, we’ll consider the human form and we shall see how much this will add to our subject matter and deepen it. The first thing to remember is that taken in its widest sense, the human form is of course connected with the whole of human life, and this is what we have to consider if we want to gain real inner understanding of it. Human beings are part of the whole universe, the cosmos. If you take it that the form of the human head primarily reflects the sphere of the cosmic universe, you may say that with regard to the head, human beings relate to the whole universe. However, to understand how human beings relate to this when at the same time they are also an entity that is complete in itself, we have to consider the way human beings relate to the world around them.

Let us begin by saying that in all their thinking, in so far as it is connected with the head, human beings turn to the whole cosmos. When at birth we bring the head into this physical world from the world of the spirit, we are encased in a living physical body and in a way able to look back to our inner reality of soul and spirit, and to a time when we were not encased in a body. It may be easiest to see what I mean if we consider how human beings gain insight and knowledge by looking back inside themselves, as it were. We are looking back inside ourselves, for instance, when we do arithmetic or geometry. We recognize the laws of geometry simply because we are human beings and are able to find the laws of physical space in ourselves. We also know that these laws fill the whole universe. This, then, is something we inevitably see when we use our eyes; everything is arranged in geometrical order; even the design of our eyes, and the way we are able to focus, is based on geometry.

Thus we are able to say that when we relate to the world through thinking, which is connected with the head, we take back into ourselves what lies spread out in the universe. One way we relate to the universe may therefore be seen as follows: The universe is reaching into us, and we are, in a way, looking back on it. This would be the way in which human beings relate to the universe, out of which they have been built, at the most superficial level.

We progress a little more if we now consider, in second place, how human beings make everything they take in from outside come alive in them. You see, when a child is born everything it went through between death and rebirth is inside it. If the child were able to develop the right kind of awareness, it would be able to look back on life before birth. Those pre-birth experiences then begin to stir. Human beings do not merely look back inside themselves to find the universe, but also look around them and see their environment. We are thus able to say: Apart from taking in the universe, we also look out into the universe around us, taking its mobility into us. We become inwardly mobile.

Now to the third aspect: In the first two, human beings are not really quite inside themselves. Having the universe inside us, say as geometry, we live in something that is really outside us. When the child begins to be inwardly mobile as it imitates the movements of the universe, it lives in something that is outside it. How does the human being become inward and become aware of self?

Just take your left hand in your right hand, thoughtfully—all you have to do is take hold of yourself and you remain entirely inside yourself. You are using your right hand for an activity, but it is you yourself you take hold of. You may take hold of other objects at other times, but in this case you take hold of yourself. All self-awareness, all inwardness, essentially is a matter of thus taking hold of oneself. We do something similar with our eyes. When we focus on a particular point, the right visual axis intersects with the left visual axis, just as the right hand takes hold of the left. Animals have less inwardness because they do much less of this taking hold of self. The third thing, therefore, would be experiencing or touching ourselves. There we are actually in the outside world and take hold of ourselves, and we are not yet inside our skin.

Let us now consider the boundary between outside and inside. We indicate the process by letting the right hand move to and fro over the left hand which it is holding. This defines a surface area we actually have all over, the covering which encloses everything inside. The fourth thing, then, is to enclose oneself. Get a real feeling for the way the skin encloses your form, and there you have the closing-off principle.

1. The universe reaching in. Looking back
2. Looking out into the universe. Taking in the mobility of the universe
3. Experiencing self, touching self
4. Enclosing ourselves.

These four things show how the human being is gradually given form from outside in. First there is the whole universe and we are outside ourselves; then imitation of the universe, where we have not yet come to ourselves. Taking hold of ourselves we find ourselves outside ourselves. With the fourth element we enclose ourselves.

For the fifth we have to look for something that is inside us, fills us, actively pulses inside us.

As to the sixth, since we not only have a skin but also something that fills it we are now inside ourselves, but this is also where the form is dissolved again; we have something that not merely fills us inside, but makes us like a fruit when it grows ripe. Take a fruit when it is just on the point of being ripe; once it goes beyond this point it starts to dry up. The sixth thing, then, is ripening.

But visualize this ripening process. As we grow ripe we begin, in a way, to decay inwardly. We cease a little bit to develop further as human beings. We are human but we decay inwardly, turning to dust, as it were. We become mineral and thus part of the outside world again. That which fills us is wholly inside. But as we fall to dust we become part of the mineral world again. We become a body that has weight, as it were. The seventh thing, then, is to become part of the inorganic world.

I have shown, on another occasion, that if we weigh a human being who walks this earth, that human being is just like a mineral. There we have the process of becoming part of the forces of outer nature. Just think—if you walk properly you involve yourself in the forces of physical nature, and if you do not walk properly you fall over. The first step in finding our place in the outside world is therefore to find our balance.

The eighth thing: We find that we do not merely become part of the outside world but also take it into ourselves as we breathe and when we eat. Before, we essentially only fathomed things that were already inside ourselves; it is a matter of being alive inside. But we take the outside world into ourselves, and at this point it has to be clearly understood that everything we take in from outside is something that does not really belong inside us.

People have the wrong idea about the way we take in things from outside. In principle, everything we eat is a little bit poisonous. Life consists in taking in food and not letting it become entirely part of ourselves, resisting it. This resistance, defending ourselves, is in fact life. The point is, however, that the foods we eat are not very poisonous so that we are able to hold our own against them. If we take in real poison it will destroy us, for we’ll not be able to defend ourselves.

Thus we may say: With the outside world, a poison sting enters into us. I have to use words that have real meaning, but today’s language and understanding does not have them. You’ll have to understand what I mean when I put these things before you.

5. Something that fills us
6. Ripening
7. Becoming part of the inorganic world. Finding our balance
8. Poison sting.

The human being is now at the point where the outside world is taken in. First we considered the way the human being is given form out of the universe. Then came the way the human being is given form from inside, and this has taken us to where the inner human being gains form by resisting the outside world.

But human beings create their form, or at least shape their lives and a little bit also their actual human form, according to the way they relate to, and are active in, the outside world. Today our activities no longer relate entirely to our human nature; we have to go back to earlier times to see human beings relating to the world around them in a way that makes them act in a truly human way. We are then able to say that in the ninth place, one human activity is to involve oneself in the outside world here on earth, and not in the universe. In their outside life in civilization people were first of all hunters.

They progressed by developing another activity—breeding of animals. That is the tenth stage, and the eleventh stage of perfection is to be a tiller of the soil. Finally the twelfth stage is to be involved in trade. - You’ll see later why I do not include other activities that followed. They were secondary. Hunting, animal breeding, tilling the soil and trading are the primary human activities.—This, then, defines the human form in relation to the earth:

9. Hunter
10. Animal breeder
11. Tiller of the soil
12. Trader

We might also show this in a drawing. Let us say this is the earth, and here we have the human being on earth. With regard to the first four form principles, form is given from outside, from the cosmos surrounding the earth (Fig. 9, left). Let us leave the middle principle aside for the moment and consider where the human being is formed by the earth to be hunter, animal breeder; here the opposite would be the case. Here the constellations influence the human being; but the influence of the constellations which are down there has to pass through the earth to reach the human being. This would mean that the human being would have to take his orientation from the earth where these stars are concerned. And the four middle principles would give human beings the potential to develop inwardly.

Thus these four principles (Table below) take us out into the universe; the last four take us to the earth, with the stars involved covered by the earth. In the four middle principles, stars and earth are in balance, and we have human beings with an inner life.

People had a feeling for this in the past. They would say: One part of the starry heavens influences human beings by forming them from outside, out of the universe. Different stars had to be seen in that role through the ages, of course, for the constellations change. But let us take, broadly speaking, the age in which we live. An ancient Greek who had given some thought to these things would say: The stars that are in the region of the Ram are acting on us from outside, and so do those in the region of the Bull, the Twins and Cancer. Through them human beings have the principle in them that looks back, the one that is inwardly mobile, the one that takes hold of itself and the one that encloses itself. To the stars down there on the opposite side, which are covered by the earth, human beings owe their existence as hunters (Archer), animal breeders (Goat), tillers of the soil—walking across the field carrying urns to water the fields (Water Carrier), and we are traders thanks to the part of the starry heavens that takes us across the seas—in far distant times boats were built to look similar to fish, and two ships side by side that have sailed the seas in pursuit of trade are the symbol for trade. If we take the liberty and call the ships “fishes” we have the twelfth sign.

The human being formed out of the universe—head

1. Taking in the universe. Looking back—Ram
2. Looking out into the universe. Taking in the mobility of the universe—Bull
3. Taking hold of ourselves (touch)—Twins
4. Enclosing ourselves—Crab, Cancer

The human being formed from within—chest

5. That which fills—Lion
6. Ripening with ear of corn—Virgin
7. Becoming part of the inorganic world. Seeking balance—Scales
8. Poison sting Scorpion

Forms of Human activity on earth—limbs or earthly human being

9. Hunter—Archer
10. Animal breeder—Goat
11. Tiller of the soil—Water Carrier
12. Trader—Fishes

In the middle we have that which fills, that is, something which acts like the blood that fills human beings. The best animal to symbolize the blood is probably the Lion, because there we have the activity of the heart at its highest. Ripening—we only need to look at a field where the wheat or rye is getting ripe; the ear of com is exactly the stage at which fruiting becomes ripening—so we have the Virgin with the ear of corn, and it is the ear of com that matters. Human beings become part of the outside world again in seeking balance—Scales. And where we feel the poison sting, and feel that everything is slightly poisonous—Scorpion.

In the past, people really had a feeling for the way the human being is connected with the universe and the earth. In our time people say: Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion ... and draw those figures, but they no longer have any real idea as to their meaning.

It is important to see these things in the right way. If you look at an old illustration of the Ram, you’ll realize that it is not a naturalistic, materialistic image of a ram. The important characteristic is, again and again, the gesture of looking back. The way the Ram looks back is the way the human being looks back on himself as he looks back to the universe that lives in him. It is the gesture that counts.

If you look at old pictures of the Bull you’ll find that the Bull always looks sideways and makes a leap. It is the gesture of looking around you and letting the general, universal principle come alive in you. Looking at the Twins you have one person on the right and another on the left, and always the right hand of the one on the right holds the left hand of the one on the left. This is the gesture of touching, feeling oneself. Two individual persons are shown in order to indicate that in a way the human being is still outside himself, and takes his pre-birth human being into himself by touching himself.

Closing off, enclosing oneself—Crab. The people who chose the Crab as the symbol for this enclosing gesture did so because the crab puts its claws around its prey. The word “cancer” actually still holds the meaning of enclose. The Crab is the symbol of the individual closing himself off, not merely touching and feeling himself but closing himself off from the outside and creating an inside.

The Lion is the animal of the heart, for the obvious reason that its heart is particularly well developed. It represents the qualities that come in fifth place.

With the quality of ripening, it is the ear of corn the Virgin holds that represents the fruiting quality when it is just on the point of drying up. The Scales show the search for balance, and the Scorpion is of course the poison sting. The Archer is really an animal form, the front part of which is a human figure with bow and arrow, like a Centaur astride an animal body. This is the hunter.

Capricorn, the he-goat, is really a goat with a fish’s tail, something which does not exist in the natural world. But human beings breed animals and thus make them as tame as tame fish. This, then, is a made-up symbol.

Agriculture is represented by the Water Carrier. There is a certain spiritual justification for thinking in terms of water, but what matters is the way he walks across the field. He holds an urn in each hand and pours water from these. This is the gardener and the tiller of the soil.

I have already suggested that the Fishes represent trade. People used to have fishes' heads up on the front part of their ships, heads of dolphins, for instance—dolphins are not fish, of course, but the ancients thought them to be. This symbol clearly points to trading activity.

Rather than consider these things in a superficial, schematic way, which is so often the case today, we have to look at the way the human being is given form and then see how this gives us the relationship to the universe and to the earth. Basing ourselves on the form, we gradually perceive the human being as part, as a member, of the whole universe. Another approach is the following. Let us take the Ram, for instance. Considering Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes from the point of view of the ancient Greeks we may say: In the shape of the head, the human being is formed out of the universe. Then mobility develops inside and the potential for symmetry. Next, however, it will be necessary to see the influence of the last constellations in the list as having the opposite effect. In this case the influences come from the earth. Activities have an effect on human beings.

If we made the figure broad at the top (see Fig. 11), we’d best make it narrow (down) here, saying: When human beings want to be hunters the qualities we may take to be those of the Archer must be particularly well developed in them. To be animal breeders they have to bend their knees a lot. The tiller of the soil has to walk; he is therefore shown stepping out, and so on. Carrying on trade: If we want to look for a symbol in the human being, it has to be the feet. All these organs are also formed from outside in. The remaining part, where the human being develops himself, is in the middle.

This figure I am drawing really arises from the twelve signs as if of its own accord. We are able to say: There (in the middle) the universe with its stars is more active in the inner human being; there (at the top) the stars act from outside, and there (below) they compress the human being. You can see that the form I have drawn is the human embryo. Basing yourself on the laws of zodiac, you really have to draw the human embryo like this, just as you get a triangle if you draw a figure that encloses 180 degrees. It is therefore immediately apparent that the human embryo is created out of the whole universe.

As I said, we have to take the point of view of the ancient Greeks to do this, for today we can no longer start with the Ram; we have to start with the Fishes. We have been in the sign of the Fishes for centuries now, and this marks the time of transition to human intellectual development. But if you go back to the time when it was right to start with the Ram and the zodiac could be seen the way the ancients saw it, you have not much more than Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, or the occupations of the hunter, animal breeder, tiller of the soil and trader. Today we live in the age of the Fishes, during which the whole of our modern industrialized civilization has developed. Going back to the time of the Ram, we still find the four honest occupations—through modified to some extent and more complex—which place human beings in the world of nature.

Going back through the ages of the Bull, the third, second and first post-Atlantean ages, the last Atlantean age, the last but one, and so on, we would come to an earlier age of the Fishes, when human beings were still completely etheric and had not yet descended into the physical world. And because human beings were completely etheric in the earlier age of the Fishes, they are today essentially repeating everything they went through at that earlier time when they were in the process of becoming human. They have been repeating this from the middle of the 15th century, but in an abstract way. Then they were truly evolving their humanity; now they are growing into things that have been abstracted from them, for a machine is something that has been abstracted. With the new age of the Fishes, human beings are placed in something that is actually dissolving them. And when humanity enters another Water Carrier age, the process of dissolution will go a great deal further. Above all humans beings will not be able to relate to the world in any way at all unless they hold to the world of the spirit. It is exactly because of this recapitulation that humanity must move on into the world of the spirit.

Again it is possible to see that human beings are really threefold by nature: formed out of the universe in so far as they are head; developing inwardly, merely in concord with the outside world, in so far as they are chest; developing limbs and metabolism in so far as they make themselves part of the physical world, i.e. are limb people, or earth people (see Table above).

Threefoldness exists also in another respect. When we arrive in the world, the first four powers or impulses are already in us, though we only develop them afterwards. Yet in a sense we are also full human beings, for the potential for the other eight principles is also there. The head person is a whole human being, but the other parts are only rudimentary. The chest person is a whole human being, but the first and last four impulses are rudimentary. The limb person is a whole human being, but chest and head are rudimentary. So we really have three people in every human being. The first, the head person, is a metamorphosis of the previous incarnation. The chest person is the human being of the present incarnation in the true sense. And everything we do in the world around us, which comes to expression in our limbs and in our metabolism, takes us forward into our next incarnation. In this way, too, human beings are threefold by nature, and it is another way of studying the human form as a whole. We really ought to say that to draw a human being we ought to draw the head. This would be a complete human being. You can see it like this: The lower jaw really represents legs, except that in the head they point backwards; this person is sitting on his legs.

The chest person is another whole human being, with the arms more or less the outer representatives of etheric eyes. And the limb person is another whole human being, with the kidneys the eyes, for example. Even in terms of form and shape, we have three human beings fitted into one another. In the human being who has vanished into the head and become a sphere we see the previous incarnation coming alive, in the chest we have the actual human being of the present time, and in the person who is walking about we may see what will enter into the next incarnation.

In a sense we are also able to say that the way people comport themselves today shows a threefold nature. Take the human being of the limbs and metabolism: he is capable of engendering a whole human being. All you need is the human embryo in the mother’s womb and you see how the limbs and metabolism person wants to become a whole human being.

As to the chest person, look at a small baby and you can see how at that stage the head and chest still form a whole. Threefoldness therefore shows itself also in the way we grow up. And when we are no longer babies we are brought up and educated. The human head is the educator of other human beings—a child’s head, or a childish person, teaching another childish person, for essentially we are for ever children in the head. We only grow old, that is to middle age, in the middle, or chest person, and really old in our limbs. People find out about this when they get old. As the old riddle goes: We walk on all fours in our youth, then on two and later on three legs. People grow old in their limbs. In their head they always remain somehow the outcome of their previous incarnation, and throughout life the head is really a child’s head. Education theory will have to solve the problem of how the child’s-head teacher can best treat the child’s-head pupil.

These things can be amusing, but behind them lies a deep truth which must be considered if human beings are to see themselves in the right light.

Essentially the human head is a passenger carried by the rest of the human being. The legs of the head are always in a sitting position and it does not even attempt to do its own walking. The head is carried around like a passenger sitting in a coach. The chest person is the carer, and the limb person is the worker, used as a slave, and the one who really works his way through life. This is also why we have a head, in so far as we are head as a whole human being; I have said so many times. All the way to where we enclose ourselves, using the Crab principle, we are head. This is the gift of heaven and we do not have to contribute. Here (in the middle) we must breathe and eat: this is the the carer, the wet-nurse. And the true worker belongs to the sphere of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes.

We are thus able to evolve the human form in relation to the whole universe. You need to take these things very seriously, even if they are presented with a fairly light touch and not in a pedantic way. Taking them seriously you will see that on the one hand everything I have said today holds the potential for understanding the human form out of the whole universe, and on the other hand it is something to make us feel the greatest respect for the perceptiveness of people in the past; out of instinctive clairvoyance they were able to gain the most tremendous knowledge of man from the signs of the zodiac. Today our knowledge is such that people goggle at the Ram but fail to realize that the way it turns around is the important thing; they goggle at the Bull and do not know that it is the way it leaps and looks sideways is what matters; and with the Twins the way one hand holds the other, and so on. Everything in those signs of the zodiac, every single gesture, is truly profound, and if there is no gesture, as in the case of the Lion, the symbolic element has been chosen in such a way that the sign itself has the gesture in it, with the Lion having the strongest heart beat. The Lion represents that which fills us. We can find the wisdom of those ancient days again if we look for it in ourselves.

Today I have been considering the human form, tomorrow I intend to consider human life in relation to the universe. In the following lecture we’ll consider the human soul in relation to the universe.

Yesterday we discussed the way the inner and outer human form is created out of the universe. We also found that this was something people knew instinctively in earlier times. It is important, however, to note the following. In one of my drawings I showed that the whole zodiac can be seen to lie in the human form, but this had to be the form of the human embryo. If we draw this we have literally recreated the zodiac within the human form.

During life on earth between birth and death, human beings tear themselves away from this embryonic form. They certainly have their form given by the universe during the embryonic period, but they “stretch” during their time on earth, lifting the head up and out of the circle that reflects the zodiac. They then have the form given to them as embryos, but no longer allow it to relate to the fixed stars, and this means that human beings become able to take into the form of the head what they have brought with them from their previous life on earth.

Animals keep their backbones horizontal, and essentially continue much more in the position given by the zodiac, with the head merely attached to the front part of the backbone. This means that animals are not able to use the head to take in anything from a previous life. The situation is such that if we consider the human form in one respect, we would have to say that the human form based entirely on the zodiac would be like this (embryo). And if human beings continued to have this form throughout life, the form of the human head would not be able to take in the essential nature of a person which comes from the previous incarnation. By lifting the head out of that position, it becomes possible for the form to hold and protect the element that comes from the previous life.

Human beings also lift the other side out of the embryonic form, which is the side that takes its orientation from the last four signs of the zodiac, from Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes. As we saw yesterday, this relates to life and conditions of life in the outside world—to hunting, animal breeding, agriculture and trade, or shipping. Human beings follow these pursuits out of will impulses, out of the system of limbs which they have lifted out of its orientation on the zodiac. The result is that everything people do holds the potential, or seed, for future lives on earth. Animals retain their orientation on the zodiac and are therefore unable to take in anything from a previous life on earth or to look towards any future life on earth.

Out of the profound wisdom people had as instinctive knowledge in the past they called the circle of constellations “the zodiac”.¹³ Today we use not instinct but clear thinking to discover the same truths, and we consider the original wisdom human beings once possessed with growing respect.

So much, then, about the human form. Into this form is poured life, and we find this life localized in the human ether body just as we find form localized in the human physical body. It is quite right to consider the human physical body with regard to its form, for that is the essence of it. The ether body essentially represents life, and this is what we want to consider today. Yesterday we saw that the human form is really made up of twelve different forms and we made the attempt to study those forms. The human form as a whole, in its inner and outer aspects, arises from twelve individual forms.

Human life also has a number of levels, and in the first place these may be considered as follows.

The first, and to our everyday thinking this is not yet a level of life, is the life of the senses. Although they are part of the whole human being, the senses are so much at the periphery that we tend to forget that the life of the senses is the outermost layer of our life.

Moving inwards from the periphery—now thinking only in terms of life—we come to the life of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the life of the senses just as the nerves go inwards from the sense organs.

The life of the nerves in turn is in touch with another level that develops in the living human being. I have shown some aspects of it on earlier occasions, when I drew your attention to the way we draw breath. We take in air and the air we inhale creates a kind of inner rhythm which continues through the spinal canal and on into the brain. There the life of the nerves comes in contact with the life of our breathing, which is the next level as we move inwards.

The life of breathing in turn connects with another level of life. The breath, we may say, continually renews the blood. Thus the breathing rhythm is connected with the blood rhythm and we can move on from the life of our breathing to the life that exists in the rhythm of the circulation.

The circulation, however, is also connected with the whole of metabolism; it takes in metabolism, and we thus come to the next level, the life of metabolism.

Metabolism stimulates the movements we make in the world around us. It is thanks to our metabolism that we are actually able to move around. The nature of the human—and also the animal—metabolism is such that the soul is able to use the metabolic processes to produce movements. In the life of movement we are again becoming part of the outside world, for anything we achieve at that level of life connects us with the outside world.

There is one more level of life: the life of reproduction. In movement we continually use ourselves up, and internal “reproduction” has to take place for the very reason that we are in motion. Instead of “life of movement”, we may thus also put “internal reproduction, or regeneration”, providing we remain inside the human skin. And when this reproduction occurs independently, it becomes life of reproduction in the true sense.

1. Life of the senses
2. Life of the nerves
3. Life of breathing
4. Life of circulation
5. Life of metabolism
6. Life of movement
7. Life of reproduction

Yesterday we had twelve elements of form, today we have evolved seven levels of life, and it is true to say that in terms of the ether body, human beings live differently on each of these seven levels. If we are to take these things seriously, we cannot speak of a single kind of life that is all at the same level.

In the first place, then, our ether body may be said to live at the level of the senses, and this is a form of life that barely feels like life to us. Through it, we are involved in the outside world. If we take the eye, for example, we say the ether body is alive in the eye and in a manner of speaking enlivens it. It does however come in touch with a form of matter that is close to death in the eye, which is a living organ only in so far as the ether body enters into it. Apart from the ether body, the eye is really a physical apparatus.

Individual sense organs are always both a physical apparatus and penetrated by the ether body, each in its own particular way. Generally speaking, however, our sense organs are dead organs, except that the ether body enters into them. It would therefore be reasonable to say that the life of the senses is life in the process of dying.

The life of the nerves takes the experiences gained through the senses and makes them into something that can preserve the life of the senses. All lingering effects are due to the life of the nerves, therefore—lingering sounds, for example, and in the case of the eye, after-images. The life of the nerves, then, is a kind of resting life, or a life that holds and keeps.

The life of breathing gives image quality to the fleeting life of the senses that tends to preserve itself. We are able to have images of the outside world because the breathing rhythm is in touch with the currents that pass through the nerves. Ideas and abstract thoughts are still entirely bound to the life of the nerves, but anything to do with images is connected with the life of breathing. When we breathe we have creative life in us, a life we may call the image-creating life. This lives in the human form and therefore also takes part in the human form.

We have seen that the human form arises out of the zodiac, and because the creative life that comes with our breathing lives in the human form, it also has part in the whole outer form that has been created out of the starry heavens.

This form is therefore also part of the inner aspect of the human being. And it is thanks to our breathing that we have not only the contents of our conscious mind but also images of all our internal organs, images based on the outer form. Our internal organs therefore arise at first in a roundabout way—as images created in the breathing process. They do not yet have substance at this point. The breath creates an image of the internal human being. With our breathing we are in the outside world, moving within the zodiac with the earth, and we are continually inhaling the images of our internal organization.

These images are inhaled from life outside us. This, then is our creative life. The images we inhale are spread through the whole organism by the life of circulation. This and the life of breathing take human beings to the point where they are inwardly image of the world. Thus we may say:

The life of circulation is in touch with the life of metabolism, with the result that the images are given physical substance and physical organs develop on the fifth level of life. Matter infiltrates the images; it suffuses or tinges them. Thus the upper human being creates images in the life of breathing and these images are made tangible reality by the matter that infiltrates and tinges them.

Energy then enters into the physical organs from the life of movement. We may put it like this: We have physical organs and here we have life that generates power in the organs. The life of reproduction, finally, renews itself.

You can also see how the threefold human being arises: nerves and senses, circulation and rhythm, and metabolism and limbs, or metabolism and movement. Reproduction, finally, gives rise to a new human being.

The attributes I have added on the right (Fig. 14) give you an idea of the differences between the levels of life. Living in the senses, our ether body is in a kind of life that is dying. In the life of the nerves, the currents in the nerves, it is in a life that holds and keeps. The breathing life is where our ether body truly becomes a body of creative powers that designs images. The life of circulation ensures that those images become our whole internal organization. Physical substance is then brought in through the life of metabolism. The ether body enters into metabolism and suffuses the actual body of creative powers with matter. Subjective human energy is added through the life of the limbs, and so on.

The instinctive wisdom of old gave people understanding of this, too, and they knew, therefore, that human beings take in the life that is outside and develop it further inside them. That is more or less how the sages of old would see it. They would say: Let us take the outermost layer of the universe that is around the earth, then the next, and the next. The outermost layer is closest to the fixed stars in the sky, to the universe to which we owe the human form. Human life, they would say, does not come from the fixed stars, however, but from the planets in the sky. (Fig. 15).

They would first of all speak of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the sun. If we consider the true nature of the sun—this is something I have said many times before—it differs from the other planets in so far as it presents itself as a source of light. This is also why in popular astronomy it is called a fixed star. The other planets do not appear as light sources but as images. This is why it is said in popular astronomy that their light is borrowed light, for they reflect the light of the sun. Just consider the difference between the sun, which lets its own essential nature emerge with the light, and the other heavenly bodies, the planets, which merely present an image of their outer nature, or of whatever they have on the surface, making this visible by reflecting the light of the sun. It is a major difference. And being the source of light, the sun is also the source of life.

It is also the source of something else. At all times, even when people had only instinctive knowledge, it was said that the sun was threefold, the source of light, life and love. This trinity is to be found in the sun.

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No need to go against the Copernican system today, you can keep it and still understand what the ancients meant with their system, based on instinctive perception of the cosmos. Let us assume that, in Copernican terms, we have the sun at the centre—or at a focal point, if you like, but we can ignore that for the moment. Mercury, Venus, earth and Mars—we can ignore the minor planets for present purposes—Jupiter and Saturn are in orbit around the sun. But now we’ll look at it like this:

Let us say, and this is certainly also possible, that we have Saturn, Jupiter and Mars here, and then come sun, Mercury, Venus and earth, with the moon, however, which we’ll position here.

It is not essential, of course, to take this particular position, I am merely presenting it to show you that even with the Copernican system it is possible to get the sequence that was thought to be the right one in ancient times: moon, Venus, Mercury, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. All we need is for the relative positions to be such that the earth is to one side of the sun and the outer planets are somewhere on the other side. It is not necessary to have this kind of opposition or conjunction—which may happen in alternation—but the sequence is certainly feasible. And it is the sequence that was in people’s minds out of the old instinctive wisdom. This sequence seemed important to them.

The ancients would say: Let us think of the human beings here on earth. They are exposed to the universe. They experience the rays of the sun as their source of light, life and love. These three enter into them from the sun. Yet human beings are also exposed to the image quality of Saturn. If they were only exposed to the life of the sun as they developed on earth they would not be able to develop the life of the senses. Thus the eyes would not become a distinct physical apparatus but would be just like any other part of the human body—muscular organs, or vessels, or the like. Continuously exposed to the sun, human beings would not be able to develop eyes, nor any other senses. They are able to do develop them because Saturn, the outermost planet, reduces the influence of the sun. Saturn dries the vessel out, as it were, and this, roughly speaking, produces the physical apparatus. The ancients had as instinctive knowledge what we are discovering again today: The life of the senses develops under the influence of Saturn.

Human beings also would not be able to develop the life of the nerves if they were continuously exposed to the sun. Thanks to the influence of Jupiter, the life of the nerves dries up and does not become as vital as the muscles and similar organs. The ancients would say: The life of the nerves is stimulated by Jupiter.

Saturn orbits the sun in about 30 years. During their life on earth, human beings have it happen about once that Saturn is blocked out by the sun, in a way. If someone has the good fortune to have Saturn blocked out very strongly by the sun, a powerful sun life dawns in their life of the senses. We might say that their eyes or other senses are stimulated—the eyes are in fact least affected, but they make the best example, being so obvious. So if once during life on earth a person is in the position where Saturn does not influence the senses, that person may discover that a specific cosmic influence comes in through the senses. The individual is given a stimulus and is strengthened in the sphere of the senses.

People try to explain these things in all kinds of ways. There is a considerable literature on the subject in America. William James, for instance, wrote of all kinds of “awakenings” that happened in people’s lives.¹⁴ If you read his books and those of his followers you’ll find that a particular phenomenon occurs when someone receives a special stimulus at some point in time. These people have no idea as to the cause; they do not know that this is due to the position relative to Saturn or Jupiter. When the life of Saturn is blocked out, the life of the senses receives a special stimulus; when the life of Jupiter is blocked out, which happens all the more easily because Jupiter takes only 12 years to orbit, the life of the nerves is stimulated.

All these things are said to be in the subconscious, which is an absolute sludge tank today for people like William James and all psychoanalysts. This subconscious of theirs is a negative term, a waste bin for all the things that cannot be explained. Everything has to go in there; there you’ll find the hidden “provinces” of the soul that will react occasionally, and so on. It would certainly be highly desirable to take a good look at those pragmatic and psychoanalytical ideas one of these days.

The third planet, Mars, reduces heaving life to the point where breathing becomes possible. Mars, too, may be blocked out by the sun, and the life of breathing then receives a special stimulus. Mars orbits quite rapidly, taking about two years, and everybody therefore gets certain stimuli in the breathing life, the life of images. These stimuli are not always of the first quality, but people become poets or composers, or something like that, through receiving this stimulus in their breathing life. It does not go deep enough to make people like William James want to investigate and speculate; it seems quite clear to them. People with the old, instinctive wisdom thus felt that Mars stimulated the breathing life.

The life of the sun arouses light in the outside world, love in our hearts, and life in our dealings with the outside world. The location for this is midway between the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as the ancients also knew. Between those two lives lies the heart, which does not act as a motor but reflects the interplay between circulation and breathing.

Next we come to metabolism. People who had the old wisdom looked at Mercury not to see how far the sun is able to block it out, the way it does with the other planets, but how far Mercury itself blocks out the sun for the earth. Its position between sun and earth was considered to be the most important aspect, just as in the case of Jupiter the position beyond the sun was considered most important. When Mercury blocks out the sun, the life of the sun is reduced. As the life of the sun is weakened, this weakened life stirs inside human beings. If it were not reduced, people would immediately spit out any food or drink they had taken; they would not tolerate anything that comes from the outside world. They would then get out of the habit of eating, finding it too much of a bore. That is how powerful the life of the sun is in us. If we had only the life of the heart, or the sun, we would not be able to digest anything and immediately spit, or indeed vomit, everything out again. We owe the development of our metabolism to the fact that the life of Mercury weakens the life of the sun a little in this respect. The ancients therefore thought that the Mercury principle came between the life of circulation and the life of metabolism. The Mercury principle thus pushes physical matter through the human organism and into its individual organs.

Energy comes in through the life of movement which depends on Venus life, just as the life of metabolism depends on Mercury life. The ancients therefore ascribed to Venus the power that streams through the human being, this inner self renewal, the feeling that there is another human being, an energy human being, inside one.

The life of the moon, which is close to the life of the earth, does more than reduce the life of the sun and thus enable human beings to digest physical matter and process energies. The background to reproduction is something I have spoken of before: a space is created, with matter pushed back at the organic level, as it were. The embryo is able to develop because matter is pushed aside and in energy terms the embryo is organized from the cosmos. In this respect the life of reproduction depends on the moon life.

Yesterday I spoke of the relationship of the human form in its twelve aspects relating to the fixed stars. Today I have tried to show you how the new science of anthroposophy is in agreement with the instinctive wisdom of old in saying that the different levels of human life are connected with the life of the planets in the cosmos. Depending on the position of the earth in relation to the different members of the planetary system and the sun at its centre, life is modified in many different ways. Life is made to die, it is preserved and made creative in the upper human being. It is reduced in the lower human being so that physical matter and energies can be taken up from the earth. Human beings simply take the earth’s power of repulsion, make it their own and in this way develop the power that is in their own organs, and so on.

We see, then, that human life, too, comes from the cosmos. Looking up to the fixed stars, we see the zodiac as representing the principles that give rise to the human form. Observing the movements of the planets, we find the explanation for the different levels of human life. We look to Saturn for the life of the senses, to Jupiter for the life of the nerves, to Mars for the life of breathing, which is active in images.

Let us take a special look at this life of breathing. I told you that the images are received from the cosmos: form. The movements experienced in the zodiac stream inwards as images of our internal organs. Between birth and death, human beings are on earth, however, and the lower acts into the upper, with the result that everything has its polar opposite. The images enter into us and become suffused with matter, otherwise we would have no internal organs. But there is also always a counter process. So we are able to say that when we breathe, the images are pushed inwards, the image of the kidney, for example.

Matter then fills this out (red); but the opposite also happens, this time in an upward direction, with the images thrown back, as it were, like an echo, but do not think of this as a once-only event. The organs are in existence, having been developed in the early stages of earth existence; but the counter action may go on all the time.—The role played by the soul element in this will be considered tomorrow.

Consider each on its own, therefore. You take in the images of your internal organs with the life process. Then comes the counter action, in which the echoes of those images rise up again, as does the zodiac, especially with the life of breathing in it. Well, just think of your ears, and there you have the counter process. These images are created and go out into the air—they are the vowels and consonants! The vowels come more from the planets, the consonants from the zodiac. The counter process to the images coming in is reflected in speech. Consonants and vowels are pushed into us, as it were, to be the foundation for our organs. Anything that is more by way of form inside us comes essentially from the zodiac, anything that is more by way of life comes essentially from the planets. If the counter action relates more to life, we produce vowels, if it relates more to form, we produce consonants. All this is to some extent connected with the life of breathing, and we can see that quite clearly in speech.

You see, it is not really a good idea to try and understand the human being by putting him on the dissecting table and investigating what lies inside the skin. The result of this is no better than if someone were to take a magnetic needle and ignore the fact that the earth itself is a large magnet, making one end point north and the other south. If anyone were to insist on producing a theory that the magnetic needle takes that position of its own accord, ignoring the fact that the forces of the earth give it that particular direction, it would be just like anatomists and physiologists trying to understand the human being on the basis of what is to be found inside the skin. You cannot understand the human being on the basis of what lies inside the skin. All the people who seek to explain speech and language on the basis of what lies inside the human being are also working at the level of that explanation for the function of a magnetic needle. The truth is that human beings take their form from the life of the fixed stars and reproduce this as an echo, which gives rise to the consonants. They take in the movements of planetary life which influence their own life. The life of breathing in particular creates images of all this. The counter action then produces the vowels. Human speech can only be understood if consonants are seen in relation to the constellations of fixed stars and the vowels in relation to planetary conjunctions and oppositions. Thus human speech and language is seen to derive from the whole cosmos.

The sun, here (horizontal line in Fig 14), marks the middle. Take the three upper principles and you have the upper human being. Take the three lower principles and you have the lower human being. The reproductive life then gives rise to a new human being.

Take the life of breathing and the life of circulation. The latter essentially reflects the planetary movements. Our blood circulation is basically no more than an image of planetary life. We may thus also say that the vowels come from the life of the circulation and the consonants from the life of breathing. And now we get another strange relationship. We can relate the life of metabolism to the life of the nerves and the life of movement to the life of the senses. The life of the senses, however, relates to the movements of Saturn, which may be said to be closest to the zodiac, just as human beings present themselves most clearly to the outside world in their life of movement. If we want to show how human beings reflect the secrets of the cosmos, we have on the one hand the life of the senses and on the other hand the life of movement and this gives us—eurythmy. Eurythmy is the direct image of the relationship human beings have to the cosmic periphery. I just wanted to mention this briefly.

My purpose today has been to show you how the human being relates to the cosmos in regard to life. Yesterday it was my purpose to show the relationship of the human being to the cosmos in regard to form. Tomorrow we’ll consider the third aspect of the relationship between human being and cosmos—the soul. After considering the human soul in relation to the life of the cosmos we will have the three aspects of form, life and soul.

• 13. Zodiac from the Greek and Latin zodiakus, derived from “circle of the figures”, being the Greek for the sculptured figure of an animal.
• 14. William James (1842–1910), American physiologist and pragmatic philosopher, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), chapter 3: The Reality of the Unseen.

So far we have attempted to see the human being in relation to the universe as regards form and as regards life. We found that human beings relate in different ways to the universe at the head end and at the limb end. All these things essentially hold true for the period of human evolution in which we are today, i.e. the post-Atlantean period, and it has to be understood that anything we are able to say about the phenomena of this world always applies only for specific periods, for the world is in a process of evolution and changes radically from one stage of evolution to the next.

We saw that human beings tear themselves away, as it were, from the relationship to the zodiac. Unlike the animal head, which lies within the zodiac, the human head has been lifted out of it, going through an angle of about 90 degrees. The head end of the human being is fully in a way of life that inclines towards inorganic, lifeless nature. Here life is more or less in decline; it is dying. Both form and life tear themselves away from their connection with the cosmos, and because of this enter into a kind of frozen state, the beginning of lifelessness.

Essentially we are the outcome of previous development in this area. Think of the individual aspect of the human being and the fact that the human head is the metamorphosis of the other person who lived on earth before, and you will recall that the head points to the past, whilst the limbs point to the future.

The head part of the human being also points to the cosmic expanses of the past in another way. As you know, the head is the principal bearer of the sense organs and these had their origin on ancient Saturn. The most highly developed senses—other senses developed on ancient sun and moon—go back to the earliest stages of cosmic earth evolution. Everything connected with the human head therefore points to the past and in some respects it would be right to say: The mineral world evolved in the course of earth existence, and the human head, being the oldest part, is more than any other part involved in this process of mineralization.

Tearing themselves away from the cosmos, human beings keep the form that is no longer connected with the cosmos during their life between birth and death, and they also keep the life that is dying and becoming mineralized. We may also say that if human beings had kept the animal form, that is, if their heads had maintained the orientation given by the zodiac and therefore the weightier life that is to be found in the animal head, they would be entirely the outcome of earlier times in their heads. The head would have something that would immediately make it apparent that it has arisen out of the whole past cosmic evolution. By tearing the head away from this, human beings are in a way destroying their cosmic past.

It is tremendously important that we consider the things that were presented yesterday and the day before and realize that in the development of the head human beings essentially destroy their cosmic past. In fact, they go beyond the actual mineralization process, entering into a process in which matter is finely dispersed to an extraordinary degree. Organic forms are of course also to be found in the head, and embedded in the organic element is a process in which matter is reduced to dust to a degree that actually goes beyond the mineral level. Fig. 18.

If we look at the human head in the right way we have to say it is the focus of a process in which matter as such is reduced to nothing and it is this which makes it the bearer of a distinct inner life. The generally accepted materialistic view is entirely wrong when it comes to the form of the human head. Thanks to the head being part of the organism, human beings have a life of thoughts and ideas. This becomes possible because the material life is reduced to dust in a strange process which you may be able to picture as follows.

Imagine—as I said, it is a picture, but it will give you some idea of the extremely subtle process involved—imagine, then, a painting, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, for example. For the painting to exist in this world, it is necessary for it to have physical substance. Imagine that the physical substance falls to dust, but a fine etheric tissue would remain. So now the Sistine Madonna has turned into dust, but everything that was painted by using physical paints, including the nuances of colour, continues to exist in etheric form and someone with etheric perception would be able to perceive the etheric form that remains.

That is what the thinking process is like, the process of forming ideas. When we become conscious of a thought or an idea, this is due to the fact that because the head has been taken out of the wholeness of the cosmos, as we have seen yesterday and the day before, matter loses all significance and human beings face the constant need to let their heads come alive again because they are always disintegrating, and dying in every detail. The etheric aspect of their heads lifts out of it in the process (Fig. 18, red line on the outside) and thoughts evolve. Matter turns to dust and falls away, as it were, and the etheric remains and that is how people become aware of their ideas.

You’ll remember me saying that in the senses we already have something of a physical apparatus. The eye is a physical apparatus, except that the human ether body is active in it. There it already is the way I am now also going to describe for the rest of the head, for nerve tissue. Please take careful note of what I am going to say now. In the senses, and especially in the senses connected with the head, a separate etheric principle is active in the process of perception. In the sphere of the senses, therefore, we have a kind of independent etheric process.

Take the eye. It is a physical apparatus, but the etheric is active in it. Independent etheric life is to be found in an organ that is all the time tending to disintegrate and is really a mechanical, if not sub-mechanical, object. This is the situation in the sphere of the senses.

In the sphere of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the sphere of the senses, the situation is such that the ether body is more closely bound up with the physical substance, but the whole of our life of the nerves wants all the time to become life of the senses. Imagine, therefore, that you are seeing a coloured surface. The ether body moves independently in this process of sensory perception. If you now leave this process aside and give yourself up to the life of the nerves, the whole sphere of the nerves becomes sphere of the senses and you have a idea of the coloured surface in your mind. We may say that in so far as human beings are nerve human beings, they become entirely sphere of the senses in their mental images or ideas.

Now comes the reaction. The senses are geared towards the physical and are able to take things in continually. The organism of the nerves takes in what the senses present to it. It changes into sphere of the senses and in doing so it partly dies. It seeks to become all eye, or all ear, for instance. To prevent this happening, the vital principle, the principle of life, enters from the rest of the organism and pervades it and the human individual lets the idea go, as it were.

To sum up, we may say that towards the head end, human beings destroy their past. They thus become human beings with nerves and senses that hold images and they have a living experience of images that moves in the etheric realm. You see if we base ourselves on the spiritual science of anthroposophy it is perfectly possible to describe the life of ideas that arises in the conscious mind.

As human beings develop their head end with regard to form, they do so in a way that in the present age exposes them to the influence of forces that evolve in the cosmos when the sun is in the Fishes, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, but they lift their heads out of this, as far as the form is concerned. The result is that the head does not become an animal head but assumes what we may call the “human vertical”, whilst the animal remains within the zodiac.

With regard to life we are able to say that towards the head end, life evolves under the influence of the outer planets Saturn and Jupiter, as we saw yesterday. But human beings lift their life out of this, and thus the following happens: If those planets were never blocked out by the sun, the whole life of the nerves would increasingly become life of the senses. People would perceive with their eyes, or their ears, but this would continue on into the life of nerves. The life of the twelve senses would be in total, inorganic chaos in their life of nerves. Due to the fact that those outermost planets are blocked out, the life of nerves is torn out of the life of senses, and human beings are able to be conscious and act with deliberation in the life of ideas—entering into sensory function and leaving it again by deliberately suppressing ideas, and so on.

Thus an independent etheric principle is active in the senses during sensory perception and a reduced life of senses that is bound to the physical body is active in the nerve organism.

The whole has image quality because by going into the vertical human beings destroy the principle that would give them not image quality but the quality of physical substance. Animals remain within the zodiac and have only dream images and not the conscious images that human beings have. Dream images grow out of the vital principle of the organism; conscious images are lifted up into an etheric life that has become independent of the physical body. It is important to realize that human beings develop an independent etheric life towards the head end because they raise that part out of both the zodiac and the movements of the planets. Then the astral body and the I enter into the independent etheric life and are able to take part in the thought and idea activity of the ether body.

We thus see that the nature of the soul principle can be understood if we know that human thought life has soul quality, that is, it does not take part in material life.

We have seen how human beings develop with regard to both form and life at the other extreme. The day before yesterday we saw that human beings become active in the world through their limbs; going back to ancient Greek times we saw how they became hunters, animal breeders, tillers of the soil and traders who sailed the oceans. Human beings continue in these activities by withdrawing from the influence of the relevant images in the zodiac. Animals remain fully under the influence of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes and therefore develop forms that relate to the earth. A study of the zodiac will show why animal limbs have developed in a particular way. Human beings develop their system of limbs in such a way that they relate it to the earth when those zodiacal images are beneath the earth, when the earth is at that point in the zodiac in the northern hemisphere for a time. This is also why the geography of the earth offers different living conditions. Human beings are however able to transfer something they have developed in one place to another. I am speaking of things that apply to earlier times; today the different human forms mingle on the globe and the study of geography will no longer give a real idea of the way human beings relate to the macrocosm.

Here, then, human beings tear themselves away from the line of the zodiac in a different way, entering into the “human vertical” in the opposite direction. They remain fully exposed to the constellations of the zodiac with regard to form and to the outer planets with regard to the head, but withdraw from both influences by standing on the earth and letting the earth cover up the other side. Saturn and Jupiter influence human beings by letting their light shine on the earth. Living in images in their heads, human beings also receive the images of those starry worlds, just as they receive images of the planetary movements by developing the principle of life towards the head end. Images from the cosmos, the macrocosm, are taken up into the life of images that human beings develop.

At the other end, images are taken up and thus the forms develop that I showed you the day before yesterday—the limbs, forms that are the opposite of those seen in the head. Human beings also develop activities that are beyond the influence of the macrocosm, that do not allow those influences to enter.

At the head end, therefore, human beings destroy their past. The opposite is the case at the limb end. If we stood on a transparent earth so that both zodiac and planetary movements could influence us from the other side as well, we would not be able to act freely and independently but only under the influence of the life of the planets and fixed stars. Freedom of action is only possible because the earth blocks out the life of the planets and fixed stars. Furthermore, if we were fully exposed to them, then in view of the special nature of the human life span, with repeated earth lives, the life of our limbs would grow wooden, it would harden in itself. We would be unable to let matter fall to dust, and our organic substance would become cornified (horn-like) before it matured. Human limbs would be cornified in a way that is utterly different from the hoofs of horses or cows—almost all the way up. We are protected from this horny development because as human beings we are lifted out of the zodiac.

The process which results from this is the opposite of the process of reducing to dust in the head, where the past is destroyed and matter turns to dust. Development of the limb end is such that matter is not allowed to reach full cosmic maturity. It is held back. We have fingers and toes because we do not allow our limbs to reach their full growth potential. If they did, we would not just have nails but our arms and legs would be completely stiffened and cornified. By holding our limbs back we are able to develop the will in them, and this provides the basis for future lives on earth. If we allowed the limb person to reach full maturity, life would consist of one life on earth only. We preserve the basis for our future by not letting the limb person grow to maturity.

Thus we have a complete contrast: When it goes in the direction of thought, our inner life becomes a life in images; when it goes in the direction of our limbs, life becomes material, it is flesh and organic matter—“young”, I’d say. It does not cornify and grow old and because of this it is possible for the flesh to fall away and the image of youth to go through death and into the next life on earth.

There (Fig. 19) the will is able to develop, and we may say that the “will-end” of the human being is organic development not taken to its conclusion. At the head end we were able to speak of image quality, and here we must speak of something else. Organic development not taken to its conclusion remains germinal, an embryo capable of further development. At the head end we have something like an oyster shell, pure matter that has been secreted out. At the limb end we have something that is embryonic.

Here (above) we can say we have living inner experience of a purely etheric principle—the image. Here (below) we live not in the image but in germinal life and we know ourselves to be bound up with matter, which is also why we are able to move our limbs. We do not have much physical movement in the head, except in so far as our senses are transformed into limbs, so that in the head, too, we are human beings with limbs. One thing is also always to be found in the other, that is a basic principle. In a sense our eyes are also hands, in so far as they are able to move. Nevertheless, the head is largely immobile, and the lobes of the brain and similar structures in particular are incapable of voluntary movement. Even the outside of the head does not show much mobility; it is quite rare even for people to be able to move certain ear muscles; if they can, it provides them with an excellent opportunity for showing off.

Life experienced in organic substance does not allow conscious awareness to arise and this makes it possible for us to develop the will. (Up) here, then, we destroy physical matter, and (down) here we retain, in embryo, the powers for our next life on earth when physical substance falls away from us at death.

Between the two lie the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as we called them yesterday. We also saw that with regard to form this area relates to the constellations of the zodiac that lie between the upper and the lower ones.

If we consider the present-day fixed stars to be Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, we need to relate these four (Fishes, Ram, Bull, Twins) to the head. Under their influence and in accord with the planetary movements that are above the earth, the head is given a dying life that offers experience of life in images, an inner life of ideas. The four opposite constellations—it would have been slightly different in ancient Greece—would be Virgin, Scales, Scorpion and Archer. The constellations that lie between the upper and lower ones would relate to the rhythmical aspect of the human being, just as in planetary life Mars and Mercury hold a middle position. Here, we may say, the human being swings to and fro between image and embryo. The life of breathing and of the blood illustrates this quite beautifully. We take in oxygen which gives life and is connected with the limb organism and with everything that is mobile in us. We combine the oxygen with carbon, a substance that initially has a stimulant effect on the life of the nerves and senses, bringing in an element of death, and is then cast out as a dying element. Here we have in physical, material terms the continuous contrast of extreme life in oxygen and extreme death in carbon: dying and enlivening, dying and enlivening. Life swings to and fro between these extremes.

At the level of soul life it is like this: we have inward experience of something that on the one hand is still purely etheric, like the life of thoughts; but the ether body takes hold of certain glandular structures and these glands secrete matter. At the physical level, therefore, the ether body acts on the glands. Glands do not make a connection with etheric life, the way muscles do—which are essentially part of the limb organism but secrete matter when etheric life takes hold of them. Etheric life and physical, material life therefore do not fuse completely, and we have a stage of transition. Matter is taken hold of but it also resists and is secreted out. If you study muscles and bones, the elements of the limb system, you find that matter is rigorously taken hold of by the human ether body, most of all in the bones. Nothing falls to dust and is dispersed, everything stays fresh and alive. In the head, none of the matter is taken hold of, but as the head develops, matter falls to dust. Unbound, etheric activity develops to become the life of thought. When the ether body takes hold of the glands, it unites with them but they resist. Muscle tolerates the ether body and take it into itself. Glands do not tolerate it; they immediately secrete matter and drive out the ether. At the soul level this is the life of feeling.

We can now get a real idea of the life of thought. Matter is not put to use, it only goes as far as the etheric, and conscious awareness lives in this etheric element. In the life of feeling, the ether body takes hold of glandular life, which does not tolerate it. Yet for the time that the ether body vanishes into glandular life, before secretion actually comes into effect, human beings are without their ether body, which has vanished into the glands. At that point they find themselves only in their I and astral body, and that is how it is when we feel.

idea—ether body, astral body, I
realm of feeling—astral body, I
life of will—I

If we take the ideas that come in the life of thought—the life of the physical body is cast off; human beings experience themselves in ether body, astral body and I. In the human head the I is active in the astral and the ether bodies and rejects the physical element; the I is thus able, with the aid of the astral body, to experience thoughts, thinking, in the ether body. In the realm of feeling human beings have the ether body taken away from them when it takes hold of glandular life; it is withdrawn from them until the gland has taken the secretory activity to its conclusion. The ether body is therefore in the physical body and human beings have only the astral body and I available for conscious inner life. Experience is at the level of feelings and dream-like in quality, because we enter into the physical body.

In their life of will, human beings enter completely into organic matter with the ether body. When we are awake, the ether body takes the astral body with it, and this enables us to move our limbs. The astral body is also taken into matter and is therefore withdrawn from us so that we have conscious awareness only of the I.

Thus we find that the inner life and the physical life are related at every level. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit we merely need to have a clear picture of the way in which I, astral body and ether body are involved in the physical body and we perceive the difference between the inner life of thought, the inner life of feeling and the inner life of will. We find that the inner life of thought is in the dying part of the organism which has torn itself away from the upper part of the world of the fixed stars and the upper world of the planets, and become a life in images by reducing the past to dust. We find that in the middle, or rhythmical region we are able to share in life relating to the past and therefore also to the macrocosm, which has evolved out of the past; yet we also react to this because there is a continuous rhythmical element—on the one hand the rhythm of oxygen combining with carbon, and on the other that of glands being taken hold of and responding with secretion. When the macrocosmic life in us is taken hold of and takes hold, the microcosm, that is, the individual human being, reacts. We live in rhythm not only inside ourselves but with the world; we open up to the cosmos and take it back into ourselves. We are half-way individual beings and move rhythmically to and fro between macrocosm and microcosm, and this is where we are alive and active in our feelings. Here we can see exactly how the physical, material aspect of the organism interacts with the element of soul and spirit. In the life of the will, physical matter is most strongly taken hold of and this is where we are most of all mere microcosm, withdrawing entirely from macrocosmic activity in becoming active ourselves.

Living in the northern hemisphere, we withdraw from the other fixed stars and planets in our own way; people living in the southern hemisphere do the same in a similar way, and the whole does, of course, rotate. In our limbs we are therefore entirely microcosm between birth and death, in a world of our own which therefore is also able to take itself forward into a future. We are today developing the will as the youngest element in the inner life. This is still entirely dependent on the physical body for support; it allows only the I to find to itself, with the astral body and the ether body caught up in the physical body.

We shall never understand the inner life unless we are able to differentiate between I, astral body and ether body. Anyone who does not have a real, inner grasp of these will never be able to understand the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. What happens when people refuse to grasp this reality today?

What happens is that people who carry some authority stand there and tell people that it is not really possible to know anything about the inner life, though certain phenomena suggest that something exists that has soul quality, which they call “psychoid”. Giving an explanation of the way Descartes¹⁵ and Spinoza¹⁶ endeavoured to discover the nature of this interaction, they are unable to be anything but abstract—the body on one side, the soul on the other. It will never be possible to get at the truth in this way, because the relationship between soul and body is different in the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. People will not get to the truth if they insist on making one big muddle of the whole inner life and talk of a “psychoid” element rather than giving real consideration to the way the I, astral body and ether body are related in real life. It is as if someone were to refuse to look at the real human being and talk about an “anthropoid” in order to avoid speaking of the anthropos¹⁷ That kind of science is anthropoid-sophy rather than anthroposophy; it is psychoidology.

If we give real consideration to the life of soul and spirit, we can give full detail of the “interactions” and so on, as people call them. There will be no need to cut out bits of the liver, or the brain, and present them neatly as abstract tissues, the way anatomists do. Instead we must know that the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is different at the head end and the limb end. At the head end we reduce it to dust, destroying the past. At the limb end we do not allow growth to reach its full potential but remain embryonic.

The worst thing is when people leave truth aside and speculate on the nature of the physical body as well as of soul and spirit. Using worn-out old words and making them into -oids, they fail to grasp the real truth. There are people nowadays who have no notion of how to get from a word to a concept. Someone called Arthur Drews¹⁸ has been giving lectures to non-conformist religious and monist congregations in Germany today, both of which live on the dregs of the materialistic science that goes back to the 1860s and 70s. He has studied Hartmann’s philosophy¹⁹—as a young man he would always dance attendance on him—but he really only took in the words, which roll about in his head like the balls in a pin-ball machine, and he has no idea of how to get from word to concept. And he uses these words from Hartmann’s philosophy, words that whizz around in his head as if in a pinball machine, to criticize anthroposophy!

Those are the fruits of education in our modern civilization, where people refuse to give serious consideration to the methods available for gaining real insight into the relationship between human being and cosmos. These enable us to describe the human form and human life on the basis of the cosmos and to understand that because human beings are specifically torn away from the cosmos they have dying life at one end, which enables them to develop an inner life of ideas based on images, and a life that remains embryonic at the other extreme, which allows the will element to develop.

These things sound incomprehensible to the people involved in the official science of today, and as a rule—not always but as a rule—we cannot expect them to gain access to them, for essentially they have lost all real understanding with their kaleidoscope of words. For anyone who knows the real situation, those lectures about psychoids are essentially no more than word kaleidoscopes; the things said about Descartes, Spinoza and so on, right up to Fechner,²⁰ have no inner connection and are kaleidoscopes of words. The scraps of words that whirl around in confusion can only gain inner meaning through insight into I, astral body, ether body, and so on. It seems a pity that one has to talk about the present time like this; but when it comes to the “intellectual life”, as it is called, we have to speak about the present age like this. The philosophers have no longer been able to get their bearings because decades ago their words have lost all meaning.

The latest thing is to appoint modern scientists as professors of philosophy. They are asked to hand down philosophy. It started with Mach,²¹ and today Driesch²² is one of the main representatives of the species. Scientists are being appointed as professors of philosophy because the philosophers no longer have anything meaningful to say, whilst scientists at least still have the faculty of external observation. What they say about philosophy is, of course, even more empty of meaning than the things said by philosophers, who at least still had the words. This really has been a strange development. We have seen philosophy, which still had meaningful content in the first half of the 19th century, evaporate completely in the wordy works of someone like Kuno Fischer,²³ for instance. But in his day the chairs of philosophy were still held by philosophers, even if their philosophy no longer had inner meaning.

It is absolutely necessary that we realize this clearly and that there are at least a few people in the world who see through all the glitter of those “psychoids” and know that we are deeply in decadence, particularly in the field of academics. You can’t know this strongly enough, and I think it will be good for you to enter deeply into the things I have tried to put before you in these three lectures.

We have seen that on the one hand man appeared to be connected with the universe in outer form and in the way of life, but that he has renounced the universe at the head end and at the limb end, so that we are only wholly given up to the rhythm of the universe in so far as we are rhythmical human beings; renounced in order to develop the life of thoughts as life in images, that is, independent of physical matter, at one end, and at the other end to develop the life of will by keeping matter at an embryonic level, not letting it assume the rigid form that the macrocosm is able to impose. The limb end is thus kept mobile and has the potential to evolve and progress from earth to existence on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

Hold on to these things and you can see that the insight gained in anthroposophy really wants to take hold first of all of our sense of truth, secondly of our sense of aesthetics—when you study the human form as it arises out of the macrocosm—and thirdly also in the direction of what is good and of religious life. These three lectures are particularly able to show the profound justification of the statement that has been made so many times here, in courses and also on other occasions, that we must look for a synthesis, bringing together in harmony religion, art and science. This cannot be achieved unless we come to a genuine cosmology which clearly shows the reality of the human form and of human life.

Something else we need is a theory of independent activity in the inner life, a theory that shows us the true nature of man, who has torn himself away from the cosmos at either end. And we also need to know the qualities which human beings develop independently, relating to future worlds which will take the place of the earth within the macrocosm. This will lead to deeply religious inner responses and feelings.

If human civilization is to show true progress we need a cosmology that includes the human being and does not leave humanity aside the way our present-day cosmology does. We also need a theory of independent activity and we need ethics that are able to show that the potential for good which they hold is the seed for worlds. We need ethics that have reality, their values not abstract but having the power in them to come to realization. Cosmology, a theory of independent activity and ethics—these are the things humanity will need to be able to rise to something higher.

• 15. René, Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician.
• 16. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 17. Anthropos, Greek for “human being”.
• 18. Arthur Drews (1865–1935), a professor of philosophy who gave a number of lectures against anthroposophy in the autumn of 1921. See his Metaphysik und Anthroposophie, Berlin 1922, esp. the chapter on perception of the supersensible.
• 19. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher
• 20. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), German philosopher and psychologist.
• 21. Ernst Mach (1839–1916) Austrian physicist and philosopher.
• 22. Hans Driesch (1867–1914), German zoologist and philosopher.
• 23. Ernst Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), German philosopher who wrote a major history of modern philosophy, books on logic and metaphysics and on Kant, Descartes, Goethe, Lessing and Schiller.

We have been considering the human being in relation to the cosmos. To people who do not know anything beyond the present-day way of looking at things it must seem rather absurd to hear of a link being made between the essential nature of the human being and the essential nature of the cosmos, and I am certain that the majority of people will consider this to be quite unscientific. Yet when we think of the spiritual streams of today there is an urgent need to draw attention to exactly the kind of thing we have been considering and to do so quite energetically. For these things may fairly be said to be entirely in line with modern thinking. The problem is, modern thinkers are rejecting them with great vehemence, which is doing untold harm to the life of mind and spirit.

To begin with, we’ll sum up what I have been presenting in recent lectures. We have been considering the human form as the outcome of something the causes of which must be looked for among the fixed stars, and particularly the constellations of the zodiac as their representatives. We found that to understand the human form we must first of all look to the zodiac; its twelve constellations make it possible for us to understand the human form in every detail.

To understand the levels of human life we must look to the planetary system for the elements which will enable us to do so.

We then moved on from understanding the levels of life to understanding the soul principle. There we had to go to the human being himself, to the form he has been given and to that which lives in him. We also looked at the thinking, feeling and will aspects of the inner life in relation to the human form and the levels of life. Yesterday we attempted to look for the element of mind and spirit in the inner life. With the soul principle we move from the cosmic periphery to life on earth as such—that is, if we consider the soul principle during life between birth and death. We are able to approach it by considering its true relationship to the human form and to human life.

Yesterday we found that the spirit, which human beings only experience in images, has to be looked for in the sphere of the soul. If I may put it like this, we are coming down to earth from heaven. To consider the human form we have to go as far as the fixed stars; to consider human life, we need to go to the sphere of the planets; to consider the human soul in its relationships between birth and death, we must first of all descend to earth. Thus the human being becomes a whole for us in his relationship to the cosmos.

Now if we really appreciate all this, we shall be able on the basis of it to draw the borderline between animal and human nature. The way it may be done is as follows. If we consider the principle which can be understood in relation to the zodiac and how it is in humans and in animals, a difference emerges. But to see the whole of it we need to consider how the zodiac, the planetary sphere and the earth, with everything presented in yesterday’s lecture, act on human beings and on animals. Outside the human being the physical world does not take the form it does in the human body. We find it in the forms of the mineral world, a world very different from the human physical body. This is because in the human being the physical principle is clothed in an etheric and an astral principle and in I nature, all of which change the physical principle, adapting it to suit their needs. In the physical world outside the human being we see the physical principle as it presents itself when not imbued with etheric, astral and I nature.

The inherent form principle of the mineral is the crystal, a polyhedral form.

To grasp this form we must first of all consider the physical matter which has developed out of the forces which are active in the mineral sphere. We have to visualize that in an elongated mineral specific forces act in this direction to elongate the mineral (see crystal on the right). The forces acting in this direction (horizontal line in the centre) are perhaps less powerful, or we may say they act to make the mineral more slender in this direction, and so on. In short, in order to talk about minerals at all, we have to visualize these forces being at specific angles to each other, acting in specific directions, irrespective of whether they come from inside or outside. And above all we have to visualize these forces as existing in the universe, at least to the point where they take effect in the sphere of the earth.

Being effective, they must also have an effect on the human physical body, which means it, too, must have the inherent tendency to become polyhedral. It does not actually become polyhedral because it still has its ether body and astral body which do not allow the human being to turn into a cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron, and so on. The tendency is there, however, and it would be fair to say: In so far as human beings are physical beings, they tend towards becoming polyhedral. So if you are glad that you do not have to walk around as a cube, a tetrahedron or octahedron, the reason is that the powers of the astral and ether bodies act against the forces—octahedral, cubic, or whatever—inside you.

Now we are not only a physical body but also have an ether body. Through it we are in essence at one with the plant world. Through the physical body we represent the mineral, or physical, world around us, through the ether body the plant world around us.

Plants are also part of the physical world and therefore have the tendency to be polyhedral, but they add to it a tendency to be spherical. Circumstances may occasionally cause minerals to occur in spherical form, but this is not their true form. There has to be scree, or something of that kind, if a mineral is to be spherical.

In plants, every single cell seeks to achieve spherical form; in humans only the head goes a little in that direction. We owe this spherical form essentially to plant nature. The fact that not all plants are spherical is in the first place due to their having to fight against polyhedral form, which has its own outcome, and secondly to the plant form having also to fight against a cosmic, astral principle. You will remember from earlier lectures that a cosmic, astral principle presses down on the plant from above. All this modifies the spherical form. You also get spheres imposed on spheres. But the essential plant form is a sphere.

Seeking to achieve spherical form the plant assumes the form of the earth itself. As you know, the earth is a sphere in the cosmos, and so is every drop of water. Only the mineral parts of the earth are polyhedral. As a whole, the earth is spherical. The plant, or the life principle, therefore seeks to attain to the spherical form and in doing so is really trying to recreate the form of the earth.

Let us now go higher and consider what the human being is because of the astral body. Here the human being is something representing the animal nature found in the animal world. In the physical, mineral nature of man we look for the polyhedral form, in human plant nature for the spherical form which reflects the planet earth (Fig. 28). Animal nature can be understood if we do not stop at the spherical form but add something to this form. We have to add pockets, or sacs, to the spherical form, like this:

It is in the nature of the animal form that a pocket element breaks up the sphere, with pocket-like inroads made everywhere. Consider your eye sockets—two pockets coming in from the outside. Consider your nostrils—two pockets. And finally consider the whole of your digestive tract from mouth to stomach. It is possible to arrive at this if you let a pocket develop, starting at the mouth, which goes all the way down.

You always get the pocket form added to the spherical form when the transition has to be made from plant to animal form.

We can come to understand the pocket form if we lift our eyes from the earth to the planetary system. You will find it easy to see that the earth seeks to give its own form to everything that lives on it. But a planet acting from outside counteracts the earth forces and makes pockets in the spherical form given by the earth. The different creatures of the animal kingdom are provided with such sacs, or pockets, in a wide variety of ways. Consider the planets and the different ways in which they act. Saturn makes a different kind of inroad than Jupiter or Mars. The lion is equipped with a different kind of inner sac-nature for the simple reason that the planetary influences on it are different from those on the camel, for instance. So in this case we have sacs being formed.

But in animals—and this means above all in higher animals, for the situation is different with the lower animals—and also in human beings something arises which does not merely come from the planetary realm, so that we are able to say: The essence of both animal and human nature is to have more than just the pocket form. This would be the case if there were only the planets and if the firmament of fixed stars had no influence. Something is added to the pocket form. In many situations people are satisfied when they have not just a pocket but something in it. And it is indeed the case that it is the essence of the animal aspect of human nature to have a pocket with something to fill it. So we have a spherical form with a pocket and the pocket is filled.

You only need to look at the sense organs, the eye. You have first of all a pocket, which is the eye socket, and then something to fill it. And this fulfilment,²⁵ which occurs particularly in the sense organs, relates to the zodiac just as the pocket form relates to the planetary sphere. Human beings have the most complete animal organization in this respect, which is also why they have twelve pockets with their fillings, though this is disguised in all kinds of ways. This is why I had to list twelve sense organs in my Anthroposophy.²⁶

We can now go back and ask: Which cosmic principle relates to the polyhedral quality? You see, if we consider the earth, it has the life form if seen as a whole, and if it consisted entirely of water it would only show this form. But all kinds of disruptions enter into the water. You can observe these disruptions in the tides, for instance. There the water is given configuration. Next, let us look back to earlier stages of configuration for the liquid earth, when it first began to develop solid elements. It is still possible to see today that the tides are connected with the moon, and everything polyhedral which becomes part of the configuration of the earth relates to the moon.

Thus we are able to say: The polyhedral or physical nature of human beings is connected with the moon, their vegetable or etheric nature with the earth, their astral nature, which would produce the pocket form, with the planetary sphere, and the filling of the pocket with the zodiac.

What I have written on the board applies in a different way to humans than it does to animals. You see, with animals it is truly the case that the heavens only have significance as far as the sphere of the zodiac, meaning everything which lies within it. Anything which lies outside it holds no significance for the animal. Ancient wisdom was therefore quite right in calling it the “zodiac”,²⁷ for it was also able to say: Everything outside the zodiac in the universe might just as well not exist, for the animals on earth would still be exactly as they are. Only what lies below the zodiac, together with the earth and the moon, has significance for animals. What lies beyond the zodiac has, however, significance for human beings, for it influences the filling of the pockets.

For the animal we have to say: Everything which lies inside the zodiac influences the filling of the pockets. We therefore have to go into the zodiac itself and then we are able to explain how the filling of the pockets presents itself. With humans, we have to go beyond the zodiac (Fig. 34, brown) if we want to explain what goes on in the sphere of the senses, for example. In this respect, human beings go beyond the zodiac, animals do not.

It is also the case that in animals, the planetary sphere as such has a direct influence on the pockets. As the pockets continue inwards, to form the organs, animal organs are perfect reflections of the principles relating to the planetary sphere. Human beings again go a little further and we are able to say that in human beings, the region closer to the zodiac influences the pockets.

In animals, the earth has a direct effect on everything tending to assume spherical form. This is not possible in human beings, who otherwise would be animals, with a tendency to be spherical. In a sense, animals tend towards the spherical form. Here (Fig. 35) we have the backbone, then the legs. Animals are however prevented from becoming a complete sphere.

The back bone forms part of the sphere. Human beings tend to move away from the earth principle, just as they have moved away from the zodiac, and from the planetary sphere, towards the zodiac. We are able to say that the human spherical form is created by moving towards the planetary sphere. Human beings walk upright, however, and seek to go beyond mere adaptation to earthly principles.

With reference to the polyhedral element we have to say that the moon gives it directly to the animal. Human beings also seek to move out of the influences of the moon, “away from the moon”, as we might say, to receive their polyhedral element from a region between earth and moon. This means, however, that the moon still has an influence. In the fifth place, therefore, we must look to see what the moon, which in animals brings about the polyhedral element, is doing in human beings. It brings about a polyhedral element in humans, but as an image. Animals have the polyhedral element in their configuration; humans lift it out of the organism. Mathematical and geometrical ideas become image, taken out of the living physical body. Today, people primarily visualize and want to understand things in mathematical terms because they are able, under the moon’s influence, to lift their own polyhedral element out of the body, so that it enters into the conscious mind. We are thus able to say that thanks to the moon, we are able to understand the polyhedral element in images.

So you see how by considering the human being’s relationship to the cosmos we not only arrive at the outer form we have been considering in recent years but also understand how human beings gain inner form and structure. We see how they create their nasal cavities, or the stomach, as sacs or pockets. If we were to take this further we would understand the organs altogether and how they take internal form out of the whole cosmos. If we want to understand the human being we must always draw on the cosmos. We have to do so when we ask why we have an organ such as the lung, for instance. Essentially the lung can only be understood if we grasp that initially, in the embryo, a kind of sac forms, going inwards, with physical matter forming a lining. The sac-like form then tears itself free on the outside, and the organ closes itself off as an internal organ. We come to see why there is a lung, or any other organ, inside the human being if we perceive this organ to have originated from a sac, with the inner end of the sac thickening and due to other circumstances taking on a particular configuration. An organ such as the stomach can be seen as a sac extending inwards. An organ such as the lung, the heart or the kidney also starts as a sac, but it thickens here (Fig. 36), tears off here, and you have a closed-off internal organ.

Yet even with these closed-off organs—if we ask ourselves why they are in a particular place in the human organism, or why they have a particular shape or internal structure, we always have to consider the human being in relationship to the whole universe.

If a modern scientist were to hear of anthroposophists wanting to explain the lung, heart, liver, and so on out of the cosmos, he'd say we were quite mad. Members of the medical profession in particular would call this madness. They should not do so, however. It is up to them to realize that anthroposophy is actually trying to meet them half-way as they pursue their course clinging firmly to their accustomed blinkers. Let me give you a small example to prove this.

I have here before me a booklet written by the physician, medical scientist and biologist Moriz Benedikt in 1894.²⁸ I tend to quote this gentleman quite often, though I actually do not much like doing so, for apart from anything else, he shows himself to be terribly conceited, practically on every page he writes. He is also quite inflexible as a Kantian. There is, of course, the mitigating circumstance that he has made up his own Kantian ideas to suit himself, presenting them with some inflexibility. The man is extraordinarily gifted, however. He is not interested in anthroposophical ideas or anything of the kind, but it is fair to say that simply by being involved in medicine and science he has arrived at a reasonably unbiased view as to the value of his scientific outlook. He cannot get out of it; yet in a strange way he peers out. The others are also caught up in their science as if in a prison, but they do not even look at anything outside. He keeps looking at the outside world, and this allows him to arrive at extraordinarily interesting conclusions. His vanity has made him a great many enemies, and he will therefore sometimes say things about enemies who show themselves with their masks off—generally these people are “friends”, maintaining closed ranks. His colleagues have tended to put him down, and he therefore says things about them that are highly typical. He knows nothing about anthroposophy, of course, but still, if we consider anthroposophy in terms of its qualities it would be fair to say that, qualitatively speaking, he is an anti-anthroposophist. However, in the booklet I have before me he says:

The self-righteous ignore or deny anything that does not fit in with their point of view, persecuting not only the teaching, but even more bitterly the teachers. Self-righteousness is a peculiar kettle of fish. It smells sweet to the self-righteous but gives off a sharp, biting odour for others. Self-righteousness is by its very nature closely bound up with the scholars’ trade, so much so that although I hate the self-righteous I often ask myself: How often and in how many instances have you yourself been self-righteous? I’d be most grateful to anyone who would give me an exact answer to the question.

For my part, I am convinced that far from being grateful he would complain like anything if we were to make him aware of his own self-righteousness. Yet in his own peculiar way he has a particularly good eye for self-righteousness in others.

He goes on to speak of his own history, wanting to show that he has become a different kind of medical man from his colleagues. He writes:

Two severe strokes of destiny spelled disaster for my own development and also for the scientific position relative to the subject under discussion.

You’ll immediately be aware of a nice touch of vanity in what follows:

In the first place, I studied mathematics and mechanics before joining the medical profession. In those days we had an eminent mathematician at Vienna University, Professor von Ettingshausen,²⁹ who presented the most difficult problems in the mathematics of physics and caught our interest. I heard him develop the theories of Cauchy³⁰ and Poisson.³¹ Petzval³² taught us to express the problems of mechanics in mathematical formulas. It will be easy to show, however, how disastrous mathematical thinking is for a member of the medical profession, and above all a clinician.

Well, we shall see why it is disastrous, especially if such a person knows something about medicine. Professor Benedikt goes on with his story. You would have thought it to be a good stroke of destiny to be a mathematician, but he calls it a bad one, because it taught him to think. Other clinicians were apparently unable to think, and they hated him for having studied mathematics, for it meant he knew more than they did.

The second stroke of destiny to come in the days of my youth was that I became a student of Skoda.³³ I am still attached to his teachings today. He was the Kant of medical philosophy, and his mind rose to sublime heights not in books but in the discussion of diagnoses, indications for treatment, and particularly in postmortem reviews. Skoda had been a mathematician when young

—clearly another stroke of destiny!—

and had brought the most important and fundamental scientific thinking to medicine, though unfortunately only in isolated instances; the important insight I received from Skoda, having already been firmly convinced of it through my mathematical studies, is that in establishing scientific proof, we must be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not know.

Benedikt had thus also studied under Skoda. The idea was that when using modern scientific methods—for this was the subject under discussion—we should be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not yet know. Benedikt really did represent this principle with some degree of fanaticism in numerous treatises. He goes on to say:

This basic rule of medicine is not known to the majority of biologists, and indeed is incomprehensible to them. Some years ago, for example, I sent a manuscript in a foreign language to an anatomist, asking him to correct the language. When it came to the above statement, he wrote in the margin that he did not understand the meaning of it.

Benedikt says here that we should also consider what we do not know, and he wanted the other individual to translate the statement into proper French. The anatomist had written, however, to say he did not understand it.

When I showed the comment written in the margin to a professor at the technical university he smiled. The statement is perfectly clear to anyone involved in the exact sciences.

The man smiled because he understood mathematical thinking; it amused him that members of the medical profession thought they could ignore the things they did not know. An engineer must know what he does not know, for he has studied mathematics.

When I told a famous medical expert in Vienna of the odd reaction from my medical colleague, he said rather naively: Well, how are we to know the unknown?—This historical anecdote casts a sharp light on the method of thinking still prevalent in modern medicine and on the colossal errors made day by day and hour by hour in the medical literature.

These are the words of a medical man! But we now come to a most important point. Moriz Benedikt tells us what happens in medical science, where no account is taken of the unknown:

The problems generally arise with reference to the biology of an organ, its function, for instance. The conditions on which the function is based are partly unknown and still have to be found.

He goes on to give an example:

The liver, for instance, secretes bile. The reason for this secretory process lies mainly in the specific biochemical properties of the cells.

Let us ignore the fact that he is referring to the biochemical properties of cells, which does not really make sense. We are taking the point of view he takes in speaking of the liver.

The reason must be found as to how these differentiated properties evolve;...

He wants to find the reason why the liver is different from other organs; he intends to consider the unknown. It is known that the liver secretes bile. But now we come to the unknown, and mark you well, he produces a considerable list:

The reason must be found as to how these differential properties evolve; how the organ develops from its elements; how it comes to be in its particular place; why it relates to surrounding organs in a specific way; how with the aid of specific haemodynamic forces and haemostatic conditions it maintains the specificity of its cells; how with the aid of the central and centrifugal nervous system it is stimulated to function at the right time and with the necessary intensity; what the conditions are for nutrition in general, to maintain function and timing; which conditions impair function, causing short-term or permanent disorders, etc.

All this is not known and has to be considered. Moriz Benedikt then continues:

In science, these questions come up one after the other over long periods of time.

Just the questions come up, therefore!

The literature, on the other hand, considers only what is known at any time, without enquiring into the unknown, and behaves as if the basic problem had already been fully solved.

That is, makes no mention of the unknown. People like Moriz Benedikt are at least able to list all these unknown elements.

This is why only a small part of the theories which prevail at any given time is true, and they contain a colossal percentage of new and inherited errors which will continue on through generations as original sin.

What is this medical man really saying? He says: We have a medical literature but it only deals with the known. Yet the unknown keeps coming up after long intervals of time. What does Benedikt want? He wants people to be aware of what they do not know. What would happen in the case of the liver, for instance? A member of the medical profession taking the opposite view of Benedikt who gave a description of the liver would try to discover the biochemical properties of liver cells and present the fact that the liver secretes bile. He would be satisfied with this, for he does not talk about anything that is not known. Benedikt would say: Alright, the liver secretes bile; this is due to the biochemical constitution of the liver cells. But as a conscientious scientist I must also say everything I do not know about the liver and the bile. He would therefore write in his book:

This we know, but we do not know how the liver comes to be in that particular place; how the statics and dynamics of the blood, or rather the circulation, affect the liver; how the nervous system relates to the liver, both the system as a whole and the individual nerves; and how the liver contributes to nutrition. Benedikt’s books would therefore be different from those of other authors. As a scientist he would in this respect be extremely modest.

But he says this question as to the unknown comes up in the course of centuries; yet because of the way the questions are put, if we go down to fundamentals, then even taking Benedikt’s point of view, we could go on till Judgement Day, always putting down what is known and then what is unknown and the many questions that arise. Benedikt’s books would only differ from those of other authors in that they also list what is not known. Yet he would never accept that something we do not know has to be taken out into the cosmos, that it will continue to be unknown until we explain it out of the cosmos.

You see, a rational medical practitioner here says, speaking in the terms of his discipline, that we cannot explain the human being with the means at our disposal; all we can do is to list the things we do not know. Unfortunately he persists in his refusal to consider something which does provide answers to these questions, questions he says concern the unknown, and of course the answers can only be provided slowly and gradually.

Thus the questions are there in ordinary science. Anthroposophy offers the answers to these questions. This is the truth. It is something we should stress over and over again, quite emphatically.

Moriz Benedikt believes that the bad habits to be found in his particular science are due to the fact that people know nothing of the unknown, offering to humanity what they know on the basis of facts established in the sense-perceptible world only. He gets quite sarcastic as he goes on to say: This scientific ineptitude flourishes today ... not his ineptitude, but that of his colleagues! as much as it did a thousand years ago; indeed it is worse than ever, since production has become so much faster.

He means to say that in earlier times it was not possible to publish one’s misdemeanours so quickly.

Every short-lived notion or undertaking is published so quickly nowadays that medical journalism only needs a “Hot Wire column”, and perhaps we may see the day when telephone booths are set up just to make sure that scientific “ideas" do not lie fallow even for nine minutes.

Publication took more years in the past than it takes hours today.

Oh, and Moriz Benedikt also knows what he thinks of the public, who listen to the medical profession and swear by them! He puts it simply in the following rhyme:

Miller, Brown, Smith and Read join in every heinous deed.

He then starts to reproach his colleagues again—the heinous deeds are theirs, of course—saying:

These unsatisfactory conditions in biology will not improve until a major reform in education starts with the teachers. Anyone unable to show that he has made a serious study of mathematics and mechanics is not fit to be a thinker or a scientist, let alone a teacher. Individual genius has always achieved much; it limps, however, and will go on limping until it has learned to walk first in the school of mathematics.

Not everyone who wants to listen to something sensible will need mathematics, of course. But to work with genuine science one does need to be trained in mathematical thinking. This is why Plato—Moriz Benedikt is very rude about him, by the way—wrote on the doors to his academy: Admittance only for those trained in mathematics. This does not prevent present-day philosophers, who have not been trained in mathematics, to write about Plato, of course. And we may truly say: Most of the people who write about Plato today would not have gained admittance to his academy if it still existed. You will see, from what I have read to you from Moriz Benedikt’s booklet, how modern scientific minds view something they themselves really ought to desire, and how someone who, whilst not an anthroposophist but a rather vain individual who has got into some conflict with his colleagues, has nevertheless had some faint notion of the harm that is done—how such a person judges the situation. Let us be very clear about this: The situation we have today is exactly as an unbiased observer with insight gained in anthroposophy is compelled to describe it. The proofs are to be found everywhere in the world of modern exoteric science, you must merely want to look for them.

What we must do, however, is to learn how to consider the human being in a way which physicists would consider perfectly sensible. I have already given you the analogy: If you study a compass needle and insist on saying it assumes a particular direction out of its own inherent powers, you will never understand why there are north-and south-pointing forces in the compass needle. We must understand that the whole earth has two forces, that the poles of the two forces are determined from outside. In the same way it is utterly wrong to put a human being on the dissecting table and decide to explain the whole of the human being’s nature on the basis of what lies inside the skin. We need the whole world to understand the outer and inner aspects of the human being.

• 25. Steiner is using a slightly unusual term here, which usually translated as “fulfilment”. For the translation I have largely used terms like “filling”, “that which fills them” or “which are filled”, but I felt the note should be sounded just once in this passage.
• 26. Steiner R. Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45). Tr. C. E. Creeger. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1996.
• 27. From the Greek “ho ton [long “o”] zodion [long “o”s] kyklos” = the circle of the sculptured figures of animals.
• 28. Benedikt, Moriz (1835–1920), Hypnotismus und Suggestion, Leipzig & Wien 1894.
• 29. Ettingshausen, Andreas, Freiherr von (1796–1857), mathematician and physicist.
• 30. Cauchy, August Louis (1789–1857), French mathematician.
• 31. Poisson, Siméon Denis (1781–1840), French mathematician and physicist.
• 32. Petzval, Joseph (1807–1891), Austrian mathematician and physicist.
• 33. Skoda, Joseph (1805–1881), physician; together with Rokitansky established the high reputation of the Viennese School in its heyday.

We have been considering the human form, human life, the inner life and the human spirit in relation to the cosmos. Looking back on the different aspects considered, we are able to produce a kind of extractof it all and say: Deep down in the to produce a kind of extract of it all and say: Deep down in the depths of human nature lies the will (Fig. 37).

In a number of ways it is the most “mysterious” element in human nature, if I may put it like this. When we think of the moral sphere, it inevitably strikes us that our aberrations, tendencies in us which are often entirely hostile to the world, arise from the moral sphere as if from unfathomable depths, and that all pricks of conscience and self-reproaches we may feel stream up from the depths of the will.

We also know that this sphere of the will is mysterious by nature because in many respects there is something indefinite about it, something over which we have little control. It is an element which pushes us hither and thither on the billows of life, and we are not always able to say that we relate to it with our conscious impulses. In another respect, relating to our understanding, I have always stressed that the true nature of the will impulse lies outside our conscious awareness, being at the same level as experiences made in deep, dreamless sleep. In this respect, too, will intent is an indefinite, mysterious element which has been poured into human nature.

Considering the human mind and spirit, we are not able to say that human beings have it only when awake, say, or consciously forming ideas; we also have it in sleep and in the part of us into which will intent have been poured and where we are in the equivalent of deep sleep. We can imagine, therefore, that mind and spirit are also present when we sleep.

With reference to our will intent, two things can be distinguished. In the first place there is the will intent which induces us to be active from the time we wake up until we go to sleep—unless, of course, we are real lay-abouts. We are unable to perceive the nature of this will intent, but its effects come to awareness because we are able to form ideas of them. We do not know how our will impulse works when we take a step, but we can see that we have taken a step forward. We form an idea about the effects of our will intent and in our waking life we thus have an idea and awareness of those effects. This is one aspect of our will intent.

Another aspect is that the will is active in us even while we sleep. Internal processes occurring while we sleep are also effected by the will. We merely do not perceive them. Just as the sun also shines at night—on the other half of the earth, where we do not live—so will intent streams through our inner nature while we sleep, though we are not aware of this. It does, however, show itself afterwards, when we look back on the state of sleep.

We may thus distinguish between two kinds of will intent, an inner and an outer one.

Our will intent may be said to be down in the ocean depths of soul, rising up in waves. Since we had to agree that it is active also during sleep, when our living body is merely involved in organic activity, with no soul element streaming through it nor the light of mind and spirit illumining it, we also have to say: Our sleeping will intent has to do with organic activity, for organic, or vital, processes occur in us that are essentially connected with the will. They continue when we are awake and our will intent is in full flow. Will intent is revealed in internal metabolic processes, another area where we can speak of organic activity.

Out of the depth of this will ocean in human nature rise the waves of what comes to expression in our feelings. We know that in feeling, human nature works at a dimmed-down level (Fig. 37), with the intensity of conscious awareness reduced to the level of dreams. It is, however, less dim than our will intent. Something from the depths of human nature rises up into the light. Human beings bring light into their inner nature through feeling. In the process, the two aspects of will intent rise up into the more intensive level of conscious awareness; both inner and outer will extent can rise up and come to conscious awareness.

We therefore distinguish two kinds of feeling. One is the feeling which rises up from the sphere of the will and is related to the sleeping state in us. It comes to expression mainly in the antipathies of which we have so many. The kind of will intent which makes us active in the outside world when it rises up into our feeling, bringing us together with the world in sympathy, comes to expression in all the sympathies we feel for the world. In this region of the soul, therefore, we have dreamlike feeling experience coming to expression in sympathy and antipathy, sympathies and antipathies which go all the way up to our feeling for beauty, sympathies and antipathies relating to forms in life, both man-made and natural forms, and also the sympathies and antipathies which we have thanks to our organs of smell or taste, as we perceive odours and tastes, finding them good or repellent. All this rich and varied activity is the actual activity of the soul. Will intent is therefore revealed in organic activity, feeling in soul activity (Fig. 37).

If we study soul life from this point of view we can learn a great deal. We perceive that the waking state rouses us to be in sympathy with the world around us. Our antipathies essentially come from more unconscious levels. They rise from the sleep level of our will. It is as if our sympathies were more on the surface and as if our antipathies entered into them from unknown depths. Antipathies reject. With them, we put the world around us at a distance, isolating and shutting ourselves off. Egotism is mainly based on antipathies rising up inside us. The more egotistical a person, the more is the element of antipathy active inside. Egotists want to isolate themselves and be as far as possible by themselves.

In ordinary life we are not aware of the interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the inner life. We do become aware of it when our relationship to the outside world becomes abnormal and our defensive reactions, using our antipathies which come from the realm of sleep, also become abnormal. This happens, for instance, when our breathing is out of balance during sleep and we have nightmares. Inwardly we experience this as antipathy used to defend us against something that wants to invade us, reducing the experience of our egoity.

We get a glimpse of deep secrets in human life. When someone develops very powerful antipathies which then also enter into waking life, antipathy may enter into everything, even the astral body. The astral body then lets antipathetic nature stream out in front, rather like an abnormal aura. It may happen that the individual feels even people with whom he normally has a neutral relationship to be antipathetic and indeed people he normally loves. All the different kinds of persecution mania arise from this kind of situation. When we experience antipathetic feelings that cannot be explained by external circumstances, they come from overflowing antipathies in the soul. The pole arising from the realm of sleep in the life of the soul has undergone abnormal development in this case.

If this antipathetic element gains the upper hand, we get someone who hates all the world. And this can go to extremes. All education and all work done together in the social sphere should be designed to prevent people from developing this hatred. But just consider, if the element which rises up from the depths of human nature can make people into such egotists when it becomes too powerful, what must the inner will intent be like which is at the sleep level and which is mercifully hidden from us! We never come to realize the all-pervading presence of this sleeping will intent in the whole of our organism and our limbs. At most, highly unusual dreams may make some people a little aware of what lives in the will intent which restores the organism when we are sleeping. This element—I have shown it from another point of view in earlier lectures³⁴—is rightly beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. When you come to know it, you come to know everything in human beings which can take them to an extreme degree of badness. It is a profound mystery of life that our organic activity is balanced out by powers which would make a person a criminal, a bad character, if they were to gain the upper hand in conscious life.

Nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. Something which is thoroughly evil when it comes up into conscious life, also regulates our organic functions and restores our used up powers of vitality during sleep, which is the right place for it to be used. If you enquire into the nature of the powers which restore used-up vitality, you have to say: It is evil. Evil has its function. When human beings gain spiritual insight and see this element it is an element about which spiritual scientists of earlier times also said: Its true nature must not be described, for sinful are the lips which utter it, sinful the ears which hear it. People must know, however, that life is a dangerous process and that evil is very much present down in the depths, a much-needed power.

The waves also rise higher than this, into the forming of ideas. When the sleeping inner will intent which brings light in the sphere of feeling rises into the forming of ideas, light is shed, but at the same time the quality of our ideas is reduced through abstraction. Feelings of antipathy still have living intensity in human experience. When they rise up into the sphere of ideas, they live in all the negative, dismissive attitudes people have (Fig. 37). Everything we dismiss in this way, every “negative judgement”, as logicians call it, is due to antipathetic feeling, or sleeping will intent, rising up into the life of ideas.

When the sympathetic feelings which have their origin in wide awake, outside-related will intent, rise into the sphere of ideas we get positive attitudes. As you can see, we now have merely abstract images. In our feelings of sympathy and antipathy we still have something very much alive. In the opinion-based attitudes formed in the sphere of ideas we are standing still, as it were, and observing the world. We take a positive or negative stance. We are not as intensely involved as in antipathy, we merely say no. This is an abstract process. Instead of developing the heat of antipathy we simply say no. Instead of developing the warmth of sympathy we say yes. In contemplative calm we are above any relationship to the outside world to the point of forming an abstract judgement. Activity is merely at image level, therefore, and we are able to say, especially in the light of what was said yesterday: Here (Fig. 37) is the activity of mind and spirit, but will intent, feeling and judgement, or the forming of ideas, rise even further, into the sphere of the senses. What becomes of a negative opinion when it enters into the sphere of the senses? It becomes a situation where we perceive nothing. In terms of the most notable form of sensory perception, vision, we may call it a situation in which we see nothing and experience darkness: Experience of darkness. A positive judgement on the other hand means experience of light. We might of course just as well speak of experience of dumbness, experience of sound, etc. We could put this into words for every one of the twelve senses.

We may now ask ourselves what kind of activity we have in the sphere of the senses. We have considered organic activity, activity of the soul, and activity of mind and spirit. The last of these is entirely image-based, but still our own activity. The processes which occur between our senses and the outside world, on the other hand, really are no longer our own activity, for the world is influencing us. It is perfectly possible to draw the eye schematically, making it an independent entity, as it were. What happens in the eye is that the outside world penetrates into the organism as if through a bay. Here we are not engaged in our own activity in the world, but our position in the world is such that we may say: It is the activity of the gods. This is active throughout the whole world around us which in darkness inclines towards negative judgement and in light inclines towards positive judgement. Wise minds of the second post-Atlantean age had a particularly strong feeling for this activity of the gods influencing human beings in their relationship to the world. They had a powerful feeling for God in the light and God in the dark. God in the light is the divine principle with luciferic bias, God in the dark with ahrimanic bias. This is how people of the ancient Persian civilization experienced the world around them. To them, the sun represented that outside world—Sun as source of divine Light: second post-Atlantean age.

The sphere which lies between judgement and feeling was the main sphere of experience for the third post-Atlantean civilization, which is the Egyptian and Chaldean civilization. People then experienced the divine principle not so much in light and darkness outside but in the area where ideas come together with feelings. The influence of the gods on Egyptians and Chaldeans caused people to pour something of their antipathies into their negative judgements and something of their sympathies into their positive attitudes. We need to be able to read the images and other documents which have survived from that period to see how everything arose from positive sympathies and negative antipathies. Looking at figures from Egyptian tombs and elsewhere you can sense something in them that was artistically created out of positive sympathies and negative antipathies. You cannot create a sphinx without bringing in ideas alive with sympathy and antipathy. People then experienced not only light and darkness but the living quality inherent in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. The Sun was experienced as the source of divine Life.

During Greco-Latin times people had largely lost the direct connection with the outside world. In my Riddles of Philosophy³⁵ I have shown how people still experienced thoughts the way we experience sensory perceptions today but were gradually progressing to the state in which we are today. Due to I development, we essentially no longer have a real relationship to the outside world in which our I is in effect asleep in the body, and we tend towards the sleeping state. This was not so highly developed in ancient Greece, though it had already become quite powerful. The ancient Persians had not entered deeply into their physical nature. They did not really see themselves living fully in their bodies, particularly if they were sages. It was their belief that they moved and were active throughout the whole universe on the waves of light. The ancient Greeks had already reached a stage where they were asleep inside their bodies where this cosmic aspect was concerned. When we are actually asleep, our I and astral body are outside us; but compared to the wakefulness of the ancient Persians, even our waking state is one of sleep. The wakefulness, or let us say the “waking up”, of the ancient Persians which I have characterized in my Occult Science was like entering into the human senses, with light itself coming in at the same time.

We are no longer aware of the fact that on awakening we bring light into our eyes. Light is a shadowy element outside us. This meant that the Greeks were no longer able to perceive the sun as the true source of life but as something which penetrated them inwardly. To them, the element in which the sun lives inwardly in human beings was the element of Eros, love. Eros, the sun-element in man, was the true inner experience of the Greeks. Thus the sun was seen as the source of divine love.

Then, from about the 4th century onwards—I have spoken of various aspects of its specific nature on other occasions—came the age when the sun was experienced as no more than a physical body, a sphere of vapour, out there in space. The sun had, in fact, become obscured for humanity. Persians truly felt the sun to be the reflector of the light which billowed and lived in space with tremendous vigour. The Egyptians and Chaldeans saw it as life billowing and pulsing through the universe. The Greeks experienced it as something which instilled love into organic nature, as Eros guiding them through the waves of the emotions. Entering more and more into the human being, experience of the sun vanished into the deep down depths of soul. Today we carry the sun element down in those depths. We are not meant to reach it, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it, and because it is in the depths of which it was said in the ancient mysteries that no utterance should be given, for sinful were the lips which uttered it, and sinful the ear which heard it. Schools existed in the 4th century who essentially taught, to allow Christianity to spread: The Sun Mystery must not be revealed; a civilization has to come where the Sun Mystery is not known.

Behind everything which happens in the physical world are the inner powers which, I’d say, are teaching out of the universe. The Roman emperor Constantine (306–337) was one of the instruments of those powers. Under him, Christianity took the form in which the sun is denied.

Another emperor, Julian the Apostate,³⁶ took less account of developments in his day but let himself be guided by his enthusiasm for the last remnants of the old instinctive wisdom learned from his mystery teachers. He was murdered because he sought to restore the old tradition of the threefold Sun Mystery. The world did not want to take that road.

Today we have to realize that the old, instinctive wisdom needs to be revived in conscious wisdom. Wisdom which has gone down to subconscious levels, into mere organic, and even sub-organic, activity needs to be brought back to consciousness. The Sun Mystery must be found again.

When the Sun Mystery was in the process of being lost, Julian, who still wanted the world to be aware of it, made the most terrible enemies who finally killed him. Today we have enemies who are against the new Sun Mystery which anthroposophy must give to the world. Historical evolution now follows the opposite trend. The 4th century brought the decline; today we need the rise.

In this respect Constantine and Julian are symbols of historical evolution. Julian may be said to have stood on the shattered ruins of the past, wanting to rebuild the forms of the old wisdom out of those ruins. The old forms had been destroyed by Christianity, which initially, under Constantine, had taken materialistic form. Countless works of art, works of ancient wisdom and written works were destroyed, anything that might give people even a hint of the old Sun Mystery.

It is true that in order to achieve freedom, humanity had to come to believe that a sphere of gases moved through the universe out there, though physicists who would be able to go there would be really surprised, for instead of a sphere of gases they would find an empty space, indeed less than space. They would discover that the sun out there is not a sphere of luminous gases—which is a nonsense—but in the first place just a reflector (Fig. 39), unable to radiate light and at most merely reflecting it. In the spirit, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the moon radiate light. Physically the sun appears to be shining on them, but in reality they radiate light towards the sun, which acts as a reflector. This is the physical reality. The ancient Persians were still able to perceive the sun as the source of light for the earth, but not an actual source but a reflector. Later it became the reflector of life and the reflector of love.

Julian the Apostate wanted people to understand this and was got rid off because of this. To achieve freedom, humanity had to go through superstitious belief in a sphere of gases radiating light—something we see represented as the absolute truth in modern physics textbooks. Now we must penetrate to the truth of the matter again.

In this respect, therefore, Constantine and Julian are very much like two symbols. Julian wanted to preserve the old traditions so that the true Sun Mystery might still reach people. During the early centuries, the Christ was still an Apollo or Sun figure.

The Sun Mystery was seen as the most precious jewel humanity possessed. It was symbolized in the Palladium,³⁷ which was said to have been kept in Troy, where the mystery priests used it to reveal the true nature of the sun to people in ritual, sacramental form. It was then taken to Rome, and part of the secret knowledge held by Roman initiates was that the Palladium was in safe keeping in Rome. Essentially the initiate priests of ancient Rome, and also the early emperors of Rome, above all Augustus,³⁸ based their actions on the knowledge that the greatest jewel the world possessed, or at least its physical symbol, was in Rome. The Palladium had been placed beneath the foundations of the most highly esteemed temple in Rome, a fact only known to those who knew the deepest secrets of Roman life. Through the spirit, it had, however, also become known to those whose role it was to bring Christianity to the world. The early Christians went to Rome because of this. So there was a definite spiritual element.

When Christianity was secularized under Constantine, the Palladium was removed from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople and had the Palladium put in the ground under the column he erected to himself. The further development of Roman Christianity was that the Sun mystery was taken away by the very emperor who established the rigid forms, rigid mechanisms, of Christianity in Rome. With this, Christendom has lost the wisdom of the world, the outward sign of this being the transfer of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In some parts of the Slavonic world—people always put their own interpretation on this—it was believed until the beginning of the 20th century that in the not too far distant future the Palladium would be taken from Constantinople to another city, in their belief a Slav city.

Whichever way this may be, the Palladium—you may take the whole as an outer symbol, but it is the inner aspect which matters—is waiting to go forth from Constantinople, which is casting darkness on it, to a place where it will be totally obscured. The Palladium is thus taken to the East, where the old wisdom lives in decadence and growing obscurity. Just as the Sun is a reflector of light given to it from the universe, everything depends on it in the further evolution of the world that the Palladium be illumined by a wisdom arising from the treasury of insight gained in the West. The Palladium, heirloom of the past taken from Troy to Rome and then to Constantinople, and to be taken even further into the darkness of the East, the Palladium, jewel of the Sun, must wait until in the West grows in mind and spirit and is able to release it from the dark, obscured treasury of insight limited to the natural world. Our mission for the future is thus linked to the most sacred tradition of European development.

To this day, then, legends are still alive for those initiated into these mysteries, some of them very plain, simple people who walk about on this earth. Legends are still alive of the Trojan Palladium being taken to Rome, of the Palladium jewel of wisdom, being taken to Constantinople when Roman Christianity became worldly and superficial, and that it shall be taken to the East one day when all the old wisdom will have been stripped away in the East, having fallen into utter decadence, and legends that speak of the need to bring new light from the West to this Sun jewel.

The Sun has vanished into the depths of human nature. We have to find it again by developing the science of the spirit. Humanity must find this Sun again, or the Palladium will vanish into the obscurity of the East. Today it is sinful to utter words that are wrong: “Ex oriente lux”. The light can no longer come from the East, which has fallen into decadence. Yet the East, which will have the Sun jewel, however obscured, is waiting for the light of the West. Today, people walk in the darkness, arrange to meet in the dark, their eyes turned to—Washington.³⁹ Salvation, however, will only come from Washingtons able to speak out of the mood of the spiritual world in such a way that they not only open economic gates for China, looking for the darkness which surrounds the Palladium. Salvation will only come when conferences held in the West decide to take light to the East, letting the Palladium shine out again. Like a fluorescent body, the Palladium in itself is dark; it shines out when light streams into it. The same holds true for the wisdom of the East. Dark in itself, it will be illumined and fluoresce when the wisdom of the West, the light of the spirit from the West, enters into it.

The people of the West are as yet unable to see this. The legend of the Palladium needs to be placed in the bright light of consciousness. We must feel the right kind of compassion for Julian the Apostate who wanted to close his eyes to the age when the light of freedom would be able to germinate in the darkness, who wanted to preserve the instinctive wisdom of old and therefore had to perish. We have to realize that Constantine took the light of wisdom from the Romans by giving them a worldly Christianity, sending Christianity into the darkness. We have to realize that the light which will let the Palladium shine out again must be sought in modern science. Only then will an important step in world history come to fulfilment. Only then will the Palladium, which became Western the moment the Greeks burned down Troy and which still holds the light that shone from Troy, become Western and Eastern. It is now in the dark and must be brought out of the dark. Light must be brought to the Palladium.

We can win enthusiasm from historical evolution if our hearts are in the right place. If they are, in the sense of what I have been presenting today, we shall also be able to find the right response to the impulses which are the true impulses of the science of the spirit.

I’ll continue with this on Friday.

• 34. See the lectures given on 23 and 24 September 1921—Cosmosophy Vol. 1. (GA 207)
• 35. Steiner R. Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18), tr. by F. C. A. Koelln. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 36. Flavius Claudius Julianus (c. 331–363), half-brother of Constantine, Roman emperor (361–363).
• 37. In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an image of the goddess Pallas Athene which had come from heaven and was “the luck of Troy”. Stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes, it was thought to be in Argos, Athens or Sparta. According to the Romans, Anaeas had taken it to Rome.
• 38. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), first Roman emperor.
• 39. Washington Conference (21 November 1921 - 6 February 1922) to discuss naval disarmament and the Far East. Led among other things to American-British-French-Japanese agreement to guarantee each other’s territories and a collective guarantee of China’s independence.

In recent weeks we have been considering the human being from all kinds of different points of view, with the aim of getting a better idea of complex human nature and the relationship of the human being to the world.

Let us begin by recalling something very simple, something we know about the elemental aspects: the fact that in the present world cycle, the human being has four effective aspects—physical body, ether body, astral body and I. Let us also consider how these four essentially manifest. We have to say that the I mainly comes to revelation in all expressions of the human will. When we sleep, the will is essentially at rest. In other words: the will principle does not then come to expression through the physical organization. The I is outside the physical body when we sleep. The fact that the will principle does not come to expression reveals to us that the I is then not present in the physical body.

The activity of the astral body essentially can be observed in the whole sphere of feelings. The astral body is also outside the human being in sleep, when the sphere of feelings moves to the dim, dark part of the conscious mind. Consciousness is altogether silent in sleep, and we may thus be in some doubt as to what really comes to revelation through the physical body and the ether body. Let us leave this aside for the moment. The physical body is the most obvious part of the human being. Even someone not able to have imaginative vision can perceive the reality of the ether body in a number of ways. For the moment, however, let us leave aside the physical and the etheric from the point of view we have just taken of the I as the will aspect and the astral as the feeling aspect.

If we follow a person’s life from morning to evening, in the waking state, the I and astral body are at work in the physical and ether bodies with regard to will and feelings. Taking all the inner experiences arising in the waking state, we have first of all the world of sensory perceptions, which are bound to the physical body. We also have the world of thoughts and ideas as the consequence of sensory perception. We know very well that our world of ideas in the waking state has elements of will and feeling in it.

We have often stressed that in the sphere of the soul it is easy to make the abstract distinction between ideas, feelings and will elements. But in reality these three inner activities blend into each other. We can sense the will element in the linking or separating of ideas. We can also perceive that the idea is imbued with feeling. We can feel ourselves in sympathy with one idea and perhaps in antipathy with another. Let us now turn to the I and the astral body as they leave the living body on going to sleep. They leave something behind in the physical world which, while it does not appear at first sight to be the same as plant life, essentially is nevertheless like it, for it has a physical and an ether body just like a plant. In our astral principle we have something which comes to outward revelation in the animal world, and in our I we have something which emerges in the specifically human form, thus also coming to outward revelation. Since, however, I and astral body are outside the physical and ether bodies from when we go to sleep until we wake up again, we cannot say that this human form or animal nature is part of the inner nature of I and astral body. We have to realize that I and astral body do not come to revelation in that case; when I and astral body are on their own, during sleep, they cannot reveal themselves to the physical world in a way perceptible to the senses or to the rational mind.

I and astral body are therefore entirely beyond sensory perception. Now we also know that when we look at something in the plant world, we are not at all inclined to see it the way we see a human being. Looking at a human being we are interested in the moral element, for instance, whether the individual is good or bad. This means that there is no point in thinking in terms of good or evil with reference to the physical and ether body, the principles which remain in the physical world when we have gone to sleep. The whole human moral element is brought back when we wake up and I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies.

Even people who do not have higher vision may take this as a sign that I and astral body have to do with what we call “the moral world order”. Our physical and ether bodies soak this up, as it were, as we wake up. And it is in no way absurd for those who do not have higher vision to say: Essentially, I and astral body belong to a completely different world, for the physical and ether bodies are neutral when it comes to being good or evil, just as plants are. I and astral body take moral responsibility into them.

Even those who do not achieve higher vision through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy, but whose thinking relates to everyday life, will be able to realize that we are dealing with polar opposites here: physical body and ether body inclined to nature-given form, and I and astral body inclined to moral form. To take this further, however, we will need to draw on observations made through higher vision. When we use this to study the I and the astral body in the world to which they belong between going to sleep and waking up, they are seen to have the world of the spirit as their environment just as the natural world is the environment of the physical body. I and astral body bring the inner mortality to human beings from the world of the spirit. As the physical and ether bodies are morally neutral, they cannot possibly draw on them for moral impulses. They do in truth gain the moral impulses from the world in which they are between going to sleep and waking up.

In the science of the spirit, the following is said with regard to this: When human beings leave their physical and ether bodies on going to sleep, they meet, without being aware of it, the spiritual entities of the world, presenting to them all the inner morality they developed when conscious in their physical and ether bodies. They are compelled to let the world of soul and spirit work on the moral elements they have brought. This brings us to a different aspect of something we have often considered in our efforts to build a bridge between etheric and physical worlds on one hand and moral and spiritual worlds on the other.

The I has will quality. It develops its whole structure and constitution between waking up and falling asleep in the physical and ether bodies. When we go to sleep, the I meets the entities of the spiritual world. Here, as people walking around in the physical world, we perceive solid bodies with our organs of touch; we see colours, we use sensory perception. We relate to the physical forces of the world in a specific way The I also enters into a specific relationship to the powers of the world where it lives between going to sleep and waking up. Let me present this in graphic form It can only be schematic, of course. Let us say this is the physical man being in the process of going to sleep (Fig. 40, yellow).

This, which I am drawing here, is the ether body which fills the human being. If I were to draw the human being in the waking state, I’d have to draw in the astral body and the I. I am not going to do so, because I want to characterize the condition of going to sleep. The will element, that is, the I, meets the entities of the spiritual world.

It relates to them in the way we relate to physical entities with our physical body when awake. The relationship between the will-related I and the entities of the spiritual world is, however, much more real than the maya-like relationship which the physical body has with its environment. The relationship in sleep comes to expression above all in the following way, more or less, I can only put these things into images for you): When the I is in touch with the powers of the spiritual entities between going to sleep and waking up, everything evil in our state of soul makes the I waste away; everything good allows the will-related I to develop in freedom.

Showing this in graphic form we arrive at a specific form of the spiritual, will-related I form as it leaves the body (remember, these are only images). With regard to the human being of limbs, the I is quite intensely inside the human being even during sleep. Let me show it like this: These furrowed lines (light-coloured) have evolved from counter activities of the spiritual entities, their form depending entirely on the moral constitution. We may indeed say that the 1 assumes a spiritual form based on its moral constitution as it enters the world of the spirit.

When we go to sleep, the astral body also goes into the world outside us which is a world of soul quality. The will-related I meets the entities of the spiritual world, the feeling-related astral body enters into the soul sphere outside us.

The constitution of our will, with reference to good and evil, also has elements, or powers, of feeling in it. We merely have to recall the different feeling mood we have after doing a good deed compared to after doing something bad. 1 need only mention the whole sphere of self-reproach and inner satisfaction and you can see how our moral constitution is imbued with feeling. The feeling element as a whole enters the soul sphere when we fall asleep, and this enters into a relationship with the soul world outside. When we are awake we relate to the physical world around us through our ideas and in doing so develop the inner life of feelings—though the life of feeling merely connects with the life of ideas inside us. When we are asleep, our feeling-related astral principle makes direct contact with the astral world.

It is not given form, however. The will-related I is given form (I have shown this by drawing furrowed lines). Interaction between the astral body and the soul environment results in something I cannot draw as furrowing. I have to call it colouring, imbuing the astral body. To draw it I would, according to whether we are full of self-reproach or inner satisfaction, feelings of sympathy and antipathy, show the astral coloured by something with schematically may be shown as a particular colour (Fig. 41, reddish, blue).

Through the I, therefore, our higher nature is given form, and the astral is coloured through and through. This is of course a schematic way of putting it. It is perfectly justifiable to express these processes in colour images, but it has to be said that only part of the process can be expressed in this way. Instead of colouring the image I might just as well have all kinds of musical instruments at hand, for instance, and give expression to the above in combinations of sounds. One might even bring in qualities of taste. All this whirls and swirls together in the astral body when it is outside the physical body between going to sleep and waking up.

The situation is such, however, that the direction of the effective powers which bring about everything I have drawn, really derive, seen in schematic form, from the human being of limbs and metabolism. The spiritual entities and the soul world giving form and colour are working from below upwards, as it were.

If we try to discover the true nature of that which is given form and colour outside the human being between going to sleep and waking up, we finally arrive at the following. Between waking up and going to sleep the human form is complete, with I, astral body, ether body and physical body forming an interrelated whole. This goes hand in hand with a specific intensity of conscious awareness which is intellectual and has qualities of feeling and will. Compared to it, the element which is outside during sleep has an infantile quality. We think of a child’s dimmed-down state of consciousness, something we can only come close to when our consciousness is filled with dreams. Now imagine the child’s dimmed-down consciousness becoming even less developed—this would be closer to the nature of what is outside us during sleep. We might say: The element which is outside the human being during sleep is more infantile than the mind and spirit of a child.

What is the real nature of the element of human soul and spirit which lives outside during sleep? In the light of spiritual science, the determining factor is characteristically seen to come from the human being of limbs and metabolism. Studying what can be observed through higher vision one has the feeling—which gradually grows into the definite realization—that by taking this whole aspect here to be a photographic negative and visualizing the positive, we actually get the structure of the human brain. The scale is not the same, but if you see it as a negative and visualize the positive you get the human brain.

Think back to the various aspects I have presented. I have said that the structure of the human head in one particular life inwardly, in the structure of its powers, represents the individual from the previous life on earth, minus the head. What you are today contains the powers your head will have in your next life on earth. We see the same thing in what a human being puts into the outside world between going to sleep and waking up, except that it is infantile, childlike in form and, of course, converted into a negative.

Between going to sleep and waking up human beings in fact put an image into the world of what will incarnate into a physical form in their next life on earth. This is extraordinarily significant. If we now recall that it is the moral constitution of the soul which determines this form and coloration (Fig. 41), we must consider the powers inherent in the human head in the next life on earth to be the embodiment of the moral constitution of the soul in the present life. Since the powers of the human being come to expression in our ability to think and form ideas, this ability will therefore be the outcome of our moral constitution of soul in the present life. All of this exists as an image in what human beings put into the outside world on going to sleep.

In the light of the science of the spirit it would thus be fair to say: During the night, when we are asleep, we put a quite specific question to another world, the world of the spirit. We do not do this consciously but with a part of us that moves out of the physical and ether bodies at that time. The question we put is: How does my moral constitution of soul appear to the entities in the world of the spirit?

And we are given an answer which consists in the shaping of the furrows and the colouring we are given, both in accord with our moral constitution of soul. Every morning we enter into our physical and etheric bodies on waking up with an answer gained in the world of soul and spirit. Going to sleep, we always unconsciously ask a question; waking up, the answer is given at the unconscious level from the world of the spirit. At that level, we are all the time in dialogue with the world of the spirit, gathering there the answers which tell us the true state of our inner nature.

This allows you to see something which otherwise is always extraordinarily abstract. You see, when we speak of our conscience, this is something very real to us; yet when we are asked to speak of the specific nature of our conscience we immediately become rather vague. With reference to our moral impulses, conscience is something of which we have a real inner experience. Yet if we use the methods of ordinary science to reflect on conscience, we fall into chaos and are unable to arrive at anything definite. Here you are given something definite, which is, that your moral constitution of soul wins a continuous response from the world of the spirit. You bring the forms developed by the world of the spirit into your physical and etheric reality, and with this you bring the voice of conscience to it. In waking life, the answer given in form and colour is transformed into the voice of conscience. In fact we depend on the sleep state for everything we have by way of inner moral attitude.

Many examples have been given of the greater wisdom inherent in the instinctive perception of earlier times and the instinctive perception, which are not intellectual; it is greater than our modern science, though it takes the form of images. The moral principles of instinctive perception contain much of what comes back to us again through the true science of the spirit, though it is now clearer, more transparent and defined. One of the principles which is part of popular belief is that if someone has offended you, do not take your inner reaction to this through sleep but if at all possible settle the matter before you go to sleep. Do not take your anger through sleep, therefore, but try to calm it before you go to sleep.

When you know that going to sleep means you are putting a question to the world of the spirit and that waking up is the answer to your question, you will be able to say to yourself: The answer you receive from the world of the spirit and take into your physical body as you wake up will be different if you moderated your anger the night before, or reduced the offence you felt, than if you take the feelings of offence into sleep and put your question out of injured feelings or in such anger that the fire of your anger fills the whole question. If you take an angry mood into the world of the spirit it is as if a stream of volcanic fire were to pour into that world. The soul world outside then has to colour this stream of volcanic fire (Fig. 41, reddish). This is very different from the situation where you have let your anger go down before going to sleep.

The effects of much of what I have said here can be seen not only in the human heart and mind but also in the way physical life and the life of the internal organs, is tuned. The causes of many diseases lie in the questions we receive to the answers we unconsciously put to the spiritual world as we go to sleep. In the waking state, our physical and etheric organs have to deal fully with everything the will-related I and the feeling-related astral body bring with them from the world of the spirit as we wake up.

It is quite wrong to think we have lots of experiences when awake but none in our sleep. When awake we experience processes that mostly take place between ourselves and the physical outside world. Satisfaction feit about these processes accompanies our clear perception of our relationship to the world rather like an inner dream in heart and mind—you will remember that the feeling element only has dream-level intensity of consciousness. When we are between going to sleep and waking up, however, considerable inner activity goes an in the I and astral body: The will-related I is given form, the feeling-imbued astral body is imbued with the powers of the outside world of soul and spirit. These real, factual processes penetrate and stream through the physical and ether bodies, and the way we behave in the physical world is determined by this. We do more for our inner life during sleep than we do in our waking hours. 011 the other hand, what we do when asleep depends an those waking hours. I'd say that the whole significance of sleep essentially lies not only in physical experience but in the moral structure of our inner nature.

I have shown on a number of occasions that superficial ideas about the way in which the human physical and ether bodies relate to the process of going to sleep are wrong. It is usually said that human beings grow tired because they use their limbs, because they work, and they need to sleep to make up for this. Merely to remember that we do not always go to sleep because we are tired will put us on the right track. Think of the well-rested retired gentleman who may go to a lecture, for instance, because it is the done thing; he’ll usually be fast asleep after the first five minutes, which is hardly due to his being tired.

Considering the superficial experiences to be gained in this field, we come to realize that people generally confuse cause and effect in this instance. We are in fact tired because we want to go to sleep. The impulse to go to sleep is a much more inward one than the physical tiredness which is its counterpart. When the outside world offers nothing of interest, the longing arises to withdraw from it. Soul and spirit then leave the living physical body, which grows tired. We grow tired because we want to go to sleep, not the other way round. Anyone can see this, if they have the will to do so. It is of course extraordinarily difficult to accept the truth of things that are so closely bound up with people’s self-satisfied life interest. But if we are prepared to accept truth, we will reach the point where we do not merely see going to sleep as a physical and physiological process, but consider it in relation to the whole cosmos which, as I have shown from many different points of view, also contains the moral impulses as real impulses, not just mere words. The alternation between sleeping and waking thus shows us how a bridge can be built between the physical and the moral elements in our world order.

Du Bois-Reymond,⁴⁰ the physiologist who gave that famous lecture on the limits of natural science, once said: “It is utterly beyond us to grasp the human being as he is in waking life.” Well, we know what to think of such a statement. Du Bois-Reymond believes, however, that it is possible for us to grasp the sleeping human being. According to him, the laws and relationship of the physical world outside, which we are able to grasp, also pertain to the sleeping human being, only in a more complex fashion. We know this to be incorrect, but let us merely consider the statement, which is, that we can have scientific understanding of the sleeping human being, but not of the waking human being.

So here a scientist is admitting that we cannot use the tools of science to discover what pervades the whole human being in the waking sate, and that the sleeping individual as a physical entity looks very different from an individual who is awake even in the eyes of scientists.

Scientists know nothing, of course, of the will-related I and feeling-related astral body which leave the human being for the non-physical world. But this “nothing”, what is it in the light of our present study? It is something which belongs to the moral world order. The activity of the moral principle is a real world which begins at the very point where people taking the scientific approach cease their observations. After waking up, the real effects of the moral principle show themselves only in the inner constitution of the human being. To enter into the sphere where moral reality is to be found we must therefore consider the world in which human beings live between waking up and going to sleep. It is not surprising, therefore, that people who take the scientific view and do not enter into this world only know a real world which does not contain the moral impulses and therefore relegate moral impulses to the realm of pure belief.

Such belief, however, becomes insight as real as that achieved by the followers of the scientific approach once we turn our attention to the other sphere. Our discussion will, of course, have to be based on completely different premises if we want to consider this sphere of spirit and soul imbued with moral principles.

If my drawing represented something from the physical world, I would have to base myself on the physical. My drawing would be an image of this, and we would progress from external reality to something which is merely image. We have to take the opposite route if we want to represent the non-physical. We have to experience it inwardly and then go outside and represent inward experience in an image. This kind of inward experience is extremely mobile and I should really show this colouring as glittering and gleaming, shifting and changing, growing luminous and fading away again, which is exactly what the spiritual scientist observes when considering the human being as a whole.

If one gains a vision of the astral body and I during sleep—I am trying to be extremely accurate here—the form given to the I and the colouring given to the astral body is bright and distinct. When I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies, this bright, glittering and gleaming principle grows dark and dull. Outside the body the I aspect has definite contours; inside the body it grows indefinite. You get quite a specific feeling when you watch the I and astral body becoming submerged in the physical and ether bodies on waking. To use abstract words to describe this, means expressing oneself rather clumsily as a rule. It is however possible to define it relatively clearly. Observing the process you have a feeling which is rather like being aware of the coming of autumn and winter and letting this influence your soul. To consider the waking-up process in terms of the whole human being is to enter into a mood like that experienced with the coming of winter. Going to sleep, with the spirit and soul principles going outside the human being, you experience an inner mood similar to the one experienced with the coming of spring and summer. It is indeed the case that you enter into something very special here.

Dear friends, for several weeks I have tried to show how by taking the approach of spiritual science we come to see the human in relationship to the whole cosmos. I have shown you the human form in its relationship to the world of the fixed stars, and the levels of human life in relation to the world of the planets. Considering the human being in the light of spiritual science, we are always taken outside the human being. Today we have considered the alternating states of waking and sleeping; entering into them with inner feeling, we are again taken outside the human being, this time not into the world of the stars but into the world of time. So we said to ourselves: We understand the waking-up process if we understand the coming of autumn and winter; we understand the process of going to sleep if we understand the coming of spring and summer. From the progress of time in the human being we are taken into the progress of time in the cosmos, into the changing seasons. The human being is seen to be an image also of what happens in time. In the preceding weeks we endeavoured to see the human being as an image of the macrocosm more in terms of space.

We thus relate the human being to the world, and understand him in terms of the world. And then the moral world order also becomes reality for us and not a world of empty words. If we enter into everything we are able to feel in considering our relationship to the world, religious impulses enter into our ethical and moral world. The ethical will then comes to express the divine will which reigns in the human being, and the ethical and moral sphere is lifted up into the ethical and religious sphere. This is how anthroposophy as science of the spirit seeks to find the way to the ethical and religious. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 40. Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), German physiologist born in Berlin of French parentage, professor of physics at Berlin. The lecture referred to was published in Leipzig in 1916.

Yesterday we concentrated on the condition of the human astral body and I between going to sleep and waking up. Let us pick up the thread again. I said that if we consider the human physical and ether body during sleep and compare this to the I and astral body we have to say: The will-endowed or will-related I is given form out of the relationship it develops to the spirits of the other world during sleep. Using a diagram to show the I being given form, I said that if we see the furrowing given to the I (Fig. 42, light colour - white in diagram) as a kind of photographic negative—ignoring aspects of scale—the structure of the human brain would be like the Positive. The astral body would have to be envisaged as coloured by the soul element in its environment; I have shown this schematically by using a number of different colours (Fig. 43).

As I said yesterday, this does not cover the behaviour of the physical and ether bodies during sleep. Let us add this today. The human physical body is seemingly known in modern science, but it really and truly is only seemingly. Scientists take little account of the great difference between the human being in limbs and metabolism and the human being in the head. The constitution of the head person is a reflection of what the individual has been between death and rebirth. Again all aspects of scale are left aside.

Modern scientists take the structure of the physical brain to derive from the paternal and maternal organizations. Considering the matter from a number of different points of view, we have already realized that this is not the case. Put somewhat crudely and in radical terms, human beings develop in the physical world because initially substance is thrown into chaos in the maternal body. Into this chaotic matter, which is now outside the laws of both chemistry and physics, the powers to make the embryo what it will be are implanted out of the universe. The powers the individual has gained in the time between death and rebirth are inoculated, if I may put it like this, into these powers. The way I’d really like to put it is: With regard to form, the human being is implanted in the maternal body. Only the bed for the new human being is created in the maternal body, and the universe is constituted in such a way that if the opportunity is created for something specific to evolve, then this specific something will evolve.

The inner structure of the human head is such that in the first place it reflects what has been furrowed and coloured here during the previous life on earth, but in addition the whole universe may also be said to be re-created in this head. Modern science really does not have a very good grasp of the process by which insight and perception is gained. It is better to say: The complexity of the human brain really is a recreation of the universe. The form principles existing in the head cannot be penetrated by the 1 and astral body. They live an independent life in the human head, as I have shown before. Human beings know themselves to be I and astral body exactly because these two have an independent life. I and astral body can really only connect with the human being in limbs and metabolism. There they flourish, making us essentially into will-endowed creatures. This means that the human being of limbs and metabolism is essentially the dwelling place of the principle which on death returns to the world of the spirit. That world receives the individual human I and astral body and takes them onwards to new stages of existence. The human head, on the other hand, holds everything that comes from earlier lives, and from lives between death and rebirth, elements which have taken form in the head organization, as it were, and made themselves at home in it. The human head relates to the past, the human limbs and metabolism to the future. The rhythmical human being moves to and fro between past and future.

We need to see the physical human being in this light if we are to understand the form and structure of the limbs and their inner life. We then understand why the organization of the head is actually always breaking down, paralysing itself, whilst the organization of limbs and metabolism is always building itself up. We shall also understand why the organization of limbs and metabolism has to be connected with the chemical and physical nature of the earth, a connection which comes to expression in nutrition.

The human being of limbs and metabolism takes in elements which have a real need to develop further. In waking life, however, this human being needs to reckon with the forces that come from the earth itself. In this aspect we are subject to the earth’s gravity and to other earth forces. We are subject to the forces which enter into us with the food we eat. In this regard, therefore, we may be said to be entirely creatures of the earth. The evolution of form in limbs and metabolism had no part in what the individual lived through between death and rebirth, before entering into the present life on earth. This is the reason why the human being of limbs and metabolism also is not able to adapt to the spiritual universe outside when we are awake in life. In the waking state this aspect of the human being is given up to the physical earth.

This is not the case during sleep, however, for the human head contains the form principles of everything connected with the individual’s past, including life between death and rebirth. The forms of the organs in the human head contain subtle, fleeting images of the whole cosmos.

In waking life, the head, being all these images of the universe, is not able to influence the human being of limbs and metabolism. As the seat of the major sense organs, the head is continuously communicating with the earth world outside. In waking life, everything we see or hear influences us via the head. During sleep, the human head is not merely provided with physical nourishment. Physical nutrition, which essentially also happens in waking life, is not what matters most; something else is most essential for the human physical body during sleep.

The eye, for example, is not only the organization which provides for vision but at the same time it is also an image of the spiritual powers of the cosmos. Between death and rebirth the individual lives in the cosmos of soul and spirit. Like all organs in the head, the eye has a double function. The first is to enable communication with the outside world through vision, which happens during waking life. In the life of sleep, the eye and its surrounding parts, above all the surrounding nerves and blood, influence the physical organism in its metabolic and limb aspects. The powers of the eye closed in sleep influence the kidney system, for example, imbuing it with the cosmic image. Other organs in the head imprint other aspects of the cosmos on the human system of metabolism and limbs. For the physical body, therefore, the time we spend in sleep serves mainly to let the powers of the head structure the human being of metabolism and limbs (Fig. 42, reddish arrows). It is particularly during sleep that structuring powers radiate continually from the head to the lower human being, so that in sleep the soul and spirit aspect of the head is indeed the structurer of the human being of metabolism and limbs.

We have quite the wrong idea of creation if we see it as being limited to particular moments. We are in fact being created all the time. We are created out of the spirit every night; our system of metabolism and limbs is given structure and life out of the spirit night after night.

As you know, in modern materialistic science only the opposite of this is known, i.e. that the powers of the metabolism influence the used-up brain. That is only half the story, however, for as this effect is brought to bear from below upwards, the human being is enlivened out of soul and spirit in a process that takes the opposite direction. It is important to realize that these marvellous processes working from above downwards are governed by a high level of consciousness as we sleep, a level we human beings will not achieve until evolution on the planet Vulcan. It is the level of consciousness of the spirit human being. This level of consciousness is truly present in the human being today. It takes effect during sleep in the way I have just described. At our present level of consciousness we are not able to know our true nature well enough to be aware, under normal conditions, of the reality and activity of a level of consciousness which is infinitely higher than the conscious awareness we have of our daytime activities.

Real appreciation of such things is certainly dependent on human beings becoming more deeply religious through the science of the spirit. If people pursue activities in life that allow their true nature to be neglected so that it withers away, if they do not seek to implant in their physical bodies what can be implanted in them during life on earth, they bring destruction to something in themselves which, unknown to them in ordinary conscious awareness, is a much higher form of consciousness than they themselves are able to have.

Looking out into the universe we perceive a world which, if we gain real understanding, makes us go down on our knees in admiration. We must have the same attitude as we look, with real understanding, into the working of powers in our own inner nature that are greater than human powers. This, then, gives you an approximate indication of the situation in which the human physical body finds itself during sleep.

Apart from the physical body we also have an ether body (Fig. 42, hatched area). In the waking state this is continuously exposed to influences coming from the I, which is active in the world, and the astral body, which is connected with the I. In the waking state we always see the colours arising and fading away again and the other colouring effects which take place in the astral body and go across into the ether body. In fact, we see the ether body adapt itself to the astral body. We also see something enter into the ether body which is the I in its structuring. In short, in the waking state we see I and astral body play into the ether body. When asleep, the human being as I and astral body is outside the ether body, and the colouring of the astral body and structuring of the I do not enter into it. The ether body is then left to its own structuring principles. The way this comes to expression is that in sleep, the ether body assumes a structure that is an image of the universe and does so in a truly magnificent way.

The main substance of the etheric body is taken up by human beings as they move from pre-birth life to physical life on earth. Its composition depends on how the individual lived between death and rebirth. Everything the human being receives into himself from the universe—shown in symbolic form, as it were, in spiritual science as something the human being has taken in of the heavens from North, South, East, West—all this the etheric body bears within it. For the reasons given above, the ether body is unable to make this apparent in the waking state, but it does so in sleep. The human being is all memory then, to begin with memory of life on earth.

Occasionally people are aware that on entering into their etheric body they enter into a sea of images; they consider it part of their dreams. Anyone who has made the effort, however, to observe the sea of images which a person passes through, as it were, in the process of waking up, and observe the experiences made at that time, discovers that this ether body really contains the whole of our life on earth when we are asleep. In our sleep we are really alive and active in everything we have gone through in the ether body from the time we were born. It has however been structured for the ether body by cosmic powers. As astral body and I are not playing into it at this time, the ether body radiates what has been inculcated, inoculated into it at birth. The human ether body grows radiant (Fig. 43, yellow arrows).

This radiance of the human being in sleep is something truly significant. When the sun has gone down and the earth world is immersed in darkness of night, it represents the soul radiance of humanity, quite distinct from the physical radiance of the sun. Unfortunately, however, this soul radiance also contains everything the human being implants into the ether body via the astral body and I during life because he is bad, elements which are destructive and cause the ether body to wither. The evolution of the earth could not progress, however, without this radiance coming from human beings.

Someone equipped with the necessary organs who was out there in the cosmos, observing the earth from out there, would say: During the day you see the sunlight reflected from the part of the earth where the sun is shining; but when night covers part of the earth, the earth phosphoresces. The phosphorescence comes from the human ether bodies. The earth needs all this to progress in its evolution. If no human beings were asleep on earth, the vegetative powers of the earth would die down much more rapidly than they actually do. Human beings certainly do not exist on earth just for their own sake; they are not without significance for the way the earth as a whole is structured. For the whole of their life on earth, sleeping human beings radiate from their ether bodies into earth evolution what they have taken up in the world of the spirit between death and rebirth.

Thus we are able to say: For the physical body, radiation is from above downwards; for the ether body it is from the inside outwards. Human sleep definitely also has cosmic significance.

This is why I had to tell you yesterday that when an I and astral body return to the ether body it feels like autumn, and when they are free of the body in sleep it feels like spring or summer. It is indeed true that human beings become more sun-like or wintry in soul and spirit as the astral body goes in and out.

We may say, therefore, that during sleep the nature of the human ether body is such that the powers human beings gather between death and rebirth in the cosmos have a structuring effect on the earth. Again the level of consciousness is higher than that normally available for people’s waking activities. The consciousness of the life spirit is at work in the ether body’s activity during sleep. This is a level of consciousness human beings will only develop when our planet earth has reached its Venus metamorphosis.

We can see, therefore, that the relationship of I and astral body on the one hand, and physical body and ether body on the other, is such that they do not work together during sleep, but only from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. The relationship changes, with the swing of the pendulum moving between collaboration and non-collaboration. It is also the case that at the moment when I and astral body approach the physical and ether bodies on waking, and at the moment when they withdraw again on going to sleep, the interaction which occurs is governed by yet another level of consciousness which is above that used in human waking activity. We are able to influence our waking up and going to sleep in a certain, indirect way. But the subtle processes between I and astral body on the one hand and physical and ether bodies on the other as we go to sleep and wake up again are something our conscious human mind is not able to perceive.

I’d like to show this interaction with these arrows going in opposite directions (Fig. 43, blue). In this direction, in this interaction, as it comes to expression especially on waking up and going to sleep, though in a certain way it also continues in waking life and even during sleep, a principle comes into its own which we can say applies mainly to the astral body. We are able to say that the situation is such that the astral body is stimulated in a cosmic sense. Remember that from going to sleep to waking up the astral body is coloured in accord with its moral reactions, as I have shown yesterday. On waking up it enters into an ether body structured by the cosmos. It has to follow it and adapt to it. And we are able to say that cosmic astral powers influence human astral powers. This can be observed quite clearly in a specific case.

Imagine someone who has not gone through life between death and rebirth—which is true in the case of animals—and was newly created at birth, which is what Aristotelian philosophy postulates. This individual would not bring the effects of earlier lives on earth and between death and rebirth into the new life. His eyes, his senses would roam over experiences in the outside world, but he would have no concepts based on geometry and mathematics to make connections between them. This is just one instance, one of those where geometry, which holds true for the cosmos, enters into interaction with principles that apply only in the earth environment. Rational concepts of mathematics and geometry enter into empirical experience gained on earth. This interaction is continuous, and it takes place in such a way that the spirit self is the consciousness active in it. Observing the world from a mathematical point of view, people have no idea, of course, that as they do so, the spirit self has them by the scruff of the neck. They fail to take note of this because they limit themselves to the reflection of it which exists in ordinary human consciousness.

When the human being is finally neither sleeping nor in the process of waking up or going to sleep, when I and astral body have entered fully into ether body and physical body, we have the ordinary level of present-day conscious awareness, when we are given up to everything that is outside of spirit human being, life spirit and spirit self. When humanity will have reached the level of existence which it will have when the earth has gone through its metamorphosis into Jupiter existence, as described in my Occult Science, it will no longer be the case that people use geometry to create a cube in an external way, and then discover that this ideal cube form fits a salt crystal. Human beings will be given up to the outside world to such an extent that they will be in the salt themselves, as it were. There won’t be any salt of this kind on Jupiter, of course, but analogies like this help us to get a clearer picture of human life as it will be in the future.

Using the method we used yesterday to consider astral body and I, we can therefore also gain an idea of how physical and etheric body are during sleep. The physical body is actually self-structuring in limbs and metabolism during sleep, the ether body world-structuring.

Thinking back to what we were considering yesterday, we have to say: The human astral body moves out of the physical and ether bodies during sleep. The powers of soul in the universe stream into it, and the way they enter into it depends on the inner life of mind and soul. If someone is in sympathy with all that is good, the most beautiful powers of the universe will be able to enter. If people develop their inclinations towards evil, their astral bodies will wither away. During sleep, the astral body assumes different nuances of colour for different levels of feeling and inner responsiveness (Fig. 43, reddish, yellow, pink, mauve). We may say that individual people sparkle up in their astral bodies during sleep depending on the way they are. The astral body represents our inner state of heart and soul during waking hours. This, as it were, pours into the soul universe, and human beings experience themselves in this pouring-out process in so far as their inner state has changed, but in a situation where they encounter the world of the spirit in that inner state.

If human beings were able to enter into the consciousness of the life spirit when their astral bodies are active and alive out there, they would be able to speak to that which happens with their astral bodies. This actually happens, but at an unconscious level. Who would be speaking, if humans beings suddenly achieved the level of consciousness of the life spirit in their sleep? The only way of putting this is to say: The human astral body would be speaking, as judge over good and evil in the human being. So that we really have to say: In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul. Rightly understood, this statement is important for human life. It is a truth that shines out as if from beyond the threshold of the world of the spirit, a truth human beings should call to mind as often as possible.

Take the corresponding situation for the I. The I moves out of the physical and ether bodies, structuring itself in accord with the powers of the universal entities in the sphere of the spirit. It becomes what it can become in the light of how it lives in the physical body. If it were to come awake to the spirit human being level of consciousness, it would not merely speak to itself, as the astral body would if suddenly given the life spirit level of consciousness; the I would be given the level of consciousness which is active in the physical body it has left behind, sending powers from above downwards. If, then, human ‘I’s had this level of consciousness when out of the body during sleep, human beings would know not only the totality of judgements passed on them but they would see that which they are in the process of becoming, now as images, which will be the seed for future lives on earth.

I cannot think of any other way of putting this in a sentence than this: The I becomes its own sacrifice, a sacrifice brought by the spirit which is active in the body. A sacrifice may be such that it is accepted with pleasure, which may also be the case for the I when it is given structure out there. A sacrifice may also be such that it is rejected. These are the extremes. Mostly, of course, human beings experience something which lies more in the middle. But a sacrifice may be rejected, having been found unworthy. If human beings present themselves to the spirits of the universe in such a way that they have to wither away greatly because of experiences they had in their physical and etheric bodies during waking hours, they become rejects.

You see, therefore, that the idea of sacrifice is certainly applicable in this case. And it seems to me that these two statements: In sleep, the astral human being becomes the judge of the soul, and: The I becomes its own sacrifice, are extraordinarily important if we are to understand human nature fully.

If we consider what the instinctive judgements of humanity have achieved in the past, judgements made not with the clarity of mind we must use today to search for anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, but from instinct, we become aware of images representing significant original wisdom possessed by humanity. I have spoken of this before. They come to expression in ancient myths and sayings and also in the rites which have survived in different religious systems.

This is why we feel profound reverence for traditional religious paintings and images of ancient rites if we understand them rightly. Essentially it is true to say that religious feeling can only come alive again in human hearts if insight into the world gained through the science of the spirit—insight that is more than mere words, but perceived in its deepest meaning—takes hold not only of the head, but of the whole human being. The science of the spirit must not only provide us with insight into the world but make us feel reverence for the spirit which is at work in the world. This has been particularly evident to us today.

This science of the spirit will be able to quicken religious feeling in human hearts. Humanity has however also gone through a time when people lived only for intellectualism, rationalism and the materialism connected with this—we know this had to be, for the sake of achieving independence. Today the greater part of humanity is still caught up in these things. There has to be a return, however, to perception of the spiritual in the world, to living beyond mere intellectual understanding of the world, beyond experience limited to the purely head aspect of the human being.

If we go back beyond the age of the intellect to the days when the religious images of old were still alive—also serving as images to convey insight well into the Medieval period of modern humanity—if we consider the images created in the performance of religious rites, we find something in all of these which is enormously similar, except that it was gained through instinct, to the insights we are now able to gain in the worlds of the spirit, though now in the light of clear conscious awareness.

I really have to say that if the idea expressed in the words: “In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul” comes from Inspiration, we find this well represented in Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgement on the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Here we have something that comes from time immemorial. It has merely assumed Christian form and with this become more traditional. Pictures like these were painted out of tradition. There were times in human evolution, however, when they were seen in a living way, when instinct made people see the inspired Imagination of human souls pass judgement on themselves in sleep.

Again, if we consider the image of the Lamb of God, which touches us so deeply, the image of the Christ uniting himself with the human I, entering into it, the thought of the I becoming the sacrifice as it enters into sleep arises in heart and mind—particularly when we contemplate the Lamb sacrificing itself—we discover how fittingly the image of the Lamb expresses the sacrificial nature of the human being in sleep. We discover that an instinctive, wisdom-filled consciousness gave rise to this image, which the I needs in its life on earth, because during sleep it becomes the sacrifice of its own selfhood.

We can do no other but again and again point out that the anthroposophical science of the spirit, as it evolves, seeks to develop completely clear concepts, the kind of clear concepts which otherwise exist only in mathematics, or geometry. But because the concepts gained in the science of the spirit have their roots in the living life of the cosmic spirits they are always such that they do not leave us cold, the way mathematical concepts do, but also fill us with the warmth of inner feeling and with will impulses to fire us. Here we see the close relationship between clear thinking, warmth of feeling and energy-laden will impulses. This, then, is a point of view which allows us to perceive human nature in its fullness.

Many aspects of history, too, only find their explanation if we are able to base ourselves on such a perception of the human being. Well into the Middle Ages, as I said, many people still understood the ancient images, in which the world is seen sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, a kind of understanding that still existed in the old instinctive life of wisdom and which has to be regained in clarity of mind, seeking to achieve it through the anthroposophical science of the spirit.

We sometimes see strange individuals come up in history, people who seem rather out of place in the present-day situation. Travelling in Italy, I once talked to a priest belonging to the Benedictine order in Monte Cassino. He told me that the list of saints in his breviary included the Saxon German emperor Henry II,⁴¹ also called “the Saint”—I do not know how far this is still mentioned in the history books. What Henry II was after was an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, that was his true aim, though he is called a saint. In his day, that is, in the 10th, 11th century, it was certainly still possible to speak out of real experience of old traditional wisdom and say that what had come into the world through Christianity should be an Ecclesia catholica, meaning a church for the whole of humanity in which the spirit reigns which was intended to come into the world through Christianity. But he wanted an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, for the Roman Catholic Church had become a worldly kingdom. Truth is that everywhere where kingdoms of the spirit become worldly kingdoms the ahrimanic principle takes hold of what lives as a holy of holies and has lived as such in the ancient wisdom possessed by humanity. In the days of Henry II, people were still strongly aware that it was possible to separate Ecclesia catholica and Ecclesia catholica Romana and that the desirable aim was an Ecclesia catholica non Romana.

As I said, Henry II is out of place as a saint in the breviary. The Ecclesia catholica Romana has not the least cause to include him among the saints, for he was one of the people who in a fiery, holy enthusiasm for a catholic church actually wanted to vanquish the Roman Catholic Church.

Historical facts like these ought to be brought to mind especially when reference is made to the tremendously important truths which can be brought back again to the surface of human awareness through anthroposophical science of the spirit. It is very necessary to point this out today, for individual instances which may disgust us as they come up from the Ecclesia catholica Romana right here on our doorstep⁴² allow us to see how the ahrimanic spirit was able to enter into it. On the one hand we must not let this ahrimanic spirit deceive us into thinking that the Ecclesia catholica Romana does not hold the light-filled wisdom of eternity. When I was able to give a course here for theologians, it was evident that with the longing felt by Protestants to deepen Protestantism in its spiritual aspects, to get out of rationalism, out of intellectualism, it came as a real liberation for some of those present to hear the words: Ecclesia catholica non Romana. For today we have definitely reached a point where rationalism must be overcome just as much as the worldly nature of the Catholic Church has to be overcome; humanity must come together again in a life of the spirit that is for all, a life of the spirit to which none may lay claim who have any kind of desire to rule the world.

The ahrimanic spirit is a lying spirit. It may happen that lying minds fall so low in this lying spirit as to declare falsehood to be truth. It is necessary, therefore, that out of the depths of what is happening in the world we come to abhor lies utterly. We truly come to abhor lies if we are able to say, in full awareness: In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul. The I in sleep becomes the sacrifice of its selfhood.

Darkness is thrown on these profound truths by the ahrimanic spirit, which has also entered into the religious creeds of recent times. It will be up to people who in all honesty, and with some energy, profess themselves to be followers of anthroposophy not just to develop a superficial, intellectual liking for the wisdom anthroposophy is able to offer, but to develop real inner energy of feelings and will, and to let this energy unite with what mind and spirit are able to perceive of the world of the spirit through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy.

This, my friends, is also intended to teach you how important it is to distinguish between the element to be found even in the traditional continuation of religious images and images created in religious rites and the way in which these are sometimes used today.

Surely all of us must feel the deepest reverence for something which is contained in the ritual of the Russian Orthodox Church, something which as it were shines out to us from the spiritually grey-haired ancient Orient. Our approach to these ritual acts can always be such that we penetrate through what is happening there to the tremendous depth which comes to revelation. Millennia and millennia of wisdom evolved from instinct come to expression in these ritual acts.

Years ago I attended such a ritual in Helsingfors.⁴³ It was at Easter and it is fair to say this was one of the saddest events in my life to remember, to see how the popes, the most terrible inner liars, acted out their comedy based on eternal truth. That is how it is in the world today. Under the influence of ahrimanic materialism, lies are presented on the outside, and the deepest truth lies within, and the two are brought together in a truly dreadful way. You have to have a real feeling for this, or you will not develop the right energy in your understanding of the nature of the human being.

That was an extreme case, but the same happens everywhere today, with differing degrees of intensity. Anthroposophical awareness should be such that we see these things, and are able to distinguish clearly between truth and falsehood, a falsehood which under the pressures of external circumstances is very much hidden. We must always gain something from entering deeply into anthroposophy—for the human being as a whole and above all for the conscious awareness belonging to our age. This is what I wanted to say to you in connection with what we have been considering here.

• 41. Henry the Saint (973–1024).
• 42. Diatribe entitled “The Secrets of the Dornach Temple” published by M. Kully in Basle, 1920-21.
• 43. Helsingfors, Easter 1912. See letter Marie Steiner wrote on 13 April 1912 to Mieta Waller: “There was an Easter celebration in the church ...”. Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Easter 1967, No. 7, p. 12.

These lectures are volume two of the Cosmosophy lecture course and the 8th volume in a series of lecture courses Rudolf Steiner gave under the general title “Man and his relationship to the cosmos” for members of the Anthroposophical Society in 1920 and 1921, published in nine volumes in GA (German Gesamtausgabe or collected works) 201-209.

The first 11 lectures (Cosmosophy vol. 1, GA 207) have been translated by A. Wulsin and M. Kirkcaldy and published by Anthroposophic Press, New York 1985.

This volume will easily stand on its own, but readers will need to have some knowledge of Rudolf Steiner’s science of the spirit and are advised to read the basic works first, e.g. Occult Science and Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The Cosmosophy lectures are not easy, with very close reasoning at times, and would be hard to understand without such basic knowledge.

Over the years these lectures have come to be very dear to my heart. They really demand us to become active and mobile in both heart and mind, which is something Rudolf Steiner often asked of the members of the Society. The first lecture immediately turns one inside out and upside down, as it were. I have sometimes found it useful to enter almost physically into the movements described, something that may also be helpful on other occasions when studying the works of Rudolf Steiner.

The drawings in the text have been taken from the German edition, with only the labelling put into English. They were produced for that edition by Assia Turgenieff and Hedwig Frey.

I have numbered them through, as this makes it easier to refer to them. Readers may find it helpful, if they do not have a copy of the original drawings, to remember that the images would have remained on the board for the rest of the lecture. In some text passages one gets an indication that Rudolf Steiner would point again to a drawing made earlier. It may be a good idea to make copies if one does not want to keep turning back the pages. If one did them oneself, perhaps also colouring them up, this may also contribute to better understanding. It has to be remembered that these were blackboard drawings, with white chalk also used.

The original blackboard drawings of the figures in this volume are now available in volume VIII of Rudolf Steiner, Wandtafelzeichnungen zum Vortragswerk, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. They are in colour and add something to one’s reading, though not essential. Study groups may be able to buy them together or borrow them from a library.

These lectures were given 76 years ago and readers may find it helpful to have a little background information. Rudolf Steiner always spoke out of the situation that existed at the time.

In 1921, three years after World War I, with democracy and social ideals trying to win through in the Weimar Republic, and financial collapse just round the corner, Rudolf Steiner mainly concentrated his efforts on cultural renewal in Europe, especially in economics, education, medicine, theology, the sciences and the arts. Two publications that continue to this day first appeared in 1921, the monthly journal Die Drei in February, and the weekly paper Das Goetheanum in August. Two clinics opened that year, the Institute of Clinical Medicine in Arlesheim and another in Stuttgart. Within the Society, local groups had often slid into comfortable complacency, and Rudolf Steiner sought to shake them out of this. With anthroposophy gaining a higher profile with all this activity, opposition also grew stronger and more organized, not only in Germany but also in other countries. Apart from Germany and Switzerland, Rudolf Steiner also lectured in Amsterdam and The Hague that year, and in November and December in Oslo. More than 380 of the lectures he gave that year have been published from shorthand records in German. He would often give two, sometimes three, and occasionally even four lectures a day!

Anna R. Meuss
Surbiton, July 1997