The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the previous lecture you will have been able to see that the very form of man's body is a result of the co-operation of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers.

It is particularly important in the present age for man to recognize this co-operation between Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; for only by such recognition can he gradually learn to understand the forces that are at work behind the external phantasmagoria of existence. We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. We spoke on this subject at some length in Munich last year [ see Secrets of the Threshold, by Rudolf Steiner. ]; and we have also given indications in this direction in lectures here in Dornach.

When we saw last time how the physical spatial body of man owes its form to the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, we were dealing with the most external element of human life in which Lucifer and Ahriman play a part. We come a little nearer to the inner nature of man when we pass from the physical to the etheric body. The etheric body may be regarded as the shaper of the physical body. At the foundation of our physical organism—and embedded at the same time in the whole etheric world—lies this etheric organism, in perpetual inner movement. Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are active here too, as well as in the physical body. Man as etheric being—and it is important to recognize the fact—is also placed into the counterplay of these forces.

In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.

So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.

A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and willing unite in man to form a whole—to that problem none of the philosophies of modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do not know—so say the philosophers—whether the human soul in its essential nature has more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to say: “I have no idea what a ‘man’ really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much taller being, who is what is called ‘middle-aged.’ Finally a third person comes and shows me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am really at a loss to know what the being called ‘man’ is, for I have been shown three totally different beings with this name.” Of course the true answer is that they are all of them “man.” The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a knowledge of “man.” It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in our soul in these three activities.

We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time. Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling) and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of man.

These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream—for it is in the etheric body that we have to make our observations—then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic—and again Ahrimanic—activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by Luciferic activity the result is will. When the Luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a juvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

When, on the other hand, Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. Thinking, the having and holding of thoughts, is quite impossible in ordinary life unless Ahriman exerts his influence within our etheric body. We cannot get on in our life of soul, in so far as this comes to expression in the etheric body, without Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would have nothing to fire our will. If Ahriman were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would never be able to attain cool thinking. In between stands a region where Lucifer and Ahriman are in conflict. Here they interpenetrate; their activities play into one another. It is the region of feeling. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it Luciferic light and Ahrimanic hardness. If you could look at it, you would not of course see it as we might try to show it in a drawing; you would see it all in movement. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite untransparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. Forms and figures show themselves which resemble the patterns made by ice on a window pane. These are hardenings in the etheric body, and they are the result in it of the life of thought. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness—and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation—such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

Not only, therefore, is the form of the physical body of man called into being by the interplay of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces—now creating a balance, now disturbing it again—but in the whole etheric body too, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are continually active. When the Ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the Luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling. Thus do Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play into one another in the etheric body of man. We human beings are as it were ourselves the resultant of these forces, we are placed into their midst.

Now we must not imagine that we are present in this interplay with our full Ego. Our earthly Ego, the Ego that we have acquired in the course of earth evolution, can only come to its full consciousness in the physical body. Not until the time of Jupiter will the Ego be able to unfold itself completely within the etheric body. In all that takes place within the etheric body the real Ego of the human being has no immediate part. Had the progress of world evolution gone on without the intervention of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, then man would have been an altogether different being. He would, for example, have been able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not have been able to have thoughts. The capacity to have thoughts he owes to the fact that Ahriman can acquire influence over his etheric body. And he has impulses of will because Luciferic forces can acquire influence over his etheric body. These forces are therefore necessary for man, they must needs be present.

We have said that with our earthly consciousness we cannot descend fully into the etheric body. Only in the physical body can we experience our full Ego-consciousness. With the etheric body we enter a world with which we cannot fully identify ourselves. And it is so, that when Ahriman enters into our etheric body, something more enters in with him besides the thoughts he forms there. Nor is it only impulses of will that enter our etheric body with Lucifer. And the same must be said of the feelings, the realm where the two are in conflict. In so far as Ahriman lives in our etheric body we dive down with our etheric body into the sphere of the elementary Nature spirits—the Earth, Water, Air and Fire spirits. We are not cognizant of the fact because we are not able to descend fully into our etheric body with our Ego. Nevertheless it is always so. Within this etheric body not only does there live the power of the thoughts that we ourselves think, but the influences also of the Nature spirits; these enter in and make themselves felt. When a man has met with these Nature spirits he is able afterwards to tell of some experience he has had which he did not have in his ordinary Ego-consciousness. For it is when he, is in an abnormal condition that man meets the Nature spirits, namely, when the etheric body is to some extent loosened from the physical body.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen in the following way. The etheric body of man is in communion with the whole surrounding etheric world, therefore also with the whole sphere of the Nature spirits. Let us imagine, to take a simple case, that a man is walking along a road. When he is walking along a road in the daytime with his ordinary consciousness, his etheric body is properly in his physical body and he perceives with his Ego-consciousness what one is normally able to perceive with the Ego-consciousness. But now suppose that he is walking along a path by night. When we walk along a path by night, it is generally dark, and this fact will of itself produce in many persons a “creepy” feeling. And just because he gets into this condition, then the peculiar sensations that he experiences enable Lucifer to seize hold of him. His etheric body becomes loosened from the physical body, and then this emancipated etheric body can enter into relation with the surrounding etheric world.

Now let us suppose that the man comes into the vicinity of a churchyard where etheric bodies are still present over the graves of recently deceased persons. In the condition in which he is, with his etheric body loosened, he is perhaps able to perceive something of the thoughts which are still remaining in the etheric bodies of the dead persons. Suppose someone has died only a short time ago leaving debts behind him; he died with the thought that he has incurred debts. Then it can be that this thought is still present in the etheric body of the person after he has died. We do not of course ordinarily perceive the thoughts in the etheric body of a dead human being. But for a man who has come into the condition I have described it might well be possible. He could enter into relation with the etheric body of the other and perceive within it the thought: “I have incurred debts.” And then because this experience strengthens the Luciferic power in him, there arises in him the feeling: “I must pay the debt for him.” He experiences in this way in his etheric body something he would never experience in the physical body in normal life. Such an experience does not happen to us in ordinary human life, and when it comes it makes an extraordinary impression upon our consciousness. For it arouses the knowledge: “I have had a strange and singular experience. I have not had this experience within the body, nor can I ever have it within the body.” We have the feeling quite distinctly that we are somewhere else than in our body, and that is a strange, an unaccustomed feeling. We experience at the same time an overpowering desire to return once more into the body, we long for help to return again into the body.

This feeling of longing to return attracts to us certain elementary Nature spirits for whom this very feeling in us is food and nourishment. They come, because they are attracted by the feeling, “I want to be drawn into my physical body,” and they help us to find the way back to it. If one is asleep in the ordinary way, one finds the way back quite easily. But when one has undergone an experience such as I have described, it is difficult to find the way back. You must not of course imagine that we see the situation as we perceive things in the physical body; no, we see it imaginatively, in pictures. Someone comes to us—it is really a Nature spirit, appearing perhaps in the guise of a shepherd, and gives us the advice: “Go to a certain castle, I will take you there in my wagon,”—or some similar words. The situation may even be still further developed. The body which we have left and outside of which we have had the experience, may assume the appearance of an enchanted castle from which we have to release someone when we return into it. So do we “imaginate” in pictures the longing for the physical body and the help that the Nature spirits bring to us. And then we come back into the physical body—that is to say, we wake up.

People who have had such experiences will tell us that they feel they have in actual reality come into contact in this way with the thoughts of a dead man. They say to themselves: “That feeling I had was not something that was merely in myself, it was no mere dream that I dreamed, it was a feeling that communicated to me something that was taking place in the world outside. It is of course all expressed in pictures, but it does truly correspond to an event.” I will now read to you such a picture, where a man narrates what he has experienced. As you will see, it was an experience somewhat similar to the one of which I have spoken. He describes it as follows. “When I had taken leave of the soldiers I met three men. They wanted to exhume a dead person who owed them three marks. I was filled with compassion and at once absolved the debt, in order that the dead man might rest in peace and not be disturbed in his grave. I walked on a little further. A strange man with pale countenance accosted me, invited me to mount a leaden carriage, and persuaded me to go with him to a castle. In the castle, he said, dwelt a princess, who had declared she would marry only a man who came to her on a carriage of lead. He turned to the driver and said: ‘Drive in the direction of the sunrise.’ Then came a shepherd who said: ‘I am the Count of Ravensburg.’ He ordered the driver to drive faster. We came to a door and we could hear a tumult within. The door was opened. The princess asked the man whence he came and how it had been possible for him to drive in company with that old man—and behold, I saw that he who had led me thither was a spirit. Then I entered in at the door and took possession of the castle.”

That is to say, he came back into his body. There you have the description of just such an experience as I have been speaking of.

And what is such an event, when it happens to someone who then tells others of it? It is a Märchen (a fairy-tale [ see Goethe's Standard of the Soul, by Rudolf Steiner. ]).

You must not imagine that an experience of this nature is the only way in which man comes into relationship with the external etheric world through his etheric body. There is another. And that is, in an activity which is only half conscious, an activity in which the Ego only half participates—namely, the act of Speech. Our speaking is not so conscious as our thinking. It is not the case that speaking is something which belongs to us and which we have in our power. In speech live etheric Powers, and a good part of our speaking is unconscious. The Ego does not reach fully down into speech. When we speak we are in communication through our etheric body with the surrounding etheric world. We learn to think as individuals, but not to speak. We are taught to speak through the fact that our Karma places us into a particular set of circumstances in life. We have already seen how we may come into relation with the Nature spirits in abnormal conditions when the etheric body is loosened, and now we find that inasmuch as we speak and do not merely think silently, we come into relation with the Folk Spirits. The Folk Spirits enter our etheric body and live there—without our being aware of it. This life of the Folk Spirit within the human being really belongs just as little to his fully conscious Ego activity as does the “Märchen” of which I have told you. So much, then, for the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in man's etheric body.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces enter also into the astral body. When we come to study the astral body of man, we must turn our attention to what is the distinguishing mark of the astral human being as he is on earth—namely, consciousness. In the physical body form and force are the essentials, in the etheric body, movement and life: in the astral body, consciousness. Now in the body of man we have not only one consciousness, but two; the ordinary waking state and the state of sleep. But, strange to say, neither of these two states is entirely natural to us. Natural would be for us an intermediate state between the two, a state which, as a matter of fact, we never really consciously have.

If we were perpetually awake we would scarcely be able to develop in a proper, orderly manner through the various ages of life. Something is always present in us which is less awake than we are in our day-consciousness, and only by virtue of this are we in a position to evolve and develop. Ask yourselves, how much do you expect to be able to evolve through all that you experience and receive in ordinary life? For the most part, we merely satisfy thereby our desire, our curiosity, or our need of sensation. It is not often we act with deliberate intent to place what we experience in waking day life in the service of our development. The truth is, development takes place through the fact that something is continually sleeping in us, even in the daytime. I am not alluding to the habit of dropping off to sleep in the daytime! But when man is wide awake by day, something still remains fast asleep in him, and this it is which brings it about that he does not remain for ever a child, but evolves further.

The ordinary waking state is what comes to consciousness through our astral body. In this ordinary waking state we are, however, too strongly awake, we are too intensely given up to the external world; we are, in fact, quite lost in it. How does this come about?

The reason is that the waking consciousness lives under the influence of Ahriman. Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. It is quite different in the case of the sleep consciousness. In sleep consciousness we are too little awake. We are too engrossed in our own evolution; we are so completely and so powerfully within ourselves that all consciousness is obliterated. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand.

This is then how the matter stands with our astral body. When we are awake, Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer; everything becomes pictures when Ahriman is no longer busy fixing them in rigid ideas. They melt and become mobile in themselves. A state of equilibrium is induced in a pair of scales by having both scale-pans equally laden; we have, then, not a state of rest but a state of equilibrium. It is the same with the life of man. We have not in man a state of rest, but a state of equilibrium; and the two forces which hold the scales and each of which at certain times brings extra weight to bear, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman's side sinks down, in sleep consciousness Lucifer's. Only in the intermediate state, where we dream, are the two scale-pans held in poise, not at rest, but delicately poised in equilibrium.

We can go on to carry our study into still higher regions of human life. Here too we shall find evidence of how Lucifer and Ahriman fill the world with their inter-working. Two ideas play a great part in human life. One is the idea of duty. We might also say, when we consider it from a religious point of view, the idea of commandment or behest. We speak sometimes, do we not, of the “behest of duty.” The other idea, which can be placed over against it, is the idea of right (or rights).

If you will reflect a little on the part played in human life by these two ideas of duty and of right—I mean, the “right” one has to do this or that—you will very soon realize that they are polar opposites, and that men's inclinations are turned now more in the direction of duty, and now again in the direction of right. We live certainly in an age when people are more ready to speak of right than duty. All possible spheres of life claim their rights. We have Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and so on and so on.

Duty is the opposite idea of right. Our age will be followed by an age when duties will be more regarded than rights, and this will be directly attributable to the influence of the anthroposophical spiritual world-conception. In the future—certainly, in a rather distant future—we shall have movements where less and less emphasis will be laid on the demand for rights and people will inquire more and more as to their duty. The question will rather be: What is our duty as man, as woman, e.g., in this or that situation of life? The present epoch that demands rights will be succeeded by an epoch that asks after duties.

We said that right and duty play into life like two polar opposites. Whenever a man turns his thought and attention to duty, he looks right away from himself. Kant has given great and grand expression to this fact. He pictures duty as a lofty goddess, to whom man looks up: “Duty, thou great and exalted Name, thou has nought to do with fondness nor with favor; all that thou requirest is to submit thyself and serve.” Man beholds duty, so to say, raying down upon him from regions of the spiritual world. In a religious sense, he feels duty as an impulse laid upon him by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And when man surrenders himself to duty, he goes right out of himself. It is in this going-out-of-himself in the feeling of duty, that man can begin to learn how to get beyond his ordinary self.

There is, however, a danger to man in all such going-out-of his ordinary self, in all such endeavor after spiritualization. If man were to give himself up entirely to this, he would lose the ground from under his feet, he would lose his feeling of gravity. Therefore he must endeavor, when he surrenders himself to duty, to find within himself at the same time something that shall give him weight, so that he may keep his sense of gravity. Schiller expressed it very beautifully when he said that man has the best relation to duty when he learns to love duty.

This is really saying a great deal. When a man speaks of learning to love duty he no longer merely surrenders himself to duty; he rises out of himself, taking with him the love with which otherwise he loves himself. The love that lives in his body, in his egoism—this love he takes out of himself, and loves with it duty. So long as it is self-love, so long is it a Luciferic force. But when man takes this self-love out of himself and loves duty in the way that otherwise he loves only himself, he releases Lucifer. He takes Lucifer into the realm of duty and gives him, so to say, a justified existence in the impulse and feeling of duty.

If, on the other hand, a man cannot do this, if he cannot draw forth the love out of himself and offer it to duty, then he will continue to love only himself; and since he cannot love duty, he is obliged to subject himself to her, he becomes a slave to duty, he becomes, as we say, a man who “does his duty,”—hard and cold and uninspired. He hardens in an Ahrimanic sense, notwithstanding that he follows duty devotedly.

You see how duty stands, as it were, in a midway position. If we surrender ourselves to her, she annuls our freedom, we become her slaves, because Ahriman draws near on the one hand with his impulses. But if we bring ourselves—if we bring all our power of self-love—as an offering and offer it up to duty, bringing thus to duty the Luciferic warmth of love, then the result is that, through the state of balance induced in this way between Lucifer and Ahriman, we find a right relation to duty.

Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the Luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

Schiller sets himself this very question in his “Aesthetic Letters”: How is it possible to rise above slavery to duty and attain to love of duty? Of course he does not use the expressions “Lucifer” and “Ahriman,” because he does not see the problem in its cosmic aspect. Nevertheless these wonderful letters of Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man are directly translatable into Spiritual Science.

Right, on the other hand, immediately shows that it is united with Lucifer. Man does not need to learn to love his right, he loves it already! It is perfectly natural that he should do so. It is natural for Lucifer to be connected with right in man's feeling—man feels that this or that is his right. Everywhere that right asserts itself, Lucifer is speaking there too. It is very often only too evident how Lucifer makes his voice heard in the demand of some right. Here it is a question of calling in something that can be set over against right. We have to call in Ahriman to create a polarity to Lucifer. And this we can do by cultivating the polar opposite of love.

Love is inner fire, its opposite is calmness—the quiet acceptance of what happens in the world. As soon as we approach our right with this quiet and calm interest we call in Ahriman. It is not easy to recognize him here, for we set him free from his merely external existence, we summon him into ourselves and warm him with the love that is already united with right. Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity. That is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that he feels in his heart the urge to make new conditions possible, continually to let the old give place to the new. This is the revolutionary current in human life. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles.

Thus we see how right and duty show each of them a state of equilibrium between Lucifer and Ahriman. We only learn to understand how the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body manifest in life, or how duty and right come to expression in the life of duty and the life of right, when we learn to recognize the interplay of great spiritual Powers, above all of those spiritual Powers who bring about the state of equilibrium.

For just as what is in the external world stands under the influence of the spiritual forces that bring about balance, so does our moral life too belong in a world of polar opposites. The whole morale of human conduct, the whole ethical life of man with its poles of right and duty, only become comprehensible when we take into account the instreaming forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. And when we look at the life of man in history, that takes its course in an alternation between, on the one hand, revolutionary and warlike—that is to say, Luciferic—movements, and on the other hand, conservative—that is, Ahrimanic—movements, there too we find a condition of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. In no other way is the world to be understood than by recognizing in it these opposite forces and influences.

What we behold in the world outside is dualistic, it shows itself to us in opposites. And in this connection Manichaeism, correctly understood, has its complete justification. How Manichaeism is fully justified even within a spiritual monism—of that we shall have more to say in the future. The object I have had in view in these lectures is to show you how the whole world is a result of the working of balance.

Particularly evident is the result of the working of balance in the life of art. With this as our starting-point we will go on in later lectures to consider the arts and their evolution in the world, and the part that has been taken by different spiritual Powers in the evolution of the life of art among mankind.

Above all, I must ask for your forgiveness if I am unable to give the lecture I am supposed to give in one of the local languages. The fact that this lecture is being held corresponds to the wish of the friends of our Theosophical Society, for whom I was invited here, to hold a series of lectures for a fortnight, and who thought that there was a possibility of also inserting the two announced public lectures within this time. Of course, this means that I will have to apologize in advance if some of the names and terms, which are borrowed from the national epic of the Finns, are not pronounced quite correctly by me, as I am not familiar with the language. However, only next Friday's lecture will be able to introduce us to spiritual science itself. Tonight's lecture will rather concern a kind of neighboring area that can be illuminated from a spiritual scientific point of view. However, the talk will be about an area that, in the very deepest sense of the word, is one of the most interesting for human historical reflection and human historical thought.

Folk epics! We need only think of some of the better-known folk epics, the epics of Homer, which have become Greek folk epics, the Central European Nibelungen saga and, finally, Kalewala, and it will immediately become clear to us that these folk epics lead us deeper into human souls and human than through any historical research, so that important ancient times are brought to life and presented to our souls as if they were present, but in such a way that they touch us in the here and now like the fates and lives of people living around us. How uncertain and hazy are the historical times of the ancient Greek people, as told to us by the Homeric epics. And how do we look into the souls of those people when we let the content of the Iliad and the Odyssey take effect on us, people who have actually been completely removed from the usual view of history? No wonder that the study of folk epics holds something of a mystery for those who study them scientifically or literarily. We need only point out one fact about the ancient Greek epics that a spirited observer of the Iliad repeatedly expressed in a very beautiful book about Homer's Iliad that was only published a few years ago. I am referring to Herman Grimm, the nephew of the great Germanic myth, saga, and language researcher Jakob Grimm. By letting the figures and facts of the Iliad take effect on him, Herman Grimm felt compelled to say again and again: Oh, this Homer – we do not need to go into the question of the personality of Homer today – seems, when he describes something that is borrowed from a craft or an art, as if he were a specialist in this craft or art. When he describes a battle, a fight, he seems to be completely familiar with all the strategic and military principles that come into play in warfare. — Herman Grimm is right to point out that a strict judge in such matters was an admirer of Homer's factual depiction of battles, namely Napoleon, a man who was undoubtedly entitled to pass judgment on whether or not the military is directly and vividly presented to our minds in the spirit of Homer. From a general human point of view, we know how vividly Homer presents the figures to our minds, as if we had them directly before our physical eyes.

What about a national epic like this, how does it prove itself over time? For truly, anyone who observes the circumstances impartially will not get the impression that artificial arrangements of humanity, such as an artificial pedagogical discipline, have repeatedly held the interest of the centuries in the Iliad and Odyssey down to our days. This interest is a matter of course, it is a general human interest. But in a certain sense these folk epics give us a task, and if we want to study them, they immediately present us with a very specific, one might say interesting, task. They want to be taken very seriously in all their details. We immediately feel that something about the content of such folk epics will remain incomprehensible to us if we want to read them in the same way that we read a modern work of art, a modern novel or the like. We feel right from the first lines of the Iliad that Homer is speaking precisely. What is he describing? He tells us at the beginning. We know from other accounts, which are not contained in the Iliad, about events that follow on from the facts of the Iliad. Homer wants to describe only what he says succinctly in the first line: the wrath of Achilles. And if we now go through the entire Iliad and look at it impartially, we have to say: there is nothing in it that cannot be characterized as fact, that follows from the wrath of Achilles. - And further, a peculiar fact right at the beginning of the Iliad. Homer does not begin with the facts, nor with some personal opinion, but with something that modern times might be tempted to take as a mere phrase: “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles!” And the deeper we penetrate into this national epic, the clearer it becomes to us that we cannot understand the meaning and spirit and significance of it if we do not take this saying seriously at the outset. But then we must ask ourselves: what does it actually mean?

And now the way it is presented, the whole way the events are brought before our soul! For many, not only expert and scientific observers, but also for artistically comprehensive minds like Herman Grimm, it was a question these words: “Sing to me, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.” A question that went to their very hearts. In this Iliad, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs or in Kalewala, the deeds of spiritual-divine beings—in Homer's poems, first of all, the deeds and intentions and passions of the Olympian gods—intertwine with the deeds and intentions and passions of men who, like Achilles, are in a sense far removed from the ordinary human, and again with the passions and intentions and deeds of men who are already close to the ordinary human, like Odysseus or Agamemnon? When this Achilles appears before our soul, he seems lonely to us compared to the people with whom he lives. We very soon feel in the course of the Iliad that in Achilles we have a personality before us who cannot really talk about her innermost affairs with all the other heroes. Homer also shows us how Achilles has to sort out his actual heart affairs with divine spiritual beings that do not belong to the human realm, how he stands alone in relation to the human realm throughout the entire Iliad, and yet is close to supersensible, supermundane powers. And yet it is strange that when we gather all our human feeling into the way of thinking and feeling that we have acquired in the cultural process and direct our gaze to this Achilles, he then appears to us in such a way that we often have to say: How selfish, how personal! — A being in whose soul divine-spiritual impulses play, he acts entirely out of the immediate personal. For a long time, a war that was so important for the Greeks, such as the Trojan War of the legends, only progresses, and the special episodes that the thliad describes, are won by Achilles making up for himself what he has to make up for personally with Agamemnon. And we always see that supernatural powers are at play. We see Zeus, Apollo, Athena handing out impulses, so to speak, putting people in their places. It was always strange before the task came to me to approach these things from the standpoint of spiritual science, like a very spiritual man with whom I was lucky enough to often discuss these things personally, to find his way around these things like Herman Grimm. He expressed this not only in his writings but also often in personal conversations, and there much more precisely. He said: If we only consider the historical forces and impulses at work in the development of humanity, then we cannot get to grips with what lives and creates in the great folk epics. Therefore, for Herman Grimm, the brilliant observer of the Iliad and folk poetry in general, something that goes beyond the ordinary powers of human consciousness, beyond understanding, reason, sensory perception, beyond ordinary feeling, becomes a real power, a power that is creative just like the other historical impulses. Herman Grimm spoke of a real creative imagination that runs through the development of humanity, spoke of an imagination as one speaks of an essence, of a reality, of something that prevailed for people and that could tell them more in the beginning of the times we can observe, in the development of the individual peoples, than what the ordinary soul forces tell people. Herman Grimm's words always appealed to the creative imagination, which for him thus took on the role of a co-creator in the process of human becoming.

But now, when we look at this battleground of the Iliad, this representation of the wrath of Achilles, with all the interplay of divine, spiritual powers, we cannot get by with such view as Herman Grimm took it, and in his book on the Iliad we find many a word of resignation that shows us how the usual point of view, which one can take today, whether literary or scientifically, cannot deal with these things. Where does Herman Grimm come to in relation to the Iliad and the Nibelungen saga? He comes to the assumption that the historical dynasties and ruling houses were preceded by others. In fact, one might say, Herman Grimm literally thinks in such terms. He considers, for example, that Zeus and his entire entourage represent a kind of ruling house that preceded the ruling house of Agamemnon. He thinks, so to speak, of human history in a certain uniformity, thinks of the gods or heroes depicted in the Iliad or the Nibelungen saga as ancient humans, whom later humans dared to depict only by clothing their deeds and characters in the guise of superhuman myth. There are many things that cannot be understood if one takes such a premise as a basis, especially the particular way in which the gods intervene in Homer. I ask you, my dear attendees, to consider just one thing: how do Thetis, the mother of Achilles, Athena, and other divine figures intervene in the events of Troy? They intervene by taking on the form of mortal men, inspiring them, as it were, and leading them to their deeds. They do not appear themselves, but permeate living men. Living men figure not only as their representatives, but as the shells that are permeated by invisible powers that cannot appear on the battlefield in their own form, in their own essence. It would be strange to assume that ancient people of the ordinary kind should be depicted in such a way that they would have to take the representative people from the mortal race as their shell. This is just one of the indications that can prove to us all that we cannot get by with the old folk epics in this way.

But we are just as little at home with the figures of the Song of the Nibelungs, that Siegfried from Xanten on the Lower Rhine, who is transferred to the court of the Burgundians at Worms, woos Kriemhilde, Gunther's sister, and then, because of his special qualities, can only woo Brunhilde. And how strangely such figures as Brunhilde from Isenland, like Siegfried, are described to us. Siegfried is described as having overcome the so-called Nibelung race, as having acquired, conquered the Nibelung treasure. Through what he has acquired through his victory over the Nibelungs, he acquires very special qualities, which are expressed in the epic by saying that he can make himself invisible, that he is invulnerable in a certain way, and that he also has powers that the ordinary Gunther does not have, because the latter cannot acquire Brunhilde, who does not allow herself to be defeated by an ordinary mortal. Siegfried defeats Brunhilde with the special powers that come from being the owner of the Nibelungen hoard, and because he can conceal the powers he displays, he is able to present Brunhilde to Gunther, his brother-in-law. And there we find that Kriemhilde and Brunhilde, who we then see at the Burgundian court at the same time, are two very different characters, characters who are obviously influenced by things that cannot be explained by the ordinary human soul. This leads to quarrels between them, and also to Brunhilde being able to tempt Hagen, a loyal servant, to kill Siegfried. This again points to a trait that appears so peculiarly in Central European legend. Siegfried has higher, superhuman powers. He has these superhuman powers because he possesses the hoard of the Nibelungs. Ultimately, these do not make him an unconditionally victorious figure, but a figure who stands before us tragically. The powers that Siegfried has through the Nibelungen hoard are also a curse for the human being. Things become even stranger when we add the related Nordic saga of Sigurd, the dragon slayer, but this has an enlightening effect. There we are immediately confronted with Sigurd, who is none other than Siegfried, as the slayer of the dragon, who thereby acquires the Nibelungen hoard from an ancient race of dwarves. And we are introduced to Brunhilde as a figure of superhuman nature, as a Valkyrie figure.

We see, then, that there are two ways of presenting these things in Europe. One way, which directly links everything to the divine-supernatural, which still shows us how something in Brunhilde is meant that directly belongs to the supernatural world, and the other way, which legend has humanized. But we can still recognize how the divine can be found resounding everywhere in this way too.

And now let us turn our gaze from these legends, from these folk epics, to that region about which I can truly only speak as someone who can see things from the outside, only as they can be recognized if one does not speak the language in question. I ask you to bear in mind that I can only speak about everything that a Western European encounters in Kalewala as one who sees the spiritual content and the great, powerful figures and who, of course, must inevitably miss the subtleties of the epic, which only come out when one really masters the language in which it is written. But even when viewed in this way, how peculiarly the triad in the three presents itself to us, indeed, one is actually at a loss to use a name, one cannot say gods, one cannot say heroes, so let us say in the three entities: Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen. These figures speak a strange language, when we compare their characters with each other, a language from which we clearly recognize that the things we are to be told go beyond what can be achieved with the ordinary human powers of the soul. After all, if we look at them only superficially, these three figures grow into the monstrous. And yet again, which is the peculiar thing, in that they grow into the monstrous, every single trait is vividly before our eyes, so that nowhere do we somehow have the feeling that the monstrous is a grotesque, a paradox; everywhere we have the feeling that what is to be said must, of course, appear in superhuman greatness, in superhuman significance. And then: what mystery in the content. Something that inspires our soul to think of the most human of things, but which in turn goes beyond what ordinary soul forces can grasp. Ilmarinen, who is often called the blacksmith, the most artistic blacksmith of all, forges the Sampo on pins for Wäinämöinen in a realm inhabited, so to speak, by humanity's older brothers or at least by more primitive people than the Finns, for some foreign realm. And we see this strange thing happening, that far from the scene of the facts under discussion, many things take place, that time passes, and we see how, after a certain time, Wäinämöinen and Ilmarinen are again caused to retrieve what was left to them in a foreign land, the Sampo. Anyone who allows themselves to be drawn into the peculiar spiritual language that emerges from this forging of the Sampo, from this keeping away and regaining of the same, has the immediate impression – as I said, I ask you to bear in mind that I speak, so to speak, as a stranger and can therefore only speak of the impression of a stranger – that the most essential, the most meaningful in this grandiose poem is the forging, the keeping away and the later regaining of the Sampo.

What strikes me as particularly strange about Kalewala is the ending. I have heard that there are people who believe that this ending may be a later addition. For me, this ending of Mariata and her son, this introduction of a very strange Christianity – I say explicitly a very strange Christianity – is part of the whole. It acquires Kalevala, through the presence of this conclusion, a very special nuance, a coloring that can, so to speak, make the matter even more understandable to us. I may say that, for my feeling, such a delicate, wonderfully impersonal presentation of Christianity is nowhere to be found at all than at the end of Kalevala. The Christian principle is detached from all locality. The journey from Mariata to Herod, who in Kalevala appears as Rotus, is so impersonal that it hardly reminds us of any locality or personality in Palestine. Indeed, one is not even remotely reminded of the historical Christ Jesus. At the end of Kalewala, we find a delicate hint of the penetration of the noblest cultural pearl of humanity into Finnish culture as the most intimate affair of the heart of humanity. And linked to this is the tragic train, which in turn can have such an infinitely deep effect on our soul that when Christianity moves in and the son of Mariata is baptized, Wäinämöinen takes leave of his people in order to go to an unspecified location, leaving behind only the content and power of what he knew how to tell through his art of singing about the ancient events that include the history of this people. This withdrawal of Wäinämöinen towards the son of Mariata seems to me so significant that one would like to see in it the living interplay of all that prevailed at the core of the Finnish people, of the Finnish national soul, from ancient times until the moment when Christianity found its way into Finland. The way in which this ancient power relates to Christianity is such that one can feel everything that takes place in the soul with a wonderful intimacy. I say this as someone who is aware of the objectivity of what I am about to say, which I do not say to please anyone or to flatter anyone. In this national epic, we Western Europeans have one of the most wonderful examples of how the members of a nation stand before us in the flesh, with their whole soul, so that through Kalevala we get to know the Finnish soul in a way that allows us to become completely familiar with it.

Why have I said all this? I have said it to characterize how something speaks in the folk epics that cannot be explained by ordinary human soul powers, even when one speaks of imagination as a real power. And even if to some what is said sounds only like a hypothesis, then perhaps what spiritual science has to say about the nature of these folk epics may be adduced in this consideration of folk epics. Certainly, I am aware that what I have to say today still touches on something to which very few people can give their consent in our present time. Many may perhaps regard it as a reverie, a fantasy; but some will at least accept it alongside other hypotheses put forward about the development of humanity. For those who penetrate spiritual science in the way that I will dare to describe in the next lecture, it will not be a hypothesis, but a real research result that can be put alongside other scientific research results. The things that have to be discussed sound strange because the very science that today believes it stands firmly on the ground of the factual, the true, the only thing that can be attained, limits itself only to what the outer senses perceive, what the mind, bound to the senses and the brain, can explore of things. And that is why today it is often considered unscientific to speak of a research method that reaches to other powers of the soul, which make it possible to see into the supersensible and the way the supersensible plays into the sensory. By means of this method of research, by means of spiritual science, one is not merely led to the abstract imagination to which Herman Grimm was led in regard to the folk epic, but one is led to something that goes far beyond imagination, that represents a quite different state of soul or consciousness than that which man can have at the present moment in his development. And so, through spiritual science, we are led back to human prehistory in a completely different way than through ordinary science.

Today, ordinary science is accustomed to looking back on the development of humanity in such a way that what we call human beings today have gradually developed from lower, animal-like creatures. Spiritual science does not confront this modern research with a combative attitude, but fully recognizes the greatness and power of the achievements of this natural science of the 19th century, the significance of the idea of a transformation of the animal forms from the most imperfect to the perfect, and an attachment of the outer human form to the most perfect animal form. But it cannot stop at such a view of the becoming of man, of the becoming of organisms in general, which would present itself if one could survey with an external sensory view that which has taken place in the organic world up to man in the course of earthly events. Today, in spiritual science, the human being stands alongside the animal world. We see the variously shaped animal forms in the world around us. We see the human race spread out over the earth as a unified entity in a certain way. In spiritual science, we also have an unbiased view of how everything in the outer form speaks for the relationship between man and the other organisms, but in spiritual science, when we trace the development of humanity backwards, we cannot go back so far that we can directly place the stream of humanity into the animal series of development in some distant past. For we find, when we go back from the present into the past, that we cannot, anywhere, directly attach the present human form, the present human being, to any animal form that we know from the present.

If we go back in the development of humanity, we first find, one might say, the soul forces, the powers of mind and feeling and will, that we also have in the present, developing in ever more primitive forms in humans. Then we go back to the mists of time, of which old documents tell us only very little. Even where we can go back as far as the Egyptians or the peoples of the Near East, we are led everywhere back to an ancient humanity, which, although more primitive in some respects, also has more magnificent the same powers of mind, and will forces, which have only recently reached their present development, but which we recognize as the most important human impulses, as the most important historical impulses, as far as we can trace back humanity by considering this present soul. Nowhere do we find the possibility of placing even the most ancient race of men in a special relationship to the present animal forms. This, which spiritual science must assert for itself, is recognized today even by thinking natural scientists. But if we go further back and consider how the human soul changes when we compare how a person thinks, say, scientifically or otherwise, how he applies his intellect and how his powers of feeling work, when we trace this back — oh, we can trace it quite accurately — to a certain time when it first shone forth in humanity. We might say that it first appeared in the sixth or seventh century before Christ. The whole configuration of present-day feeling and thinking does not go back farther than the times of which we are told as the times of the first Greek natural philosophy.

If we go further back and have an unprejudiced eye, we find, without yet touching on spiritual science, that not only does all present-day scientific thought cease in the past, but that the human soul is in a completely different state altogether, in a much more impersonal state, but also in such a state that we have to address its powers much more as instinctively. Not in the sense that we are saying that people in this period acted on instincts like those of animals today, but the guidance of reason and intellect, as it exists today, was not there. Instead, however, there was a certain instinctive, direct certainty in people. They acted on the basis of direct, elementary impulses; they did not control them through the intellect tied to the brain. There we find, however, that in the human soul those powers still prevail unmixed, which we today have separately as powers of reason, and those powers, which we today carefully separate from the powers of reason and lead to science, the powers of imagination. Imagination, understanding and reason, they all work together in those ancient times. The further back we go, the more we find that we can no longer speak of what prevailed in the soul of human beings, what worked there as imagination and understanding, as we call a soul power today, when we call it imagination. Today we know very well that when we speak of imagination, we are speaking of a soul force whose expressions we cannot really apply, to which we cannot ascribe reality. The modern human being is careful in this matter, he is careful not to mix together what imagination gives him with what the logic of reason tells him. If we look at what the human mind expresses in those prehistoric times before imagination and reason appear separately, then we feel an original, elementary, instinctive power prevailing in the souls. We can find characteristics of today's imagination in it, but what – if we use the term – imagination gave the human soul back then had something to do with a reality. Imagination was not yet imagination, it was still – I must not be afraid to use the expression directly – clairvoyant power, was still a special soul faculty, was the gift of the soul through which man saw things, saw facts that are hidden from him today in his developmental epoch, when understanding and reason are to be particularly developed. Those powers that were not imagination but clairvoyant power penetrated deeper down into hidden forces and hidden forms of existence that lie behind the sensual world. This is what an unbiased consideration must lead us to: that when we look back at the development of humanity, we have to say to ourselves: Truly, we must take the word evolution, development, seriously.

That humanity in the present, in the last centuries and millennia, has come to its present high level of rational and intellectual powers, so to speak, is a result of development. These soul powers have developed out of others. And while our present soul powers are limited to what presents itself in the external sense world, an original humanity, which of course had to do without science in the modern sense, without the use of reason in the modern sense, an original human soul power at the basis of all individual peoples looked into the foundations of existence, into a realm that, as a supersensible one, lies behind the sensual. Once upon a time, all peoples possessed clairvoyant powers as part of the human soul. It was out of these clairvoyant powers that the present human powers of understanding and reason were formed, as well as the present way of thinking and feeling. These soul powers, which we may refer to as clairvoyant powers, were such that the human being felt at the same time: I am not the one who is thinking and feeling within me. Man felt as if he had been given over, with all his physicality and also with his soul being, to higher, supersensible powers that were working and living in him. Thus man felt like a vessel through which supersensible forces themselves spoke. If one considers this, one also understands the meaning of the further development of humanity. Human beings would have remained dependent beings, who could only have felt themselves to be vessels, as shells of powers and entities, if they had not progressed to the actual use of intellect and reason. Through the use of intellect and reason, man has become more independent, but at the same time, for a while of development, he has also been cut off from the spiritual world in certain respects, cut off from the supersensible foundations of existence. In the future, this will change again. The further we go back, the deeper the human soul sees into the foundations of existence through clairvoyant powers, and sees how those forces that worked on the human being himself in prehistoric times emerged from these foundations of existence until a point in time when all conditions on earth were quite different from today, when they were such that the forms of living beings were much more mobile, much more subject to a kind of metamorphosis than today. Thus we have to go back far from what is called the present human cultural period, we have to observe human forms and animal forms side by side. And much further back than is usually believed today is the separation of the animal form from the human form. The animal forms then solidified, became more immobile at a time when the human form was still quite soft and pliable and could be shaped and molded by what was experienced inwardly by the soul. In this way, we come back to a time in human development that is beyond our present consciousness, but for which another consciousness was present in the soul, one that was connected to the clairvoyant powers that have just been characterized. Such a consciousness, which could look back into the past and saw the development of humanity in its origin from the past already in complete separation from all animal life, also saw how human forces ruled, but still in a living connection with the supersensible forces that played into it. It saw what in the times when, for example, the Homeric epics were written was only present as an old echo, and what was present to a much greater extent in even earlier times. If we go back to the time before Homer, we find that people had a clairvoyant consciousness that, as it were, remembered human events from prehistoric times and was able to tell the story of the origin of man from memory. By Homer's time, the situation was such that people felt that the old clairvoyant consciousness was dwindling, but they still felt that it was there. That was a time when man did not speak of himself as an independent, egoistic being, but when gods and supersensible spiritual forces spoke through him. So we must take it seriously when Homer does not speak of himself, but when he says: Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles! Sing in me, higher being, being that speaks through me, that takes possession of me as I sing and say. This first line of Homer is a reality. We are not referred to ancient dynasties that are similar in the ordinary sense to our present humanity, but we are pointed to the fact by Homer himself that there were other people in primeval times, people in whom the supersensible lived. And Achilles is definitely still a personality from the transitional period from the old clairvoyance to the modern way of looking at things, which we already find in Agamemnon, which we find in Nestor and Odysseus, but which is then further developed into a higher way of looking at things. Only in this way do we understand Achilles when we know that Homer wanted to depict him as a member of the ancient human race who lived in a time that lies between the time when people still directly reached the ancient gods and the present time of humanity, which begins with Agamemnon.

Likewise, we are referred to a human prehistory in the Central European Nibelungen saga. The whole presentation of this epic shows us this. We are already dealing with people of our present time in a certain respect, but with such people of our present time who have preserved something from the time of ancient clairvoyance. All the qualities that Siegfried is said to have, that he can make himself invisible, that he has powers through which he overcomes Brunhilde, which an ordinary mortal cannot overcome, all this shows us, along with the other things that are told about him, that we have in him a man who, as in an inner human memory, has carried the achievements of the ancient powers of the soul, which were linked to clairvoyance and connection with nature, over into the present human condition. At what transition does Siegfried stand? This is shown by Brunhilde's relationship to Kriemhilde, Siegfried's wife. It cannot be explained in detail here what the two figures mean. But we can make sense of all these legends if we see in the figures that are presented to us pictorial representations of inner clairvoyant or remembered clairvoyant conditions. Thus we may see in Siegfried's relation to Kriemhilde his relation to the powers of his own soul as they rule in him. His soul is, as it were, a transitional soul, and this is because Siegfried, with the treasure of the Nibelungs, that is, with the clairvoyant secrets of ancient times, brings something into the new time that at the same time makes him unsuitable for his present time. The men of the old time could live with this Nibelung hoard, that is to say with the old clairvoyant powers. The earth has changed its conditions. Thus Siegfried, who still carries an echo of the old time in his soul, no longer fits into the present, and so he becomes a tragic figure. How can the present relate to what is still alive for Siegfried? For him, something of the old clairvoyant powers is still alive, because when he is overcome, Kriemhilde remains. She is brought the hoard of the Nibelungs, she can use it. We learn that later on, the hoard of the Nibelungs will be taken from her by Hagen. We can see that in a way, Brunhilde is also able to work with the old clairvoyant powers. In this way, she is opposed to those people who fit into the then-present: Gunther and his brothers, Gunther above all, for whom Brunhilde has no time. Why is that? Well, we know from the saga that Brunhilde is a kind of Valkyrie figure: in other words, something in the human soul, and specifically that with which, in ancient times, man was still able to unite through clairvoyant powers, but which has withdrawn from man, has become unconscious, and with which man, as he currently lives in the age of reason, can only unite after death. Hence the union with the Valkyrie at the moment of death. The Valkyrie is the personification of the living soul forces that are in the present human being, those soul forces that the old clairvoyant consciousness was able to perceive, but which the present human being only experiences when he passes through the gate of death. Only then is he united with this soul, which is represented in Brunhilde. Because Kriemhilde still knows something of the old clairvoyant times and the powers that the soul receives through ancient clairvoyance, she becomes a figure whose anger is described, as in the Iliad the anger of Achilles. This is sufficiently indicated to us that the people who were still endowed with clairvoyant powers in ancient times did not control with reason, did not let reason prevail, but acted directly from their most elementary, most intense impulses. Hence the personal, the directly egoistic, in both Kriemhilde and Achilles.

The whole matter becomes particularly interesting when we consider the folk epics, if we add Kalewala to the folk epics listed. We will be able to show, today, because of the limited time, that spiritual science in our present time can only point to the old clairvoyant states of humanity because it is possible today, again — albeit in a more advanced way, permeated by reason, not dream-like — to evoke clairvoyant states through spiritual training. Modern man is gradually growing into an age in which hidden powers will arise from the depths of the human soul, pointing to the supersensible. These powers will be guided by reason, not uncontrolled by it. They will point to the supersensible realm, so that we will become familiar again with the realms of which the old folk epics speak to us from the dim consciousness of ancient times. Therefore, we can say: One learns to recognize that it is possible to gain a revelation of the world, not only through the external senses, but through something supersensible that underlies the external physical human body.

There are methods – which will be discussed in the next lecture – by which man can make the spiritual supersensible inner being, which is so often denied today, independent of the sensual outer body, so that man does not live in an unconscious state as in sleep, when he becomes independent of his body, but perceives the spiritual around him. In this way, modern clairvoyance shows man the possibility of living cognitively in a higher, supersensible body, which, like a vessel, fills the ordinary sense body. Spiritual science calls it the etheric body. This etheric body rests within our physical body. When we detach it inwardly from the physical body, we can enter into the state of perception through which we become aware of supersensible facts. We become aware of two kinds of supersensible facts. Firstly, we become aware of it at the beginning of this clairvoyant state, when we begin to know that we no longer see through our physical body, we no longer hear through our physical body, and we no longer think through the brain that is bound to the physical body. At first, we know nothing of the external world. — I am telling you facts that can only be explained in more detail in the next lecture. — But the first step of clairvoyance leads us all the more to an insight into our own etheric body. We see a supersensible physicality of human nature that underlies it and that we can only address as something that works and creates like a kind of inner architect, inner foreman, that permeates our physical body in a living way. And then we become aware of the following.

We become aware that what we perceive in ourselves, what we perceive as the actual living part of our etheric body, is, on the one hand, limited and modified by our physical body, so that it is, as it were, clothed on the physical side. In that the etheric body lines the eyes and ears and the physical brain, we belong, as it were, to the earthly element. Through this we perceive how our etheric body becomes a specific, individual, egoistic human being, integrated into the sheath of our physical body. On the other hand, however, we perceive how our etheric body leads us precisely into those regions where we stand impersonally before a higher, supersensible reality, something that is not us, but that is present in us with full presence, something that works through us as spiritual, supersensible power and strength. In spiritual scientific observation, the inner life of the soul then breaks down into three parts, which are enclosed in three outer bodily sheaths, filling them. We initially live with our soul in such a way that we experience in it what our eyes see, our ears hear, our senses can grasp in general, and what our mind can comprehend. We live with our soul in our physical body. Insofar as our soul lives in the physical body, we call it the consciousness soul in spiritual science, because it is only through the complete integration into the physical body in the course of becoming human that it has become possible for the human being to become aware of himself. Then the modern clairvoyant, in particular, also gets to know the life of the soul in what we have called the etheric body. The soul lives in the etheric body in such a way that it has its powers, but the soul's powers work in such a way that we cannot say that they are our personal powers. They are general human powers, powers through which we are much closer to the hidden facts of nature as a whole. Insofar as the soul perceives these forces in an outer shell, namely in the etheric body, we speak of the mind or emotional soul as a second soul element. So that just as we find the consciousness soul enclosed in the shell of the physical body, we have the mind or emotional soul enclosed in the etheric body. And then we have an even more delicate body through which we can reach up into the supersensible world. Everything that we experience inwardly as our very own secrets, at the same time as that which is hidden from consciousness today and which in the time of ancient clairvoyance was felt as the formative forces in the human process of development, which was felt as if one could look back into the events of the dim and distant past, we ascribe all this to the sentient soul, ascribe it to it in such a way that it is enclosed in the finest human body, in what we — please, do not be put out by the expression, take it as a terminus technicus — call the astral body. It is the part of the human being that connects to the external earthly that inspires the human being, which he cannot perceive through the external senses, nor can perceive when he looks into the etheric body through his own inner being, but what he perceives when he becomes independent of himself, of the etheric body, and is connected with the forces of his origin.

Thus we have the sentient soul in the astral body, the mind or emotional soul in the etheric body, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. In the days of ancient clairvoyance, people were more or less instinctively aware of these things, for they looked within themselves and saw this threefold soul. Not that they analyzed the soul intellectually, but because they had a clairvoyant consciousness, the threefold human soul stood before them: the sentient soul in the astral, the mind or emotional soul in the etheric, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. Looking back, they saw how the outer man, the physical form, developed out of what is now before us as the threefold soul-forces. They sensed that this threefold division is born out of supersensible creative powers. They sensed that the sentient soul is born out of supersensible creative powers, which gave man the astral body, that body which he not only has like his etheric and physical bodies between birth and death, but which he takes with him when he passes through the gate of death, and which he already had before he came into existence through birth. Thus the old clairvoyants saw the sentient soul connected with the astral body and that which, so to speak, has an inspiring effect on man from the spiritual worlds and creates his astral body, as the one creative power that forms man out of the world as a whole. And as a second creative power, they saw what we have today as a result of the mind or emotional soul, and what creates the etheric body in such a way that this etheric body transforms all external substances, all external matter, so that they can permeate the physical human form in the human, not the animal, sense. The creative spirit for the etheric body, which manifests itself in our mind soul, was seen by the ancient seers as a superhuman cosmic power, working into physical matter as in magnetism, and into man. They looked up into the spiritual worlds and saw a divine spiritual power that shapes and forges the etheric body of the human being so that this etheric body becomes the master craftsman, the architect, who reshapes outer matter, confuses it, pulverizes it, grinds it, so that what otherwise exists as matter is structured in the human being and the human being acquires human abilities. The ancient clairvoyants saw how this creative power artfully transforms all matter so that it could become human matter. Then again they looked at the third, at the consciousness soul, which actually makes the egoistic human being, which is the transformation of the physical body, and they attributed those powers that prevail in this physical body solely and exclusively to the line of inheritance, to what comes from father and mother, from grandfather and great-grandfather, in short, what is the result of human powers of love, of human powers of reproduction. In this they saw the third creative power. The power of love works from generation to generation.

The ancient seers saw three powers, a creative being that our sentient soul ultimately evokes by forming the astral body in man, which powers can be inspired because it is the body that a person had before becoming a physical being through conception, the body that a person will have when he has passed through the gate of death. This formation of forces, or, as we might better say, this heavenly formation in man, lasts while the etheric and physical bodies pass away. At the same time, for the old seers this was what their direct experience revealed to them as being capable of bringing all culture into human life. That is why they saw in the Bringer of the astral body that power which brings in the divine, which itself consists only of the permanent, through which the eternal sings and sounds into the world. And the old seers, from whom — I say it unashamedly — the figures of Kalewala have sprung, have presented the living plastic embodiment of that power of creation that penetrates to us in the result of the sentient soul, that inspires the divine into the human, in Wäinämöinen. Wäinämöinen is the creator of that human limb that outlasts birth and death and that brings the heavenly into the earthly. And we see the second figure in Kalewala: Ilmarinen. When we go back to the ancient clairvoyant consciousness, we find that Ilmarinen creates everything that is an image in its living formation from the forces of the earth and from what does not belong to the sensual earth but to the deeper forces of the earth, starting from the etheric body. In Ilmarinen, we see the bringer of that which transforms all matter, that which surrounds it. We see in him the smith of the human form. And we see in the Sampo the human etheric body, forged by Ilmarinen out of the supersensible world, so that the sensual matter can be pulverized and then passed on from generation to generation, so that the human consciousness soul continues to work in the physical human body through the forces that the third divine supersensible being gives from generation to generation through the forces of love. We see this third divine supersensible power in Lemminkäinen. Thus we see deep secrets of the origin of mankind in the forging of the Sampo, we see deep secrets from the ancient clairvoyant consciousness at the bottom of Kalewala and thus we look back into human prehistory, of which we may say: Not at that time was the age when one could have dissected natural phenomena with reason. Everything was primitive, but in the primitive lived the intuition of what lies behind the sensual. Now it was the case that when these bodies of man were forged, when in particular the ethereal body of man, the Sampo, was forged, that it first had to be processed for a while, that man did not immediately have the powers that were thereby prepared for him by the supersensible powers. Once the etheric body has been forged, it must first become familiarized inwardly, as when we prepare a machine that must first be finished, so to speak, must first mature fully in order to be used. In the process of becoming human, there must always be intermediate periods between the creation of the corresponding limbs and the use of them. Thus man had forged his etheric body in distant primeval times. Then came an episode when this etheric body was sent down into human nature. Only later did it shine forth as the soul of the intellect. Man learned to use his powers as external natural forces, he brought forth from his own nature the hidden Sampo. We see this mystery of becoming human in a wonderful way in the forging of the Sampo, in the hiddenness, in the ineffectiveness of the Sampo, in the episode that lies between the forging and the recovery of the same. We see the Sampo first immersed in human nature, then brought out to the external forces of culture, which first appear as primitive forces, as described in the second part of Kalewala.

Thus everything takes on a deep meaning in this great national epic when we see in it descriptions of clairvoyantly acquired ancient processes of becoming human, of the coming into being of human nature from its various elements. I can assure you that I did not get to know Kalevala until long afterward. Once I had clearly visualized these facts about the development of human nature, it was a wonderful and surprising fact for me to rediscover in this epic what I was able to present more or less theoretically in my Theosophy, which was written at a time when I did not yet know a single line of Kalevala. And so we see how the secrets of humanity are revealed in what Wäinämöinen gives, he who is the creator of extrasensory inspiration: the story of the forging of the etheric body. But there is another secret hidden there. I understand, mind you, nothing of Finnish, I can only speak from the spiritual science. I would be able to express the word Sampo only and solely only by the fact that I would try to form a word that could arise in the following way: In the animals we see the etheric body so effective that it becomes the master builder for the most diverse forms, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. In the human etheric body, something has been forged that combines all these animal forms as if in a unity, with the only exception that the etheric body, that is, the Sampo, is forged over the earth according to climatic and other conditions, so that this etheric body has the special characteristics of the people, the special peculiarities of the people in its powers, that it shapes one people in this way and another differently. The Sampo is that for each people which constitutes the particular shape of the etheric body, which brings precisely this particular people into being, so that the members of this people have the same appearance in relation to what shines through their living and their physical being. Insofar as the same appearance is crafted out of the etheric in the human form, the forces of the etheric body lie in the Sampo. In the Sampo we thus have the symbol of the cohesion of the Finnish people, that which, in the depths of humanity, makes the Finnish nation have lived itself out in precisely this particular form.

But this is the case with every folk epic. Folk epics can only arise where culture is still enclosed in the forces of the Sampo, in the forces of the etheric body. As long as culture depends on the forces of the Sampo, the people bear the stamp of this Sampo. This etheric body therefore carries the character of the popular, the folk-like, in all of culture. When could a break in this popular, in this folk-like, occur in the course of the cultural process? It could happen when something entered the human cultural process that is not for one person, for one tribe, for one people, but for all of humanity. Something that is taken from such depths of human nature, from such subtleties and intimacies, and incorporated into the cultural process that it applies to all people without distinction of nationality, race and so on. But that was given when those powers spoke to people, not speaking to one people but to all humanity, those powers that are only so impersonal even in the sense of the folk, so finely and delicately hinted at in the end of Kalewala, in that the Christ is born of Mariata. When He is baptized, Wäinämöinen leaves the land, something has occurred that brings the special folk character together with the general human character. And here, at this point, where one of the most significant, concise, and magnificent folk epics flows into the description, into the completely impersonal – allow me the paradoxical expression – unpalestinianized description of the Christ impulse, Kalevala becomes particularly significant. It leads us particularly into what can be felt where the benefits and the happiness of the Sampo are felt as continuing to have an effect through all human development and at the same time in interaction with the Christian idea, with the Christian impulse. This is the infinitely delicate thing at the end of Kalewala. It is also what explains so clearly that what lies before this conclusion in Kalewala belongs to the pre-Christian era. But just as everything universally human will only continue to exist by preserving the individual, so the individual folk cultures, which derive their essence from the ancient clairvoyant states of the peoples, will continue to live in the universally human. And so everything that Kalewala indicates as Christian at the end will always combine and retain its special consequence through the never-ending effect that is hinted at in the inspirations of Wäinämöinen. For Wäinämöinen means something that belongs to that human part that is above birth and death, that walks with man through all human becoming. Thus, such epics as Kalevala present something to us that is immortal, that can be imbued with the Christian idea, but that will assert itself as something individual, that will always prove that the general human essence, just as white sunlight is divided into many colors, will live on in the many folk cultures. And because this general humanity in the essence of folk epics permeates the individual, which in turn shines into and speaks to every human being, that is why the individualities of the peoples live so much in the essence of their folk epics. That is why the people of old, who in their clairvoyance saw the essence of their own nationality as it is described in all folk epics, stand so vividly before our eyes. But we can get to know it in a very wonderful way when humanity is embraced in its intimacies by circumstances such as those in which the Finnish nation lives, where these, lying at the depths of the soul, are presented in such a way that they can be directly compared with what the most modern spiritual science can reveal to us about human secrets.

Thus, my dear audience, such folk epics are at the same time a living protest against all materialism, against all attempts to derive man from purely external material forces, material conditions, material entities. Such folk epics, especially Kalewala, tell us that man has his origin and primal state in the spiritual and soul. Therefore, a renewal, a re-fertilization of old folk epics can also provide immeasurably great services in the most vital sense of spiritual, of intellectual culture. For just as spiritual science today seeks to renew human consciousness in the sense that humanity is rooted not in matter but in spirit, so a close examination of an epic like Kalewala shows us that the best that man has, and the best that man is, comes from the spiritual and soul. In this sense, it was interesting to me that one of the runes, the kanteles, immediately, I would say, protests against an interpretation of what appears in Kalevala in a materialistic sense. That instrument, that harp-like instrument with which the old singers sang from the old days, is depicted as if it were made of materials from the physical world. But the old rune protested against this, protested in a spiritual-scientific sense, one might say, against the fact that the string instrument for Wäinämöinen was made of natural products that the senses can see. In truth, the old rune says, the instrument on which man plays the wise melodies that come to him directly from the spiritual world comes from the spiritual soul. In this sense, the old rune is to be interpreted entirely in the spiritual-scientific sense, a living protest against the interpretation of what man is capable of in the materialistic sense, an indication that what man possesses , what his nature is and what is only symbolically expressed in such an instrument as that attributed to Wäinämöinen, that such an instrument originates from the spirit and that the whole nature of man originates from the spirit. It can be regarded as a motto for the spirit of spiritual science, the old Finnish folk rune, which is translated into German as follows, and in which I can summarize the basic tone, the basic nuance of what the lecture wanted to explain about the nature of folk epics:

Those who believe that
And are in error,
Those who believe that Wäinämöinen
Made the kantele,
Our beautiful stringed instrument,
From the jaws of the pike,
And that he spun strings
From the tail of the hiisi horse.
It was made out of necessity,
Then sorrow bound its parts,
Bitter tears of longing span
And the sufferings their strings.

Thus all being is not born out of material, but out of spiritual-soul, so this old folk rune, so again spiritual science, which wants to place itself in the living cultural process of our time.

I would like to contribute to a deeper understanding of what has already been said, more or less in connection with the development of our building, so that we can add more in the future, which will be better understood through such an episodic consideration, as today's is intended to be.

We know that the human soul appears to us as divided into the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. We know that the human I works in these three soul members, as described in “Theosophy”. Now, there is really a lot going on in human nature that does not penetrate into consciousness as it happens. It is precisely spiritual-scientific knowledge that can gradually lead to much of what lies in the depths of the human soul being illuminated by the light of consciousness. But when the human soul lives in this way, it illuminates, as it were, only a small part of the entire horizon of the soul, and below this horizon lies much that has deep, deep significance for the soul, but is not conscious in ordinary life. Above all, let us now turn our gaze to something that does not usually come to consciousness. For modern man it is actually quite salutary that it does not come to consciousness. But we shall see later that this was not always the case for all human beings. If only the ordinary everyday consciousness of man were to deepen a little and were able to bring up what, I might say, is only one degree more unconscious than ordinary consciousness, then the human soul would very soon discover that it is the trinity of which has been spoken, that it is really not a unity without further ado, but a trinity. I have indicated in the writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' that when a person begins to advance towards the spiritual worlds, he, as it were, falls apart into a trinity. And as soon as one, as I said, peers a little into this, as it were, covered part of consciousness, one very soon notices that this threefoldness of sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul is there. Below the threshold of consciousness – and not very deep at that for the present human being – there really is a kind of soul realm that is permeated not by a unity, but by a kind of three-ness, by the radiance of this three-ness, so that in the moment when the human being pushes back represses what he has basically only attained so completely since the second half of the fourth post-Atlantic period and so clearly only after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, as soon as he represses this, he can distinguish exactly between three worlds or realms in his soul. One area is one that is more inspired, into which dream-like, dreamy inspirations come. The second area is that through which the human being, as it were, ensouls himself, is built up in the physical parts. And the third area is where he receives consciousness of the world.

The first area is that into which inspirations penetrate, dream-like inspirations that fill the soul, which is connected to the sentient soul. A second area, where the soul, as it were, builds up its body through its own inner formations and creations, is connected to the mind or emotional soul. This is the inner workmaster, the master builder, we could also say the blacksmith of the physical body. And the third, the mediation of external knowledge, which comes into contact with the world, which is connected to the senses, is connected to the consciousness soul. We can therefore say: connected to physical forces.

A soul trinity, as it were, reigns at the bottom of the human soul, and this trinity is contrasted with the reign and work of that which strives towards unity. I will indicate this by contrasting one particular soul realm with another here (see the following drawing). This realm of the soul works in a certain relation entirely in itself. But it works naturally in a unified way, so to speak, in the sense that the soul is its temperament, its character, which rests deep down in the soul, but as a unified soul. I would like to describe this with this: unified soul, in contrast to the trinity.

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The way our soul is now, this unity soul cannot escape a certain dull life if it is not, as it were, illuminated and illuminated. And in our time, the illumination always emanates from some form of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that I can symbolize for you what radiates in some way into the unity soul: some form in which the Mystery of Golgotha radiates into the unity soul. Over the years, we have really done a great deal to gradually gain an idea of how infinitely vast everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha is. You can therefore imagine that when the Mystery of Golgotha radiates into the human soul in any form, it is always only a certain level, a certain degree of the Mystery of Golgotha. But we imagine that because the soul of unity is something that broods over things, as it were, but contains something particularly valuable for our time, this unity must be permeated in some form by the Mystery of Golgotha.

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Now that which emanates from the various centers of inspiration and initiation in the world extends into every soul, and that also belongs to the subconscious influences in the human soul. You see, the effect of the Mystery of Golgotha is all-embracing, universal, but the human being, the human soul, can only absorb this Mystery of Golgotha in a certain way. I have often spoken in the past about the initiation center, which works particularly in the depths of the soul so that the depths of the soul are properly prepared to be permeated by the Mystery of Golgotha. I have often said that the initiate Scythianos always stands before this initiation center. Let us assume, then, that the soul has been prepared in the unified soul for what comes from the Mystery of Golgotha, ready to receive it through what works unconsciously in each soul from Scythianos.

In this way we have, as it were, split the human soul into two realms: one tripartite, and the other unitary; I would say, into a realm that is more soul-oriented and one that is more , I might say, a realm that takes up the forces of the Mystery of Golgotha into its natural foundation on the one hand and the influences of the Scythian on the other.

Now this unity cannot easily unite with the trinity, that would not work, and that is why this trinity remains below the threshold of consciousness in present-day people. This trinity is, as it were, drowned out; the consciousness of it must be extinguished. If the soul could really descend to the triad, it would immediately feel itself as a triad, not as one. It would say: There is something in me, inspiring me, something that builds me up, that forges me together, and something that connects me to the outside world. But this trinity must be, as it were, extinguished, overshadowed by something that brings the human being to say: I do not distinguish the three. — So something must radiate into the three that makes the soul not feel the three within itself, extinguishing this three, allowing it to be, as it were, like a foggy formation.

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You see, then there can be a connection between what should live in the soul as a unity and what is in the soul as a trinity, when there is a communication, a kind of exchange, a kind of soul trunk, as it were, that leads to the extinguished trinity and that emanates from what is unity but is irradiated from two sides, so to speak, is illuminated in such a way that it is not just a dull, even, character- and temperament-related unity of nature, but that it is uniformly illuminated by what the human being should be: by the consciousness of the human soul in its connection with the divine-spiritual being. Actually, I have recorded something that lies at the bottom of every human soul. Not a single human soul in our time can exist without all these things being present in it.

But now imagine the following. I have repeatedly emphasized here, in order to show what our building should be, that what lives in the human soul is also expressed outwardly, so to speak, in the outer evolution of the earth. If there is such an area in the human soul that really represents a kind of trinity, which in today's people is already, so to speak, covered by the ordinary consciousness, then we must once find a stage of evolution where we encounter it externally, that the soul really feels itself as a trinity, as it were, divided into three soul members. In other words, there must once have been a people who felt these three soul-members as separate and felt that basically the unity was felt much less in the soul than the trinity, since the trinity was still thought of in connection with the cosmos. These people were in Europe and left behind an important cultural monument, which I have spoken about before. These people, who once, in the place in Europe where they had to be, felt this trinity in the soul, are the Finnish people. And the expression of this cultural level is laid down in Kalewala. In what is presented in Kalewala, there is a clear awareness of the triad of the soul, so that the ancient seers, on whom Kalewala is based, felt: There is something inspiring in the world, a link of my soul is connected to it, my sentient soul. It tends towards it, its powers go towards it, it receives impulses from there. This people or these ancient seers sensed something human-divine or human-heroic in what inspires the sentient soul. And they called it Wäinämöinen. This is nothing other than what inspires the sentient soul in the cosmos. All the destinies described in Kalewala as the destinies of Wäinämöinen express that this consciousness was once present in a people who had a large spread in the northeast of the European area and who felt the three soul members separately and the sentient soul inspired by Wäinämöinen.

Likewise, these people, these ancient seers, felt that the mind or emotional soul is, as it were, an extra link in the soul that receives its impulses for forging, felt that what forges in the human soul, what builds it up, receives from another elementary, heroic being, from Ilmarinen. Just as Wäinämöinen corresponds to the sentient soul, so Ilmarinen corresponds to the mind or mind soul in Kalewala. If you read the lecture about Kalewala, you can find all this in it.

And it is equally important to note that these people felt that while the consciousness soul was felt in those days as that which makes man a conqueror on the physical plane in the first place, these ancient seers in Lemminkäinen felt a being that is connected to the forces of the physical plane, an elemental, heroic being in the inspirer of the consciousness soul. Thus these three heroic figures, one might say, come from the ancient Finnish people, speaking by analogy with other epics, inspiring the threefold nature of the soul.

The wonderful thing is the connection between Ilmarinen and what is forged there. I have already hinted at it. Man himself is forged out of the elements of nature. This being, forged out of all the atoms of nature, pulverized and forged together, is depicted in a magnificent tableau in the forging of the Sampo in Kalewala. And that this formation of the human being out of these three soul-members has once happened, then must go into a pralaya, as it were, and then comes forth again, is also depicted in Kalewala: how the Sampo is lost and found again, as it were, like that which is first covered by darkness of consciousness.

And now let us imagine that to the south, to the southeast, we can say, there is another people who first developed those soul qualities in ancient times of which I have spoken, the unity in the soul, that which expresses the unity in the character, the emotional qualities, in the temperament. This people is a Slavic people, while the people facing them are the Finnish people. This Slavic people receives its influences from Skythianos, who also lived for a time in ancient times, surrounded by the ancient Scythian people. It is not at all necessary that a highly developed people also live around an initiation center, but rather, in the course of development, what is necessary must happen. And the penetration of a certain form of the Mystery of Golgotha is the penetration of the Greek-Byzantine culture into Slavdom. What I have drawn for you here as a center of Greek-Byzantine culture, you can safely take as Constantinople on the map of Europe, because that is basically Constantinople.

So now we have souls that find themselves impregnated with a Slavic basic type. These are souls that, on the one hand, are connected with that which can lead to a unified being through the Mystery of Golgotha, which can prepare for Christianity in unified souls, and on the other hand, receive the Mystery of Golgotha in a very specific form, something like the inspiration, the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha, as it emanated from the Byzantine-Greek culture.

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But now something else must come, from a certain point, as it were. What was there in the Finnish people as the division, the separation into the three elements, the sediment of which is so magnificently contained in Kalevala, that must be wiped out. It can only be eradicated if an external influence comes, can only be eradicated by the advance of a people or a part of a people that is predisposed from the outset to feel not the trinity but the unity in the soul, not the unity that one receives from the mystery of Golgotha but the unity that one has by nature, as it were. If you look at the Finnish people, you find that they are particularly predisposed to develop an awareness of the trinity. And this trinity cannot be expressed more meaningfully in its relationship to the cosmos than it has been in Kalewala. But then in the north it had to be whitewashed, overcast by what, as it were, extinguishes the awareness of this trinity. A tribe was pressing down there that carried in a natural way in its soul what was there at that time as the striving for unity, which was expressed in a completely different way, at a completely different stage in Goethe's “Faust”, but also in Faust in general, something that is unaware of the threefold nature of the soul, that strives for the unity of the ego. Here, at a primitive stage, it has a destructive effect on the three soul members.

Now the Finnish people were one such people, who still felt naturally, otherwise they would not have felt the three soul members. That which flows along, extinguishing the trinity, this flowing in, pushing in, was felt as a r r r, and because it was felt as something that, one might say, is best expressed in occult language in the letters, in the sound u u o, so that one would like to say: It comes close, one must actually be afraid of it, so it breathes in the rruuo and settles, which is always felt by the Tau, t, when it penetrates into the human soul. Just as the penetration into the human soul of the ancient Jehovah is expressed by the s, by the Hebrew “Shin”, so this penetration into the soul is generally expressed by the s-sound. All this is connected with what penetrates into the soul and takes hold in the soul; all this pushes towards i, the meaning of which is well known. In the Finnish people, it is connected with rruu. That is why they felt this rutsi, ruotsi, and that is why they called the peoples who were pushing down there, the Rutsi, Ruotsi. And gradually the Slavs adopted this name, and because they associated themselves with what was pushing down from above, what the Finns called, they called themselves Rutsi, which later became the name Russians.

So you see, all that is told externally in history had to be that these peoples sitting down here called the Varangian tribes, which were actually Norman-Germanic tribes that had to join with the Slavic tribes. This is based on something that had to be, that was necessary due to the nature of the human soul. And so it came about that later in the east of Europe the element of the Russian entered into the European folk-tale. In the element of the Russian all that I have spoken of really lives. Above all, the Norman-Germanic element lives in it, even living in the name from which the name Russian has come, because it has come by the route I have indicated.

In a profound way, Kalewala expresses that the greatness of the Finnish people is based on the fact that they actually prepare unity in the trinity, prepare for the acceptance of that unity by extinguishing the trinity, and that unity is no longer only human, but is divine, and the divine hero of the Mystery of Golgotha lives in it.

In order for a group of people to be able to absorb what comes to them, they must first be prepared. In this way we get an impression of what must happen inwardly so that what happens outwardly can be fulfilled in evolution. I said that Kalevala expresses in a magnificent way that the Finnish people had to provide this preparation, in that the mystery of Golgotha is introduced into Kalevala in a peculiar way at the end. Christ appears at the end of Kalevala, but by throwing his impulse into Finnish life, Wäinämöinen goes out of the country, which expresses that the originally great, the meaningful, that has come into Europe through the Finnish element, is a preparatory stage for Christianity and receives Christianity like a message from outside.

Just as we see in the individual human being that he or she must be prepared in an extraordinarily complicated way, so to speak, so that his soul can then find what it needs from the most diverse sides in order to live in a particular incarnation, so it is with nations. A nation is not something quite so simple and homogeneous, but a nation is something in which many things converge. The people who live over there in the east, all of this has come together in them. And all that is inwardly spiritual in them, one could say, is outwardly hinted at, even if only in a slight way. I have said that there must be a soul strain in this nation that leads from below to above, or from above to below, if it is a connecting soul strain. This was present in a mighty road that went from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Finland, and on which an exchange took place between the Greek-Byzantine cultural element and the natural element of the Rutsi.

Man has to go through different things in the course of his various incarnations. One incarnation must always build upon the other. The human being can only do this by drawing upon the substance, the material, of which the individual peoples and their members are formed, and by truly drawing upon the forces that will later enable human evolution to take place. There comes a time when a human soul must find in its incarnations a physical body that has been formed from the forces I have described here. And what is so easily said, that a person is born a Russian, has a profound, a colossal significance. That a person is born a Russian means that, through the various incarnations, he has arrived at a point in his earthly career where he can only experience what he can by passing through a life between birth and death in a physical body that is composed in such a way. If one did not live through it in such a body, then one would lack something in what one acquires from incarnation to incarnation. Foolish people – I say this without any nuance of feeling, but as a technical term – have repeatedly spoken of the saying: 'The world is best understood in its truth when it appears in its simplicity'. That is not true, it is just convenient. Deep minds have always said, most recently and most forcefully Ralph Waldo Emerson, that one only penetrates to the truth of the facts when one recognizes them in all their complexity. It is not so simple to understand what is alive in the world and what is connected with the whole evolution of the world.

And just as it is on the eastern half of the European peninsula that souls are prepared to experience something special, so it is for all other cases on the earth's surface, so the individual national characters are prepared in a complicated way. Now, above all, remember one thing that we have become sufficiently familiar with in the course of our spiritual studies.

To a certain extent, when a person has passed through the gate of death, by looking back on his last life on earth, he is dependent on what he has experienced in his last life on earth. We know that the connections with earlier lives on earth play a role in the afterlife for many years. But that has to be the case. The human being must pass through a physical incarnation so that during the time between death and a new birth, certain memories of this previous incarnation are present and certain impulses from this previous incarnation reach into the present. Because he was a very specific human being with a specific organism, which was subject to certain influences due to the conditions on earth, the impressions after death, which go back in terms of memory, also continue to have an effect to a certain extent. These are influenced and affected by this, they take on a certain shade. This is the shade that a soul receives from having passed through a particular nationality, which it gets from a particular nationality. This is increasingly being shed as the national gives way to the international. But today this is still present to a great extent, otherwise today's events could not have occurred. To a certain extent, people still look back on what they experienced through their organism – insofar as it is nationally determined – in the previous life between birth and death. Now the souls that pass through bodies in the way described today, that have just been prepared in this particular way, are prepared in a very specific way for the life they enter after they have passed through the gate of death. Of course, individuality is not affected, only what is, as it were, like the clothes, the covers of the actual individuality. But these clothes or covers, with which nationality is connected, still give something that the soul also has after death, of which it knows that it has belonged to your passage through earthly life.

If the soul has now passed through a body that has been prepared in this way – exoterically one would say that it has passed through a Russian body in an incarnation – then it naturally has the nuance of the outer shell, which after death becomes an idea that one has of oneself, as one otherwise has ideas of oneself. Into this, it has incorporated everything that is expressed here (see drawing $. 49) in this way, and if one wants to express what the soul undergoes inwardly from having a body that is so composed, one can say the following. We know from our previous considerations that consciousness changes in a certain way after death; it attains a higher degree, becomes clearer, more intense after death than it is in a physical body. Having gone through what was meant before, the soul prepares to enter into a particularly intimate relationship after death with those beings who, like special guardian spirits, live above the actual human individualities and belong to the next higher hierarchy, the hierarchy of the Angeloi. In the life after death, which follows a Russian incarnation of a soul, it is predisposed, as it were, to identify with its angelos, to view the spiritual world, so to speak, with the eyes of the angelos, to use a rough expression.

The human being strives upwards to the higher self. This higher self expresses itself in the most diverse ways. Read the last Munich cycle on “The Secrets of the Threshold”. There you dealt with how consciousness becomes something else, how the soul, as it were, permeates the angelos. It must permeate itself with it and prepares itself for the permeation with the angelos by living itself through the gate of death into the spiritual world after life in a Russian body that has been prepared as we have described. So that we can say: The one who has gone through a Russian body actually feels everything more subtly after death because he is particularly imbued in his entire being with an angelos, with the protective genius of the next higher hierarchy.

But for people of Western culture, it is the case that one is less strongly impregnated, less strongly imbued after death with the essence of the angelos. If you go through a Western incarnation, you are more likely to experience the following after death: I still feel the way I used to feel, I still look at the world the way I used to look at it. - It feels like a special art to grow together with one's Angelos. For the Russian people, it is something natural to always be with one's Angelos. The soul passes through all possible nationalities on its way through the incarnations and must also pass through this incarnation, where it receives the impulse to merge more fully with its angelos, to grow together with its angelos, to see with its spiritual eye into the spiritual world.

Of course, more than in other periods between death and a new birth, this refers to the period immediately after death, the next few years or one and a half to two decades, because in the main period before and after the “midnight” of which I have already spoken, the soul discards such things. So this refers to the time when a person is still influenced by what they have experienced in their physical body, when that is still having an effect.

And now, after we have dealt with this, let us turn our gaze to the spiritual world, so to speak to the inner world in which we live, by adding to our consideration that it only corresponds to the limited human mind when it believes that it is only surrounded by physical people. He is always surrounded by the deceased, by those who live in the spiritual world. So we have deceased souls in our environment who have gone through physical, Russian bodies that have a great tendency to live more than Angelos, I would say, in their present state of mind than as humans.

After such an incarnation, the etheric body dissolves particularly quickly into the surrounding etheric world, while in the case of Western nations the etheric body is more compact, holds together more, and dissolves more slowly into the surrounding etheric world. Now, however, we are already living in a time, namely since the last third of the 19th century, as I have often indicated, when Michael has taken power in the spiritual world, after Gabriel ruled before. We are now living in a time when these conditions are emerging particularly strongly in the spiritual world, and what has been described is having a particularly strong effect in the spiritual world. For it is incumbent upon our time to prepare the great event that I already hinted at in the first mystery drama, 'The Portal of Initiation': the appearance of the Christ in a spiritual form before man. This event of the appearance of the Christ, as Theodora has indicated, can only be brought about if the rule of Michael spreads more and more. This is still a process in the spiritual world. Michael is fighting for the approach of the Christ on the plane that borders on our world. He needs his hosts, his fighters, to do this. Now important fighters are being delivered to him, important hosts from those souls that have gone through a Russian body in the present incarnation. So that we can almost see in the spiritual world a kind of conquest by Michael for the approach of the Christ. For this he recruits a host, a series of important fighters from the souls that have gone through Russian bodies, because they are predisposed to identify with their Angelos. This makes them particularly suitable for summoning the forces to create the image through which the Christ is to appear in purity. To prevent him from appearing in the wrong form, in subjective human imagination, so that he appears in the right image, Michael must fight the battle I have indicated. He can fight it particularly through those souls who naturally carry this consciousness of Angelos within them. This makes them particularly prepared. Also, because their etheric body dissolves very easily, they have nothing in their etheric body that could cause the Christ to appear in a false form, in false imaginations.

In order for everything that should happen in the world to happen correctly, various links in the world order must work together. In order for what I have described to happen, an idiosyncrasy must be combated that is more prevalent in the West, especially in souls that have gone through a French incarnation. These souls, because of their nationality, have the peculiar tendency to hold on to their etheric body, to hold on to a very specific imaginative form in the etheric body for a long time. This cannot be combated by the Western souls alone, but these Western souls must be helped, one might say, to disperse these etheric bodies in the general world ether, so that a false image of the Christ-appearance is not created. So the hosts who fight under Michael must work together to combat those souls who have passed through French bodies.

This is what clairvoyant consciousness was able to see as the basis of our present evolution, especially in the last third of the 19th century and into our time. More and more, a spiritual battle developed in the spiritual world, in the astral world, between Russia and France - naturally in that which is spiritually fundamental - and this battle grew ever stronger. A battle in the spiritual world actually means cooperation in the physical world, but it is already a picture of the battle, of the opposing forces, and those who look into the spiritual world have seen an intensification of the spiritual battle between West and East since the last third of the 19th century and into our time , through Central Europe, the battle in heaven, one could already call it that, which consists in the fact that more and more crowds in the East have been gathered under the rule of Michael, in order to prevent all that which could prevent the appearance of Christ in the West, in the West that is growing more and more into materialism.

Yes, my dear friends, where there is a high culture, a culture as distinct and mature as in France, the soul has adopted certain imaginations. These imaginations remain after death, but they prevent something completely new from coming, something that must come through the Christ. Therefore, especially in the spiritual world, what passes from a fully mature culture into the souls must be fought against. Michael cannot choose his hosts from a fully mature culture; they must first be cleansed of a particular imagination. Hence the grandiose picture behind the scene of the spiritual world: the struggle of the East against the West, the host of Michael against the souls of the West that have become independent.

And you see, the outer physical expression of a spiritual battle is a physical alliance. What allies itself on the physical plane expresses by doing so that it is in a battle on the spiritual plane. People become allies on the physical plane when they have to fight each other on the spiritual plane. From this you can see once again how seriously we must take the words of Maya and truth. The word of Maya and the truth is often spoken, but it remains theory, because anyone who looks into the spiritual world and sees what underlies the physical world is overcome by the feeling of the most tremendous shock when he seriously penetrates from Maya to truth and finds the truth behind what lives in Maya. Truth must often be expressed in quite different words than on the physical plane.

What is called an alliance on the physical plane is often called war on the spiritual plane. Of course, one must not make false constructions by seeking what one finds on the physical plane in its opposite in the spiritual, because it is not so for all things. One must seek things in their reality in the spiritual. In some cases it is absolutely true that what happens on the physical plane can be a direct reflection of what happens in the spiritual world. In other cases there is such a colossal contrast as here between the East and the West, where on the physical plane there is an alliance in Maja and in the spiritual world there is a struggle of infinitely greater significance. For through this struggle it must gradually be brought about that a true image emerges from the etheric world, an image of the Being that in our time, in the course of the twentieth century, is to approach humanity, in whom Christ is.

We will continue with such reflections at the next opportunity. But I ask you to take such things as today's in all seriousness, because I assure you that when they are first found, they are sufficiently shocking.

If we consider only the human physical body, it is very difficult to arrive at insights such as those we discussed last time. This applies particularly to the peoples who are the peoples of the new world, of Europe and America.

In these areas, the physical body is formed from within to a much lesser extent than in Asia and Africa, for example. In the case of the peoples of Asia and Africa, the physical body is more formed from within, from the forces lying in the etheric body. In the case of the peoples of Europe and America, the greater influence in the formative forces of the physical body comes from external influences.

We can say something like this: as soon as we look for the forces that form and shape the physical body of a person, we must find etheric forces. These etheric forces lie more in the interior of the etheric body for the inhabitants of Africa and Asia. For the inhabitants of Europe and America, they lie more in the etheric world that surrounds people from the outside.

The people of Africa and Asia are therefore more connected with the inner etheric forces, and the people of Europe and America more with the outer etheric forces, and thus more with the nature spirits.

If I want to express myself in a primitive way, paying less attention to what has become clear to us through spiritual scientific observation, I would have to say: the physical body of African and Asian peoples is more shaped from the inside out, more through internal formative forces. The body of the peoples of Europe and America is more shaped by the way they relate to the conditions of the outside world. The external forces are more impressed in the plastic forms and therefore shape the forms of the physical body more.

In the book Threshold of the Spiritual World, I pointed out that when we consider a human being's etheric body, we find that they are connected to the Earth's whole organism to a greater extent than one might think if one focuses only on the physical body. The Earth itself is a kind of living being. But while the human being, as a living being, appears to us, as it were, as a closed unit, so that we must also perceive him as a unit, we must consider the earth as a living organism in such a way that we see in it a multitude of natural beings interacting with each other.

The Earth includes, first of all, the solid Earth itself, which forms the continents. But what we perceive as this material, solid Earth is nothing other than Maja. The reality is a great multitude of nature spirits, which in turn are led by spirits of higher hierarchies. That this mass of spirits coalesces and functions as solid Earth is Maja. The Earth is spirit through and through. This has often been emphasized.

Now the earth is not only the solid earth, but also what permeates the earth as water, and insofar as the matter of the earth lives out in the liquid, we are again dealing with the water as the maja. In reality, however, we are dealing with a large number of nature spirits. It is the same with the air and the warmth that permeates and washes around the earth. All this is a sum of nature spirits, and the material is only the outer Maja.

More than that in Asia and Africa is the case with the European human being - let us limit ourselves to this for the time being - there is, as it were, a constant exchange of impulses between the inner etheric forces and the elemental beings contained in fire, water, air and earth. These elemental beings act from the outside in on the human etheric body, and thereby they receive the formative and educational forces, which then appear in the appearance and the activities of the physical body, right down to speech. For speech is also an activity of the physical body. But of course the impulses for speech lie in the etheric body.

Now, you see, if we consider the human being as he lives on earth, as he is an earthly being via the etheric body, and as he belongs to the earth, we must take into account the different ways in which the individual essences of earth, water, air and so on affect the human etheric body. For the elemental and etheric entities of the earth are of a very different nature, the etheric and elemental entities of water are of a very different nature, so that we can say: simply by the fact that any person lives as a physical being in the mountains or on the seashore, other entities have a greater influence on his etheric body. In the case of the person living on the seashore, the elemental entities that have their Maya expression in water have a much greater influence than in the case of the person living in the mountains. In the case of a person living in the mountains, the beings that live in the earth have a greater influence than the entities that have their Maya expression in water.

Now that which is formed, made, out of man is influenced by this interaction – I am now speaking mainly of the European human being – I say influenced, and in the way these elementary spirits of nature work, there is something of what forms man out of the spiritual world, insofar as this man is an earthly being.

Last time I spoke to you about the fact that Eastern culture preceded European culture, let us say, a layer of culture whose people were so constituted that they still had something in their souls of what is more pushed back into the subconscious in today's people, that they had something in their ordinary lives of a division of the soul into the soul of feeling, mind or emotion and consciousness. I have pointed out to you that the Finnish people, the great Finnish people of old — the present-day people are only a remnant of the once widespread Finnish people — had such a soul that the souls of these people, in their direct experience of the day, had something of a division of the soul into a soul of feeling, a soul of mind or emotion, and a soul of consciousness, in a certain ancient clairvoyance that was developed in them.

I have told you that in the great epic Kalewala, the three figures of Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen express the way in which this threefold soul is determined, as it were, by the cosmos.

Now, how could something like this come about at all? How could a great nation develop at a certain point in Europe - so we ask ourselves - that had a soul like the one I have described?

Now, you see, how the human being develops his actual self, the gift of the earth, comes from the spirits of the earth working on him from below, through the maya of earthly matter. From below, as it were through the firm earth, the spirits of the earth work, and in our cycle it is so that these spirits of the earth are essentially used to evoke the I-nature in man.

Should something arise in the soul of a people, such as the ancient Finnish people, that lies beneath the nature of the I, that is more spiritual than the nature of the I, that is more closely connected to the divine forces (for when the soul feels that it is split three ways, it is more with the divine powers than when it does not. If something like this were to arise, then not only the earthly with its elementary spirits from below was allowed to radiate into the earthly of man, but something else had to radiate into this earthly, another elementary influence.

In the same way that a person's physical existence is intimately connected with the spirits of the earth — physical existence, insofar as it is an earthly existence and one develops one's self in it — with the spirits that work from the earth itself, from below upwards, then the soul life of the human being, which manifests itself as natural, temperamental, character-shaped soul life, is connected with everything that lives on the earth as a watery element, as a liquid element. So the spirits of the watery, liquid element must have an effect on these souls, which are thus split into three.

Now, for our time cycle, the earthly element is the ego-forming element, that is, the one that matters. If another element intrudes, such as the watery element, for example, it intrudes more from the spiritual world. It is not contained in the human being itself. It must, as it were, sink into the human being as a spiritual being, so that he can receive into his earthly nature something that leads him into the spiritual world.

Let us assume that the surface of the blackboard is where the elementary forces of the earth come out. If a spiritual element wants to sink into this, it must come from the organism of the earth itself, from something that is spiritual in itself. There must be a being, a real being, which is not the human being himself, which, as it were, inspires the human being to the threefold nature of the soul. There must therefore be a Being that acts on the soul in such a way, acting from natural spirituality, that the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul separate, so that the souls can truly say: For my sentient soul, something like Wäinämöinen is at work from nature, something that flows towards me like a nature being, that gives me the powers of the sentient soul.

But there is also something like Ilmarinen, something that gives me the powers of the intellectual or mind soul, and there is also something like Lemminkäinen, something that gives me the powers of the consciousness soul. If there is a being that extends its feelers into nature as if through a kind of neck, if a being that has its main body here and extends its feelers here, so that we have one of the feelers with the sentient soul here, and the second feeler the second feeler horn and here the third feeler horn, so the nature being has a body and stretches its soul into it, as it were, like soul feelers, to inspire, and there the ether bodies can form, which give the soul the ability to feel divided into three.

The ancient Finns, the population of old Finland, said: We live here, but we feel something like three mighty beings that are not beings of the physical plane, that are nature beings. They reveal themselves from the west, they are three parts, as it were, organs of a great being that has its body over there, but it extends its feelers towards us here: Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkäinen. A mighty sea creature is spreading out from west to east, stretching out its feel-horns and endowing this tribe with that which is the three-part soul.

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The nations that still felt this, felt it this way and also spoke it, also in Kalewala, as I have explained it. The modern man, who today lives only on the physical plane, says that the western sea extends into this; that is the Bothnian, that is the Finnish and that is the Rigaian Gulf. But we take all of this together, wanting to see through the spiritual of the outer physical, that which appears to us as a cross-section of nature, we take the following together. There is still a lot of water down there, over there is the air, human beings breathe air, and the world of the sea is a great, mighty being, which is only formed differently than we are accustomed to. It is a mighty being that extends over it, and with this being the human being of the earlier race was in a very distinct, definitely configured connection. And when we now speak of folk spirits, these folk spirits have in the elemental beings, who live in numerous such soul expressions, the tools to work. They organize themselves, as it were, into an army to work, to work their way into the etheric body and, from the etheric body, to make the human being in such a way that his physical body is a tool for what he is supposed to be for his specific mission on earth.

Only when we can see the forms that appear to us in nature as expressions of the spiritual can we understand nature itself in its connection with the human being. We can understand nature when we do not simply look thoughtlessly at the sea and land borders, but understand what is expressed in these forms. After all, someone might think when looking at a person's face: Yes, there are such forms. There the flesh and the air border each other. — If someone says this, however, little will have been understood of it. It is only understood when it is grasped as an expression of the human being, as a face. Here, too, it is only understood when it is seen as the physiognomy, as it were, of a mighty being that extends certain parts of its main body out of the ocean, that extends this part of its physiognomy.

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Much really does go on below the threshold of consciousness, and the Spirits of Form have not placed the forms in nature for nothing. These forms can be understood. They are the expression of inner essence. And when we become disciples of the Spirits of Form, we ourselves form shapes that express what lives in the inner essence of the natural and the spiritual.

Thus, for example, in our architraves, in what is above the columns, forms should be formed that are truly the expression of the spirituality that is to be associated with what is to take place within the building. Man is a being that emerges from a sea, as it were, from a sea of reality, of hidden reality, in which he is immersed.

You see, this is another example of how we actually have to penetrate behind the Maja if we really want to understand what is in the world, namely if we want to understand the human being with all his expressions. We often have to go down into what lives in the human being without him knowing it, or what he only gradually learns through the mediation of knowledge.

We cannot help but look at the outer Maya first, and then we must be clear about the fact that something extraordinarily complicated lies behind this outer Maya.

If we were inclined to enter into what lies behind the maya everywhere, then there could be infinite harmony, a consonance in the whole human being, because, to a certain extent, this human being is infinite underground impulses with a harmonious unity being, and everything that exists in the world can only be understood if it is examined in relation to what lies beneath the surface of existence.

It is always one-sided to look at anything only in relation to Maya. I want to interject something here. It is true that we can only fully understand the things we have discussed now, little by little. I want to show how difficult it is, even in ordinary life, to really go into everything that lies in the things that come to us. For example, perhaps very few of our dear friends have noticed that I once spoke at length about Switzerland in a recent lecture, about something that is closely related to Swiss nature. I don't know how many of you are actually aware of what I am talking about. But perhaps you remember that I followed the four lectures I gave on occult reading and hearing with a lecture in which I spoke a great deal about Herman Grimm from a purely external, historical point of view. That was a lecture in which an extraordinary amount was actually said about Switzerland, but one has to go back to the essence of the matter, to what lies beneath the surface. Why is that?

You see, the human being – I repeat something very elementary – consists, as we know, of his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body and his ego nature. We know that the I-nature and the astral body leave the physical and etheric body during sleep and, as it were, dwell in the spiritual world, in a world of which we can say: At night we are in this world, where the elemental, etheric beings are also. But there are also those spiritual elemental beings in it that are connected with the whole structure of our physical being. They are all there and at work. A number of elemental beings are connected with the whole structure of our physical being. In a lecture series I once gave in Kassel on the connection between the Gospel of John and the other gospels, I pointed out how man is connected to the entities of elementary nature through his ancestors. I pointed out – you can read about it in this lecture cycle – that if we arrange the four parts of the human being in this way, we have the physical body, the I, the etheric body and the astral body, and that what lives more in the physical body and the I is inherited from the paternal side.

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Those who have read the lecture cycle carefully will remember that what lives more in the etheric body and in the astral body is inherited from the maternal side. When we sleep, we have the physical and etheric bodies in bed, so we have something paternal and something maternal. But we have the I and the astral body outside. The astral body contains that which is imprinted on our feelings, on our entire temperament, that which gives us our soul character. And in this, which gives us our soul character, in turn, in the succession of time, elemental beings have an effect, beings that carry the forces from the ancestors to the descendants, so that these descendants become, in a certain way.

In the case of a personality such as Herman Grimm's, something very peculiar takes effect. One has an after-effect with Herman Grimm from what his immediate ancestors were. His immediate ancestors, his father and his uncle, were the collectors of the Children's and House Tales, and they heard these Children's and House Tales told. They simply listened when they were told and then wrote them down. But you don't do something like that unless you have a specially tuned astral body that is predisposed to it. Such things must be deeply rooted in the whole course of events.

Who was this mother? Dorothea Grimm, née Wild, was from an old Bernese family. She herself was still a citizen of that city. Her ancestors had fought in the Battle of Murten. All the feelings that she had gained there, with all the elemental spirits, were then carried up into Hessian, because the father, who had emigrated from Bern – Herman Grimm's grandfather – had learned the apothecary's trade, then moved to Kassel and founded the Sonnenapotheke (Sun Pharmacy). So if we look for what the elemental spirits were doing in Herman Grimm, what was making the particular configuration of this spirit, so to speak, because these spirits were working in him while he slept, then we have to think of Switzerland, and we are actually talking about the characteristic of Herman Grimm when we speak of the characteristically Bernese-Swiss.

And so, sometimes, outwardly completely overshadowed by Maja, we encounter the essential. If we consider the peculiar structure of his mind, we listen attentively to what the essence is in the mind of Herman Grimm's mother, so that I actually said something directly Swiss in the spiritual, in what I emphasized as lying below the threshold of consciousness, and spoke of the Swiss, especially the Bernese, when I spoke of Herman Grimm. Therefore, it was to be assumed that precisely this kind of thing, of which hints had been made, would evoke quite familiar, homely feelings among some of our friends.

So it does not just depend on what, so to speak, appears externally to us, but on what lives in what appears externally to us. The earth with all that is on it is actually intimately connected, the earth as a unified being is actually intimately connected with what the human being can be on it, with what is formed around the human being through the etheric body.

Now that I have made it clear through the present example how we have to go through the Maja if we want to understand what is there, let us go back to the sea dragon, which is, so to speak, the inspirer of European humanity, which pushed its way across from the Atlantic Ocean to be the inspirer of European humanity. If we consider the totality of its elemental-etheric beings, it contains everything that is spiritual in European humanity. If we could understand it completely, this dragon, if we could give ourselves completely to it, then we would all be clairvoyants. But it is not the task of European humanity to be merely clairvoyant; rather, it has the task of developing precisely that part of the soul that rises above clairvoyance like islands rise above the sea. That which now had to develop particularly as, I might say, the basic types of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, had to have the basic character to stand out as a nature of consciousness, to stand out from the merely soul-like. It had to be inspired by the nature spirits working through the earth. It had to have the possibility of being connected everywhere, of being connected with this inspiring being through countless flowing impulses, as it were. But it had to be set apart, it had to send the earthy into the watery. And this happened through the British Isles rising out of the inspiring sea with the sum total of all their nature spirits.

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When there is a real spiritual science, then it will be known that on such a continental area of the human soul-bearer, his physical and etheric bodies, must form in the same way as the relationship between sea and land requires. Just as the elevation above the sea, the elevation of the land above the sea, determines this, so it is that the human being, in his nature, must fill certain spaces by not letting them be muscles, but letting them become bones, so that the soft and the hard have a certain relationship to each other.

This is also how it is formed outside in the great Earth Mother, and in such a way that the solid element emerges from the liquid element. One can say: the Earth sends up from its depths the elemental spirits that form the Earth in a certain configuration, at a certain point of spiritual inspiration, so that such soil can arise on which such bodies can dwell, in which the consciousness soul develops.

The solid land in the sea is really like a skeletal structure in the elementary being. Just as our skeletal system sits within the soft muscle system, so the solid land of the earth sits within the sea, configured within it. And the countries do not arise so randomly as geology presents them, but arise in their forms just as regularly as our bone system arises regularly in us, although not through cells, as the bones form. We just have to learn to understand why the individual continents are formed in this or that form. I would like to use another comparison, which should just not lead you to misunderstand. I would like to say: In order for the view we have been talking about to arise here among this ancient Finnish people, it was necessary for such a land configuration to arise in the gulf.

Just as human lungs let in air, so in this land configuration are outlined – as if drawn in – the tentacles of that great being that is connected with the entire configuration of Europe.

We have now spoken for the last time about the bodies that are given to the Russian soul when this soul incarnates in a Russian body. We have shown, last time and also in the course of other considerations, that in a Russian body the Russian soul forms itself expectantly, that it forms in itself that which a future being can once receive. For this it is necessary that this soul should in a certain way remain in relation to the spiritual. Otherwise the spiritual self could never be formed. But on the other hand this soul must be prevented from developing too early into those regions which are actually pictured for it.

Let us assume that here - where the Baltic Sea is now - there would be land and that here - where Russia is - would be sea. Only peninsular formations like Italy and so on would stretch out. The Gulfs of Bothnia, Finland and Riga would extend as far as the Caspian Sea, instead of us having Russian land here. Then we would have a seafaring people here, sailing these seas. But then the bodies would not be able to form here as they should. The being that stretches its tentacles over here would breathe out what these seafarers would receive, and they would develop their abilities prematurely, that is, at too early a time. They would develop too early that which should have waited for a later time. The spirit self must wait a certain time and must not be developed too soon. Therefore, there must not be a sea here, but the land must emerge to such an extent that the spirit self is not developed too early, but that there is still the possibility of receiving the inspirations of this great being. There must not be high mountains like the Alps, nor flat lands, only such elevations that the spiritual self is not received too early. There must be just enough land to produce the spiritual self: extensive, more flat land areas. If there were a seafaring people here, they would have developed the spiritual self long ago. But that would be immature, and development would occur at the wrong time.

And now we come to the cosmic mind of the earth. The earth has cosmic mind, which conditions its form, conditions its form in such a way that it raises the land everywhere as far as is necessary for the right elemental spirits to come into contact with the beings on the earth, and on the other hand allows the water to exist as far as is necessary for the inspiring genii to work.

We get the impression that we are literally looking at our earth and that we can see something similar in such an elevation of land, as when we form this or that expression in the face, where the soul also appears in the expression in this or that configuration of expression. The soul of the earth meets us in the configuration of the earth. In fact, as soon as we touch on the human ether body, this essence of the human ether body expands, as it were, over the entire organization of the earth, and the human ether body is connected with the earth organism everywhere. Everywhere we find that what is actually earthly — the Maja for the earth spirits — is connected for the present human being with his I-nature, with the outer physical nature. Everything that is water and air – spiritually speaking – is connected with what he develops in contradiction to the nature of the I. For the whole earth exists to form the earthly human being. The other thing is to nuance this earthly human being. This nuancing is achieved through the mutual relationship of land and water and air through the earth.

If we look at southern Europe, and in particular at the Greek and Italian peninsulas, we find that the way in which land and water are distributed here prepares the earth for such bodies, which could carry the fourth post-Atlantic culture, in which the mind or soul soul is so particularly expressed.

If the countries in southern Europe had been larger and the sea inlets smaller, something should have arisen in Greece and Italy that was only to arise later. That is to say, something would have arisen for evolution in an unusable way. In order for the Greek character to find its counterpart in the Romanic character, as I have described it, there had to be a broader land mass stretching out towards the sea than is the case with Greece. But that is the case in France. And in the relationship that I have said exists between France and Greece, you can find it expressed precisely in the physiognomy of Greece, how it is cut into by the sea everywhere, and in the physiognomy of France, how it extends its projections towards the sea more on a large scale.

I wanted to give you a few pointers today for all kinds of things that need to be done during our time together. We will then build on these pointers tomorrow.

Yesterday we spoke at least in a few words about the extent to which the Earth itself is a source of inspiration for people living on it. Of course, only hints can be given in a field that is as all-encompassing as this.

It is important and significant, especially in our time, to become aware that such connections exist as those we have been talking about, because man within the evolution of the earth is at the point, especially in our present time, of emancipating himself, as it were, from this earthly influence, and, on the other hand, to allow himself to be permeated by those influences that do not come from the world of the earth but from the spiritual world surrounding the earth.

This endeavour to get into human abilities, into human thinking and feeling, that which is not merely earthly, underlies our spiritual-scientific endeavour. All tendencies of modern education are really moving towards this spiritual-scientific endeavour, and it may well be said that there are two things that must increasingly come to the consciousness of the modern human being.

The first is that man, in relation to his own soul essence, belongs to a world that does not reveal itself to the external senses, but that lies behind the external sense world. Man belongs to such a world with his innermost soul being, which can be reached neither through sense observation nor through inferences and logic based on sense observation. It will be the task of our time to gain clarity on this point, that all knowledge conveyed by the external senses and their philosophy, which is based only on external sensory knowledge, cannot approach what the human soul actually is.

The second truth is one that you are familiar with from your spiritual scientific life, but you also know that it is still very far from the general consciousness of the present day. It is the important truth of repeated earthly lives, of the fact that the human soul is not exhausted in the body in which it lives between birth and death, in all that is connected with this body, but that it goes from life to life.

Because these two truths, that the soul belongs to a world that lies behind the sensory world and that it goes from life to life, are among the most important for our time, which must be understood first, I have added a chapter to the second volume of my Rätsel of Philosophy», I have added a chapter in which these two truths in particular are pointed out in an intensive way from the course of human development, because it is an urgent requirement of our time that more and more people learn to understand precisely these two truths.

Since this book, “The Riddles of Philosophy”, is not specifically aimed at anthroposophists, but at all people who can read and understand what they read, an attempt had to be made to point out these two truths as briefly but as sharply as possible. It may be said that it lies in the deeper consciousness of people in modern times to direct their thoughts towards these truths. For the time being, I will just say to direct their thoughts. We can see such tendencies to direct thoughts towards these truths everywhere. I have sometimes tried to cite people from the new spiritual history who tend towards such truths. Today I would like to give another example.

Emerson is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the 19th century, who wrote so meaningfully and forcefully, if not in pedantic philosophical language, then in a forceful language. Whether he is talking about nature or the human race, Emerson points out that the outer structure of the world, which man surveys with his senses and comprehends with his mind, is only the shell, the phantasmagoria, and that one can only arrive at the truth by trying to penetrate behind the phantasmagoria.

But minds like Emerson's go even further. And I would like to give an example of this. Among his very significant books, Emerson also wrote one called “The Representatives of the Human Race”. In this book, he treated Plato as a representative of all philosophical human endeavor; Swedenborg as a representative of mystical human endeavor; Montaigne, a significant mind of the 16th century , as representative of skepticism; Shakespeare as representative of the poetic faculty; Goethe as representative of the literary faculty; and Napoleon as the man of action, as representative of the man of action.

This book has certainly achieved something significant. It highlights the types of humanity in relation to the soul. It would make for an interesting reflection if one were to shed light on how Plato's representative of philosophical endeavor and Montaigne's representative of skeptical endeavor are actually met. This book marks one of the greatest achievements of human spiritual endeavor. Now, Emerson curiously devotes, I would say, a particularly loving portrayal to Montaigne, although this loving portrayal is only encountered when one thoroughly engages with this chapter on Montaigne. This is also very significant for Emerson's commitment to the spiritual-scientific world view. Anyone who seriously engages with this world view becomes aware of how truly every thing has two sides, how when one tries to express a truth, one can only say something one-sided and the second side must lurk in the background, as it were.

The skeptic who has a vivid sense of the fact that one is, as it were, already doing an injustice when formulating a truth strictly, is touched in the deepest sense by the spiritual-soul fluid that is always present in the human soul and that prevents one, as soon as one is only touched by the spiritual world, from stating a sharply contoured truth with too much aplomb, without pointing out that in a certain sense the opposite of it also has a justification.

This sense of having been touched by a feeling that comes from spirituality is what makes Montaigne an important figure. But that is not what I wanted to point out. I wanted to point out how Emerson tells how he came to Montaigne. He says: Even as a boy, I found a volume of Montaigne in my father's library, but I did not understand him. — When he had then graduated from college, he looked at the book again, and then he got the strange urge to get to know, sentence by sentence, what Montaigne had written. And he did that, following this urge. Now we see in the chapter about Montaigne, which Emerson wrote, that he was looking for an expression for why he was suddenly obsessed by Montaigne and suddenly began to absorb him completely. He finds no better expression for it than to say: It was as if I had written these books by Montaigne in a past life. From this you can see how a man of the most eminently modern mind, who approaches what is demanded by the present, is forced, when he wants to express himself about the most intimate things in his soul, to form an expression that tends entirely towards the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He cannot find a better expression and must therefore resort to the idea of repeated lives on earth.

Something like this is extremely characteristic and tremendously significant, and this now leads us to tie in with the idea that was expounded yesterday. If we look at the most distinguished minds of our time – and one of the most distinguished is Emerson – then, on the one hand, if they are as great as Emerson, they have inherited the knowledge of the earth, in that they are part of the evolutionary process of the earth. They know what is absorbed by a person today. They know that when you are placed at a certain point on earth, you speak a certain language and so on, that it is customary in the place where you are sent to hand these things down to the child, to the young person, and thus to bring that which is called education to the people. This knowledge, which is handed down to a people in this way, is knowledge of a wide scope. It is fair to say that this is knowledge of a broad scope, and one can see how Emerson actually proceeds.

We know that when he had a lecture to give, it seemed as if what he said sprang forth from his mind as he was saying it. Everything seemed improvised. If he was visited on a day when he was supposed to give a lecture, the visitors could see that all kinds of notes were lying around the room, from which he had gathered what he had to say, so to speak, about the outward appearance of his material. But behind what he passed on to humanity lay intimacies, and this is precisely an intimacy, which I have expressed, that the idea of repeated earthly lives shimmers quite chastely in one place.

One can see how even the best of our time, by feeling and feeling through such truths in their souls and also expressing them, remain chaste within themselves, do not yet want to carry these truths into the realm from which external knowledge arises.

If we now approach the matter from a spiritual scientific point of view, we have to illuminate it differently, because our time is the time whose mission it is to bring to clarity and to real knowledge what has so far been held back in the soul and only occasionally hinted at, clarity, to bring it to real knowledge, to shape it into forms of knowledge, so that our time really has the task of making many things that have emerged from the souls of the best up to this time of ours into full clarity, into a truth that is self-evident for people. And here we can describe exactly how it was when Emerson, in his rich lectures, would soon say a sentence expressing a realization about the industrial life of his surroundings and then a few lines later bring something that deals with ancient India, and then again something that deals with Shakespeare. So he gathers together, so to speak, the knowledge of the earth and then often a remark slips out of him that comes from the intimacy of his soul.

Where does what lies in such a remark come from? This can only be answered by considering all sides of human nature. Man recognizes only the least, only a part of his life, which takes place from waking to falling asleep, during his time on earth. The other part of life is spent asleep, and this part of human life is very, very diverse.

It is true that for many, many people this life in sleep proceeds in such a way that they come into contact with elemental world entities that are connected with lower expressions of human nature than the daytime expressions. One would like to say that people engage in all sorts of nonsense from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, in the realm of elementary life, of nightlife, things that they have outgrown when they are in the outer life. Who would not know that he often has to be ashamed of his dreams. This is a general experience that anyone can have. Man, then, during sleep, does all kinds of foolish things, in a company that is not a good one, but one that appeals to his passions, his instincts, and is much worse than the one in which he is educated during his waking life.

Only if we understand this can we better understand many historical events. To prevent people today from making too much of a mess of things in the physical world, they need to be endowed with the gift of not attaching too much importance to their dreams. He therefore forgets his dreams very easily, forgets the Allotriia from the dreams, and that is good for him, because he should be prepared to enter the spiritual world in waking consciousness, while the prehistoric times were there to let people enter this spiritual world during sleep until they woke up.

Strictly speaking, a stronger awareness of this world is not as far behind us as is usually believed. I will give you an example of this too. There is a picture by Albrecht Dürer that has posed many riddles for many people, especially scholars. The etching is about a satyr-like, faun-like figure that is holding a female being, as it were. From the background, another female figure appears, approaching the couple as if to punish them. And a Hercules-like male figure stands nearby, holding a club in his hand, which he uses to hold back the punishing female figure from the group of the woman with the satyr, preventing her from approaching. It is, one might say, quite remarkable, extremely remarkable, how the scholars have struggled to understand this picture. It is usually called 'Hercules'. But what it expresses is not found in the usual Hercules saga. So one wonders: how did Albrecht Dürer come up with this scene? And some very curious ideas have been put forward. One can see, for example, how helpless Herman Grimm is in the face of this picture. He does not know what to make of it. He comes up with the strangest ideas. And why is that? Why can't people make sense of it? Because he and the scholars do not know — as Albrecht Dürer still did — that people can still enter a spiritual world when they are asleep. Today, this awareness has been lost. But Dürer still knew, for example, that there are men who, during sleep, engage in all sorts of antics with the elemental world, men who are quite civilized during the ordinary time, but during sleep they fall back into the world of drives and do all sorts of useless things, all sorts of antics.

In the painting by Albrecht Dürer, we see the satyr and Hercules with the club. Good old Hercules, who is standing there, would like to be this satyr himself. But he lives in the physical world, in a moral world on the physical plane, and his wife does not allow him to do so. She comes along and wants to drive him away. But he likes it and holds her back.

We see here an inner process of the soul and know that Albrecht Dürer still knew something of these things. Thus much in the art of not so distant centuries can be explained, because at that time there was still an awareness of the connection of man with the spiritual-elemental world immediately adjacent to the physical.

But if we turn to such noble minds as Emerson's, we have to say that they do not engage in frivolities during their sleep, but in noble things. When they are in the spiritual world with their ego and astral body, they come into contact with the truths that are to be true anthroposophy in humanity. What future physical knowledge is to become comes to her consciousness. One could say that Emerson receives something like this in his sleep. That is why it fits so chastely and intimately into what he has to say about the physical life with his physical senses and mind, surveying the wide expanse of earthly life.

Now it would not be in keeping with the evolution of humanity if people were simply to grasp, as I said, in their life of sleep, what lies behind the appearance of sense and behind the phantasmagoria of the senses. For that is again the meaning of evolution, that the life of sleep loses more and more of its significance in knowledge. One must be a great spirit like Emerson if one wants to conquer something out of the life of sleep, like the idea of repeated lives on earth. But what is spiritual must come into humanity, must find its way into humanity. Just as these truths are related to the innermost human soul life, as they reveal themselves there, as it were, in a kind of dawn, especially in spirits like Emerson, so on the other hand there must be an earthly disposition to understand such truths in the light of waking consciousness. There must be an earthly predisposition to perceive oneself in such a way that one finds it natural to recognize these truths. You understand that this is not yet natural in the present, because we are still such a small group as spiritual scientists, and all those who stand outside of spiritual scientific striving see us as fools or something similar.

It is not part of modern education to recognize these truths directly. Man's natural temperament argues against it. As a rule, the logical arguments people put forward against spiritual science are extremely inferior, because people do not resist on logical grounds; they resist because, by their very nature, they are not predisposed to accept such truths today, through all that they are through the forces of the earth.

But there must come a time when man's nature will be so constituted that he can immediately grasp these truths, just as he can grasp mathematical truths today. Man must be organized naturally so that he can grasp these truths. For this it is necessary that he is physically so constituted for the time that elapses between birth and death that his brain is so developed that he can see these truths.

In the sense of yesterday's discussion, such a relationship must be established between the spirits that work in the earth and people, that people are constituted in such a way that they can absorb these truths, and this happens in such a way that an area of land, as I showed and sketched yesterday, leans from east to west towards the three gulfs I spoke of yesterday. This area of land is only a phantasmagoria on the outside. This area of land is in reality composed of the spirits of the earth. In reality, the spirits of this area of land work on people and physically shape them in such a way that they understand the truths of the spiritual and mental constitution of man and repeated lives on earth. What I would say is more for the Western spirits, which have to conquer from sleep, will have to become a more self-evident truth in waking life for those who lean towards the East in the evolution of humanity. The earth prepares its bodies, one would like to say, for what they need for evolution. This earth is absolutely that which I discussed yesterday: a far-reaching organism that is ensouled and that, from time to time, sends out the earth spirits from its soul life, which organize the bodies in such a way that they can intervene in evolution in an appropriate way.

You see, these things are extraordinarily deep and significant, and one must really get involved with such things if one wants to understand what it is all about. However, if you compare the earth as an ensouled and spiritualized organism with what man is as an ensouled and spiritualized organism, there is a great difference. Man is related to the actual spirits of the earth through the exterior of his physical body, in which he actually does not usually live in it, but in which he is stuck in it. Through the etheric body, he is related to the spirits of water; through the astral body, he is related to the spirits of air, and through his connection with the ego, he is related to the spirits of fire.

When a person leaves their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, they live with their ego and astral body only in relation to the warmth that pervades the earth and the air that flows and breathes through the earth. They are torn away from everything that configures earth and water in the physical body. Man is truly torn out of everything that, I would like to say, the physical and etheric bodies do as earthly beings when they sleep. Of course, air and warmth also belong to the earth, but only to the earth, not to the parts of the earth. Now, for man as a spiritualized being, warmth is, so to speak, that in which he dwells as in his own element. In the higher animals, there is already a preparation for this. They have their own warmth, not just the warmth of their surroundings. They live in their soul, in their own warmth. Man has particularly developed this, that he lives in his own warmth, that he has his own temperature. This is something that separates him from the great variety of the outside world. Heat is, as it were, something that every human being carries within himself and carries with him. There he is in his actual self, there he is at home in the warmth.

In the air, he lives in it to a lesser extent. I would like to say that the differentiation of the earth already exerts a certain influence on him. Whether he lives in mountain air, sea air or country air, that makes a certain difference. In this way, the human being comes into relation to what affects him from the outside. This is the case with the human being as a soul-inspired and spiritualized organism.

The opposite is the case with the earth as a souled and spiritualized organism. What warmth is for human beings, that is for the earth just the earth, the solid earthly, and warmth is for it the 'outmost' that has a relationship to the souled earth like to us the earth. The earth is earth through and through, as we are warmth through and through. The earth is outwardly differentiated in relation to warmth. Depending on whether it extends its limbs into the icy regions or into the sultry region of the tropics, it opens its soul outwardly to warmth, just as we, in relation to our physical body, incline toward the region in which we happen to live. In the case of the earth, it is exactly the opposite of the human being, and this is the basis for the interaction between the earth as a spiritual and animate organism and the human being as a spiritual and animate organism. Through this interaction, that which comes about in the physical human body arises so that this physical human body, in the succession of nations and peoples, enters into the evolution of the whole earthly existence in the right way. We have an intensive relationship between the earthly and the human precisely in those peoples who, as a mass of people, moved from east to west. And one could express this intensive relationship as if one were to see a mighty being in the earth itself, and this mighty being would decide to intervene in evolution in an appropriate way, let us say from the 20th century onwards. Then it must say to itself: I must direct certain spiritual entities up to my surface, I must let them be active in such a way that they prepare physical bodies so that the physical bodies can receive through the brain the truths that are beneficial to humanity in this time of evolution.

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What I have just expressed is like a thought that the earth has. This thought can only be grasped if it is grasped with the right devotion and reverence, if it is not taken like the thoughts of external science, but if it is regarded as something sacred, as something that cannot be uttered without reverence, because one is reminded of man's connection with the spiritual world, because one is directly immersed in the communication between the human and the divine, where such things are expressed. Therefore, attention should be paid everywhere to ensure that the necessary atmosphere of feeling and sentiment is present when such things are expressed. This is extremely important in such matters. One might say: in a certain sense, such things must not be expressed in any other way than that they are based on the feeling, the mood of prayer. A looking up to the spiritual worlds must pulsate through what we think through so thoroughly as we approach such thoughts. And that this can happen in a natural way, through the external environment alone, is why our body is constructed, and why everything that is to appear in it is made.

Thus we see in what I have just described a kind of example of how the earth, as earth, works spiritually through what is contained in its solid element, how it creates and forms that which lives on it in evolution.

If, on the other hand, we go more to the west, we have different conditions. Yesterday I explained to you a situation where the west interacts with the east, where the liquid element leans over like a mighty being towards the east and expresses the three-part soul nature, leaning over into the three great gulfs, which the spiritually inclined peoples of ancient Finland still felt as Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen, and which today are so prosaically referred to as the Gulfs of Finland, Bothnia and Riga. In the ancient Finnish people, that which comes from the liquid element and that which comes from the solid element worked together. In the Finnish people, the element that more constitutes the ethereal human being and refines the physical human being, the liquid element, and the element of the earth, that which comes from the earth, that which constitutes the physical human being, united.

The question may be raised as to the significance of a people like the great Finnish nation, which has fulfilled such an eminent mission in the course of the Earth's mission and yet still remains for later times. All this has its significance in the whole progress of evolution, that such a people remain, that they do not disappear from the Earth when they have fulfilled their mission. Just as a person retains in living memory the thoughts that he has conceived at a certain age for a later age, so must earlier peoples also remain as a conscience, as a living memory in relation to what happens in later times: as a conscience.

And now one could say: The conscience of the European East will be that which the Finnish people have preserved. There must come a time when an understanding of the tasks of evolution will take hold of the heart, when the ideas of Kalewala will flourish from the very heart of the Finnish people, when this wonderful Kalewala epic will be imbued with modern spiritual ideas and when the whole of Europe will be made aware of its depth.

The European peoples revered the Homeric epics. The Kalevala flowed from even deeper sources of the soul life. This cannot be recognized today. But this will be understood when the teachings of spiritual science are applied in the appropriate way to explain spiritual phenomena in the evolution of the earth. An epic like Kalevala cannot be preserved without being preserved in living existence, without the souls that dwell in the body, which are related to the creative powers of Kalevala. It remains as a living conscience. In this way it can continue to work, not through the words but through that which has lived in it itself, continues to live, that there is a center from which it can radiate. What matters is that this is there, like the thoughts we have had earlier are there in later life.

In the West, there is more of what forms and shapes the etheric body. These are difficult truths, and you will have to get used to them, because I do not have the opportunity, which one will hopefully have one day in the evolution of the earth, to deal with the things that I have to deal with in an hour over the course of a whole year. You will have to be open to supplementing many things with your thoughts, to meditatively reflect on what has been said. Then it will become fully familiar to you. In particular, do not try to approach things with these or those hasty nuances of feeling.

In the West, there is more of an effect on the etheric body, which had to be formed in the same way, but at an earlier time, than it has to be done on the physical body in the East.

You see, it is very easy to misunderstand such things, because the differences are fine, very subtle. If, for example, we see in the West that it depends on the peoples that the etheric body has been formed more by the spirits of water, it is self-evident – because the physical body is an imprint of this – that the physical body has also been formed as an imprint of the etheric body, out of the forces of water. But the important thing is that in the East the forces of the physical body have a more direct effect. So we have to focus on what is important. External physical science cannot make this subtle distinction. It sees that the Eastern physical body is configured in one way and the Western physical body in another. It does not see any more than that. Only spiritual science can go into such differences in more detail. Furthermore, language is so clumsy and very unsuitable for expressing such differences. When you say something completely different, you often have the impression that you are actually saying the same thing. Yesterday, for example, I had to say that for Asian peoples it is important that the forces that build up the physical body lie in their own etheric body. Today I have to say that it is important for the peoples of the West that the etheric body is formed from the forces of water. If you take all of this together, you will understand that in the old days it was the case that the etheric body had to be formed in the Eastern peoples of Europe, but today, now, is the time when the physical body has to be formed , while in the western peoples it is the case that their etheric body is formed after their physical body has already received its character more from the outside, that their etheric body is directly exposed to the genii of the sea, the genii of the water.

In the case of Western peoples, what they are comes about through the impulses entering their etheric body. Where the impulses enter the etheric body more, what matters less is the spatial and more the temporal. How the impulses work in the succession of time is what matters more.

If we look towards the east, we see how thoughts well up out of the earth, as it were, to prepare human beings for future evolution. If we look towards the west, we see thoughts welling up out of the fluid, the forces that form the etheric bodies in the succession of time.

And there we see how, in the ancient times in the West, the etheric body of man was formed far into Central Europe in such a way that this etheric body lives out its immediate life in the body, alive, outwardly.

What does that mean? It means, my dear friends, that in ancient times in western Europe there lived people who brought their way of life to light from the etheric body in the same way that people now bring it to light from the physical body — where the etheric body has already worked with these old impulses. There were people who still had a living relationship with the spiritual world, especially with the elemental world. That belongs to ancient times. Those times are, so to speak, already over, when the genii of the liquid element spoke to the etheric body of man in the West in the most lively way. But when this etheric body is spoken to, it is different from our time, when it is mainly spoken to the physical body of man. The physical body of the human being is spoken to in such a way that an impression is made on his senses, that he acquires knowledge and adopts certain habits of life that are connected with the impressions of the senses.

These ancient Westerners were still more connected with the elemental world in their habits, in what lived within them. Among the Celts, there were people who knew about the elemental world just as we know about the physical world today; people to whom the elemental world was not closed, who could speak of nature genii, of water genii, of earth genii, just as we speak of trees, plants, mountains, clouds, who had direct contact with these nature genii. And the peculiarity of life in Europe is based on the fact that this was precisely the case in ancient times, because in those days, just as one acts today through the senses on the physical body, one acted on the etheric body of the human being.

Then, of course, work was still being done on the etheric body of the human being, but this etheric body was formed and developed in such a way that the relationship of the genii of fluidity to it took place more in the subconscious, and the conscious relationship with the nature spirits receded more.

How did this come about? For France, for example, it came about through the wave of Romanic evolution sweeping over the wave of Celtic evolution, permeating the Celtic element with the Romanic element. In the confluence of the Celtic and the Romance, we have two impulses. An old impulse, which directly mediates the connection between the elementary world and the etheric body, and in the new impulse, in the influence of the Romance, we have that which also enters the etheric body, but that it is like an historical, a historic wave, so that what I said in earlier lectures could occur, that a revival of the ancient Greek element could take place in the French element.

If we want to understand this western type of human being correctly, we must assess these various impulses, which also flow into the etheric body, in the right way. And now, so to speak, we have spoken of characteristic phenomena with regard to the influences on the physical body and with regard to the influences on the etheric body. The situation is different when we consider the middle region. There things are somewhat different. There we are dealing with something, I might say, much more unexpressed, with something that can be less clearly characterized. There we are dealing with the fact that both spirits of the earth and spirits of the liquid element have a direct effect on the physical body.

You see, it is a transition. Here, in the West, the spirits of the liquid element act directly on the etheric body. The spirits of the liquid element subside in Central Europe, and they are joined by certain spirits of the earthly element. They act directly on the physical body; less strongly on the etheric body. The spirits of the earthly element refine the physical body as you go further east. Therefore, in some way connected with Central Europe, we have everything that, over a long period of time, has provided Europe with such physical bodies that are accessible to the liquid and solid elements. And so we see how what flows into human evolution must become more complicated. We see how, out of this store, this reservoir, the people of the Franks, as I have described them, through the agency of the fluid and the solid, are preparing to reintroduce themselves into the Celtic-Romanic folk element; and only then does that which has confronted us as the active element in human evolution arise.

The Franks who remained behind thus retain the peculiarity of preferring to receive in the physical body that which emanates from the liquid and earthly spirits – the Saxons are related to them in this respect. The Franks who moved to the West united their nature with that which comes from the direct influence of the genius of the sea, which becomes even more significant when we consider that it incorporates the historical element of the Romance language.

In this way the impulses interlock and so we can understand how, above all, if we want to characterize Western Europe, we cannot come to an understanding unless we take into account everything that intervenes in the etheric body.

If we want to characterize Central Europe, we have to say that it depends more on the physical body, it depends more on what is configured in the physical body. Now we see how such impulses, like the ones expressed, concentrate in certain centers, as it were, how they characteristically emerge in certain centers. Two such centers, which are truly characteristic of each other, are found in Central Europe on the one hand and in the British Isles on the other. In Central Europe, where it is most strongly expressed, we have what I have called the solid element, and where what comes from the spirits of the liquid and the spirits of the solid flows into the physical body, where it is mixed, and in the British Isles, where - in some ways more strongly than in France, for example - what comes from the spirits of the liquid element has a preferential effect on the etheric bodies. This has led to people living in these two areas who basically carry the same impulses within them; only some carry them in their physical body and are suited to everything connected with the work of these genii in the physical ; the others, in the British Isles, have them in their etheric bodies and are thus called upon to bring about everything that is connected with the impulses of the etheric body. If I may say it grotesquely, I could say that if you put a German and an Englishman together, you notice the difference when you look at their physical bodies. You only notice the similarity when you put the German's physical body together with the Englishman's etheric body. Only then does it become apparent that the same impulses are alive there.

You see what emerges, caricatured, in the external view, which remains with the external phantasmagoria, I would say. Do not misunderstand the word. It only appears in its true form when one considers what becomes the basis of life, what the truth is. But because in the world the entities must work together, because it cannot be otherwise, because the world is a whole, it must be so that on the one hand certain impulses work through the physical body, on the other hand through the etheric body. I would say that is the way it should be. This is how the corresponding real interaction arises.

And so you see, what appears in the spiritual world is that a very special relationship has come about between the German world and the British world. I have explained this very special relationship for the East and West in a previous lesson, in which I showed you how a certain struggle takes place in the spiritual world for the East and West, caused by the diversity of the souls that come from an eastern and the souls that come from a western body.

The effect of the conditions just described is something else. I ask you not to take what I have to say today as if it can be understood or speculated upon rationally. One must observe in the spiritual world, otherwise one will not be able to arrive at the right conclusion. A harmony is gradually emerging between what is happening in Central Europe and the British Isles, a harmony, a true spiritual alliance that has gradually grown so strong that it can be said that spiritually speaking, no earthly souls love each other more than the earthly souls of Central Europe and the earthly souls of the British Isles. There the strongest love, spiritually conceived, exists, and that expresses itself outwardly in what we now see before us. Such are the complications of the situation.

One would truly not express such things if they were based only on a lightly founded knowledge, if one had not gained them through the most painful experiences. Do not think that you can generalize by thinking that every alliance in the physical world is a war in the spiritual world, and a war in the physical world is an alliance in the spiritual world. Things are as I have described them to you. And that this is expressed as a struggle is the expression in today's materialistic culture for the difficulty of really living out the matter in the spiritual.

Our time is reluctant to recognize what is present in the spiritual world, not only in words but also in deeds. It tries to present the opposite of what is present in the spiritual world, because the materialistic age is also reluctant to recognize the spiritual in deeds. And so the tendency of the spiritual world – namely, after the harmony of the physically achieved in Central Europe and the ethereally achieved in the British Isles – is drowned out in Maja by what is happening today in the form of struggle and mutual hatred.

You see, it is worthwhile for those who are not spiritual scientists to consider us fools, because the insights that emerge from the spiritual world are very much at odds with what can be observed in the physical world. But we can be assured that the further development of humanity depends on the fact that spiritual truths will really penetrate, that people really learn to see beyond the world of the senses. For this to happen, events are necessary, of which I have spoken more or less clearly in these days.

We can be glad that Karma has brought us together here in a neutral area, where it is possible to speak so frankly about these things, for it is not easy to speak about them, especially today. But it is good for the humanities to find their way into these things, because they may regard what happens in the outer world precisely as an incentive to look behind the veil. Much would remain quite incomprehensible if one could not see behind this veil. Things only get their full meaning when one sees behind this veil.

The so-called “Traumlied” (Dream Song), which will be performed today, requires a few remarks to be made beforehand.

I already referred to this Dream Song in my Christmas address to you a few days ago. There I was able to say that the establishment of Christmas is by no means an imaginary one, one that has arisen from thought, but that the establishment of Christmas arises during the course of the year from very specific inner processes that can take place in the human soul when this soul comes to clairvoyant visions as the highest fruits of the soul, either through certain powers inherent in the natural course of things or through trained clairvoyance. We can best understand what may actually lie at the root of the human soul by visualizing the following thought.

All the plants, all the sprouting and sprouted growth that sunlight and solar warmth conjure up in spring and allow to flourish throughout the summer, all this, as it were, enters into a winter sleep, into winter darkness, on a kind of winter path at the time when Christmas was moved from the historical consciousness of humanity. The time in which Christmas is celebrated seems to us like sleep, like the darkness of the natural world. It is the opposite with the human soul as it is with the natural world. While the beings of nature descend into darkness and accompany the human soul into this realm of outer eclipse, it becomes, or can become, lighter in the human soul. She can, through the natural course of things, which we have often hinted at as a certain inherited clairvoyance, or through trained clairvoyance, dive straight into the brightest spiritual world, where the secrets of the spirit, hidden behind the outer sensual things, then dawn on her. And just as this descent of the plant world around the time of the winter solstice is subject to a regular law, so too the spiritual blossoming of human beings is subject to such a law, so that it coincides in its luminous brightness with the natural darkness into which the Christmas festival is placed.

It might seem as though such things are only being expressed out of today's schooled clairvoyance, or, as our opponents say, out of mere fantasy. But there will always be a living, fully valid proof of what people and nations experience outwardly. Therefore, it was extremely interesting for me that, after I had spoken about this Christmas clairvoyance within our movement for several years, which introduces us to the meaning of the Christ-being, to the arising of the Christ-being precisely when the human soul is most strongly immersed in clairvoyance , and I once again came to Norway, which is spiritually related to us, for a lecture cycle — that a remarkable vision was brought to me up there, of which, however, anyone who is familiar with such things must immediately say: Yes, it is reminiscent of many similar visions that have always been experienced by Germanic peoples, visions that many people have seen with their clairvoyant vision during the period of the thirteen nights from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, January 6. There the human soul can look into the spiritual world and see the fate of the human soul in the disembodied state, when it goes through Kamaloka and it then becomes clear to it how a relationship is established between the higher spiritual worlds and the deeds of people here on earth. And it is interesting that the person of whom we are told in this dream song and to whom these visions in this Nordic region are attributed through this dream song is a person who bears the name Olaf Åsteson. It is said of him that during these thirteen nights he underwent in a kind of clairvoyant experience what the Nordic man can feel as a vision in his way. He first learned how human deeds continue to unfold after the human being has passed through the gate of death, but he also learned how that which we call the Christ-being , how the office of judge of Jesus, the Christ, enters into the Nordic spiritual order of life after death, as the old world judge, the so-called face of Jehovah, the archangel Michael. So that, in addition to everything else that appears to the clairvoyance of Olaf Åsteson, the penetration of Christianity into the north can be heard, and that everything becomes clairvoyantly clear to him during the period of the Jesus birthday festival in the thirteen nights that he sleeps through.

Which consciousness becomes clear? It is now strange that this is already hinted at in the name, which quite obviously originally meant in the north such a human consciousness, which is inherited from the forefathers, from the ancestors. Olaf is truly himself in those times when the ancient, clairvoyant ancestral consciousness arises again in him. He who has inherited his consciousness, his inner being, from his ancestors: that is contained in the name Olaf. And Äste means love, the love that is passed down in the blood from generation to generation. Olaf is the son of this love, Åsteson, is the consciousness that has been passed down from generation to generation from the old clairvoyant times, is like resurrected ancestry. Olaf, who is born with this clairvoyant consciousness, recognizes the destiny of the human soul, and at the same time sees the intervention of the being we celebrate in Jesus' birthday festival as his entry into earthly existence. And strangely, while such visions have certainly always been experienced, especially in Germanic countries, this dream song seems to have been forgotten. In 1850, the preacher Landstad set out to collect folk songs in Telemarken, a lonely mountain valley where few people lived at the time. And among the many folk songs, he did not know since when, he did not know for how long, the song of Olaf Åsteson was alive in the vernacular – the song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights saw the destiny of the human soul after it had passed through the gate of death, and the coming into the world of Christ Jesus. He did not know when this song of initiation of the human soul came into being, for it was always recited in the vernacular, leaning on a musical mood. The few people in the lonely mountain valley enjoyed it, and there it was read by the preacher Landstad, in that it spoke to him of the secrets that had been uncovered – as if from the folk mind itself – about initiation in ancient times. And so it came to be that Landstad found it in the vernacular. Many people naturally believe that it alludes to Saint Olaf, who introduced Christianity in 1030 AD and whose mother was called Love. This is the case with many things that have both a historical and a spiritual significance.

Furthermore, it is interesting that this dream song has now quickly penetrated a large part of the Nordic people and lives in the hearts of the Norwegian people. There is, after all, a great movement in Norway to bring the old days back to life, and with that to revive the old language, which is very close to the ancient Germanic language, the Nordic language, in contrast to the Danish language, which was introduced later. Now this song is in a language that echoes the oldest language that has been preserved there, and the people who want to revive their antiquity in the first place, to whom this song spoke to the heart, and in the last ten to fifteen years it has not only penetrated into the hearts of the people, but also into the schools. It is sung and recited everywhere, and everywhere you hear, so to speak, where the soul awakens to the old folkways, the dream song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights from Christmas to January 6, so to speak, was naturally initiated into the sacred secrets of humanity. And for this reason, we would like to present this dream song of Olaf Åsteson to you today. Miss von Sivers will recite it. I tried to make a provisional arrangement so that it could be recited in German. Mrs. Lindholm helped me to make the peculiar language in which the song lives and now lives more and more and has become an aria of folk song possible in German. So we will now hear it in this provisional arrangement, which I was able to create in a few days.

The Dream Song

I.

So listen to my song!
I will sing to you
of a nimble youth:

It was of Olaf Åsteson,
Who once so long slept.

Of him I will sing.

II.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A heavy sleep soon fell on him,
And he could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
He slept for so long!
He could not wake
Before the thirteenth day
The bird spread its wings!

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

Olaf could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The sun shone over the mountains.
Then he saddled his nimble horse
And rode hastily to the church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

The priest was already standing
At the altar reading the mass,
When at the church door
Olaf sat down to tell
The content of many dreams,
Which in the long sleep
Filled his soul.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

And young and old alike
Listened attentively to the words,
Which spoke of his dreams of Olaf.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

III.

“I went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A strong sleep soon embraced me;
And I could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up in the clouds
And thrown into the bottom of the sea,
And anyone who wants to follow me
Cannot be overcome by serenity.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up to the height of the clouds
Then plunged into gloomy swamps,
Beholding the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

And I had to travel in the depths of the earth,
Where the streams of the gods rush terribly.
I was unable to see them,
But I could hear the rushing.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

My black horse neighed not,
And my hounds did not bark,
Nor sang the morn's bird,
There was a single miracle everywhere.

The moon shone bright
And far the paths extended.

I must have traveled in the ghost land
er Dornenheide weites Feld,
My scarlet cloak was torn from me
And also the nails of my feet.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I came to the Gjallarbridge.
In highest wind heights this hangs,
With red gold it is studded
And nails with sharp points it has.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far.

The ghostly snake struck me,
The ghostly dog bit me,
The bull stood in the middle of the road.
These are the three creatures of the bridge.
They are of a terribly evil nature.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

The dog is snappy,
And the snake wants to sting,
The bull, he threatens mightily!
They let no one cross the bridge
Who does not want to honor the truth!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I crossed the bridge,
Which is narrow and dizzying.
I had to wade through the mire....
They are now behind me!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I had to wade through swamps,
They seemed bottomless to my feet.
When I crossed the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth
Like dead people lying in graves.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out far and wide.

Then I came to water,
In which the ice masses shone brightly like blue flames
...
And God, he directed my mind
So that I avoided the area.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I turned my steps to the winter path.
On the right I could see it:
I looked as if into paradise,
Which shone brightly in the distance.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

And God's high Mother,
I saw her there in the splendor!
To Brooksvalin to go,
So she called me, announcing,
That souls are judged there!

The moon shone bright
And the paths stretched far and wide.

IV.

"In other worlds I dwelt
Through many a night's length;
And God only can know
How much of soul-afflict I saw —

In Brooksvalin, where souls
To the world's judgment are subject.

I could see a young man
who had murdered a boy:
Now he had to carry him forever
on his own arms!
He stood in the mud so deep

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I also saw an old man,
He wore a cloak of lead;
Thus he was punished for Living in greed on the earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

And men appeared,
Who carried fiery substances;
Dishonesty weighs
On their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I could also see children
Who had glowing coals beneath their feet;
They did evil to their parents in life,
Which weighed very heavily on their spirits

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

And to approach that house,
It was laid upon me,
Where witches were to work
In the blood they had angered in life,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

From the north, in wild hordes,
There came riding evil spirits,
Led by the prince of darkness,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

What came from the north
Seemed evil above all else;
He rode in front, the prince of darkness,
On his black steed.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

But from the south came
Other hosts in lofty calm.
Saint Michael rode ahead
At Jesus Christ's side

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

The souls, laden with sins,
They had to tremble in fear!
The tears ran in streams
As evil deeds follow

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

In majesty stood Michael
And weighed the human souls
On his scales of sin,
And standing by in judgment
The Judge of the world, Jesus Christ.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

V.

"Blessed is he who in life
Gives shoes to the poor;
He need not walk with bare feet
In the field of thorns.

Then speaks the tongue of the scales,
And world truth
Sounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives bread to the poor!
He cannot be hurt
By the dogs in the other world.

Thus the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Resounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives grain to the poor!
He cannot be threatened
By the sharp horn of the bull
When he must cross the Gjallar bridge.

Then the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Clothes to the poor gives!
He cannot freeze to death
The ice masses in Brooksvalin.

Then speaks the tongue of Libra,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

VI.

And young and old alike
Listened intently to the words,
Which told of the dreams of Olaf. You have slept for so long... Wake up now, O Olaf Åsteson!

The time from Christmas until about now is actually an important, a significant time of the year, also in occult terms. It is called the time of the thirteen days. And the remarkable thing is that this period of thirteen days is sensed in its importance by those people who, in their entire soul disposition, have retained something of the old connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that more than the person of today's urban population has retained from the connection with the spiritual world that once existed in ancient times, the primitive person who lives out in the countryside or in a population that is even less affected by our urban culture. And there we find much that is related in folk poetry about the experiences of the soul, about experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas to Epiphany, January 6.

This is the time when, after the annual eclipse has most befallen the earth, immediately after the winter solstice, when the sun begins its victorious course again, with nature's deepest immersion and release and redemption, the human soul can also undergo very special experiences if it still has special connections with the spiritual world. Those people who no longer have the old clairvoyance but are still connected to the spiritual world in their soul feel a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this time of year. What the soul can experience there becomes meaningful, because the soul, if it is still receptive, can really get most involved in the spiritual world then. For the modern man, the year really is such that he no longer particularly distinguishes the individual seasons, because while the snow storms outside, darkness already begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and it only gets light late, the city dweller feels the same as in the summer months, when the sun can unfold its full power. Man is torn out of the old connection with the cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. But for those who have retained a connection with nature, it is not the same thing that falls during the Christmas season as what happens at another time, for example, at midsummer. While in midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, in the time when nature is most dead, it is most connected with the spiritual world and used to experience special things during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk tale in the old Norwegian language, a tale that was rediscovered only recently and has quickly become popular again due to the peculiar understanding of the Norwegian population. It is about a man who still had a connection to the spiritual world, about Olaf Åsteson. What Olaf Åsteson experiences in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully depicted in this poem.

At the New Year's celebration in Hannover in 1912, I first tried to put this folk tale of Olaf Åsteson into German lines so that it could also be performed before our souls. Tonight's program will begin with the Song of Olaf Åsteson, which contains Olaf Åsteson's experiences during the thirteen nights.

It was followed by a recitation by Marie von Sivers.

The poetry itself is old. But, as I said, it has recently been rediscovered by the Norwegian people as if by magic and is spreading rapidly. The fact that something like this is spreading will, among many facts prevailing at present, also be one that proves how it is pushing towards an understanding of the mysteries that anthroposophy can bring us today. For that something like what is described here is taking place in a soul, or at least could take place relatively recently, is not just a 'fiction'. This writing is not just fantasy, but reality, it is real. And with Olaf Åsteson, it is pointed out to people of those Nordic regions who, in the Middle Ages, around the middle of the Middle Ages, still had the opportunity, one might say, to literally experience something as it is expressed here.

When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem during my penultimate visit to Kristiania and wanted to hear something about it from me, it was initially this fact, interesting from a general spiritual scientific point of view, that was emphasized, that pushed itself into the soul. But what led to our wanting to include this poem in our spiritual scientific program, so to speak, is that one can also go into the details more and more. Through anthroposophical understanding, one finds oneself delving ever deeper into what comes to light in the poem. For example, it was significant to me that Olaf — which is an old Norwegian name — has the epithet Åsteson: Åsteson. The son of what? Of Äste. And I tried to find out what kind of mother this son actually is. Of course, one can argue about the meaning of the word “Äst” in many different ways, and there are also things that can be disputed. It is not possible today to sort out everything that comes into question. But if we take into account everything that is in question, then a name such as Olaf Åsteson means: he who is still a son of that soul that goes down from generation to generation and is connected with the blood that runs from generation to generation. But we have traced this name back to what we have so often discussed in the field of anthroposophy, that in ancient times, ancient clairvoyance was connected with the kinship of the blood that runs through the generations. And one would be able to translate Olaf Åsteson as: Olaf, born of many generations and still carrying the characters of many generations in his soul.

If we now go into the experiences, it is extremely interesting to see what the sleeping Olaf Åsteson goes through from Christmas Eve through thirteen days, during which he does not wake up, that is, is in a kind of psychic state. If one allows the individual verses to take effect, which allow the individual experiences to arise before the soul with a broad, folksy comfort, one is reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where it is said that such and such a one has been led to the threshold of death. The poem shows that Olaf Åsteson comes to the gates of death. And it will be particularly vivid when he feels like a corpse himself – except for the earth that he feels between his teeth. If we remember that the etheric body of the person to be initiated grows beyond the boundaries of the skin and the person becomes bigger and bigger, so that the person lives into wide cosmic spaces, then we are pointed to in this poem how the person descends deeply, empathizes with the depths of the earth and ascends to cloud heights. What a person has to go through after death, for example in the sphere of the moon, is also what Olaf Åsteson has to go through. It is poetically described how the moon shines brightly and how the paths stretch far and wide. Then the gulf that has to be crossed in the world is shown, the one that lies between the human and the one that leads out into the cosmic expanse. And the bridge of heaven connects what is human with what is cosmic. Then our attention is drawn to the interplay of the beings that find expression in the constellations of Taurus and Ophiuchus. But for those who can see into the world spiritually, the constellations are only the expression of what is present in the spiritual realm in the vastness of space. And then the world of Kamalokaw is depicted in the description of 'Brooksvalin'. It is shown how a kind of retribution takes place, how people there go through - but in a compensatory way - what they have not acquired here on earth. But one does not need to interpret all the details of this poetry, one should not do that at all with such poetry. But one should feel that they emerged from such an atmosphere, which is closely related to what was present in such a people for much longer than in peoples who lived more in the interior of the continents or came into contact with big city culture. The Norwegian people, who still have much in their vernacular that comes close to the boundary of occult secrets, had the possibility for longer to keep the souls connected with what lives and moves behind the outer material phenomena.

Do you remember how I have dealt with the way the course of the year has its spiritual parallel series of facts? How in spring, when plants sprout from the earth, when everything comes to life, when the days get lighter, we have to recognize what we can call a kind of falling asleep of the elementary and higher spirits that are connected to the earth. In spring, when the earth awakens outwardly, in spiritual contemplation we are dealing with a kind of falling asleep of the earth. When outer nature dies down again, we are dealing with the awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. And when outer nature is asleep around Christmas time, then that is the time when the spiritual of the earth, which is connected with earthly existence both through elemental, less significant beings and through great, powerful beings, is most active. It only appears so when viewed superficially, as if we had to compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter with its falling asleep. For occult observation, it is the other way around. The spirit of the earth, which consists of many spirits, awakens in winter and sleeps in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and vegetative are most active during sleep, as the forces play up into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is killed off during waking, so it is with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted, when the sun is at its highest around Midsummer, the spirit of the earth sleeps. And it is not without connection to these occult truths that Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, has been moved to the winter season. The things that have come down to us as customs from ancient times correspond in many ways to these occult insights.

Those who know how to live with the spirits of the earth do not just celebrate Midsummer in the summer. For the celebration of St. John's Day in summer is already a kind of materialistic celebration. One celebrates what external materialistic revelation shows. But he who has the connection with the spirit of the earth, with that which lives spiritually in the earth, awakens to his inner self, that is, he sleeps for his outer self, like Olaf Åsteson, best at Christmas time during the thirteen days. This is also an occult fact, which means exactly the same for occultism as, for example, the fact of the external position of the sun for external materialistic science. Of course, materialistic science will take it for granted that within astronomy it describes the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a certain purely external way; it will consider it foolishness what is a fact for the occultist that the spiritual position of the sun is most intense in the winter time and that therefore the conditions are most favorable for those who want to come close to a deepening of the soul, which is connected with the spirit of the earth and with all spiritual. Therefore, for someone who wants to seek a deepening of their soul, it may turn out that they can have the best experiences during the thirteen days of the Christmas season, when, without us realizing it, the experiences arise from the soul, although the modern person is already so emancipated from external events that the occult experiences can come at any time. But in so far as the external can nevertheless have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is the most important.

Thus we are reminded in a very natural way by this poem how much of what we could mention when discussing the time between death and the next birth was still quite close to certain areas of the world relatively recently, as some people still knew from direct experience.

We begin this celebration of the end of our year by having Dr. Steiner tell us the beautiful Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson, of that Olaf Åsteson who, as Christmas approached, fell into a kind of sleep that lasted thirteen days: the holy thirteen days that we have come to know through various of our reflections. During this sleep he had important experiences, which he was able to relate when he woke up.

We have made various observations that could draw our attention to the fact that, through the spiritual scientific world view, we can regain in a different way old treasures of knowledge for human knowledge that were known in days gone by by people as that which belongs to the spiritual worlds. Again and again we will come across this pre-worldly knowledge of the spiritual worlds through one or other of them, and again and again we are reminded that this knowledge of the past was based on the fact that man, by virtue of his earlier organization, was able to stand in such a connection with the whole universe and its happenings that, as we express ourselves in our language, the human microcosm was immersed in the laws of the macrocosm and that in this immersion in the macrocosm he could have experiences about things that intimately concern his soul life, but which must remain hidden from him as long as he walks on the physical plane as a microcosm and is endowed only with the knowledge given to the senses and to the mind bound to the senses.

We know, of course, how only a materialistic world view of faith can be that man alone is endowed with the ability to know, feel and will within the order of the world; whereas from the point of view of a spiritual world view, it must be acknowledged that just as there are beings below the human level, there are also beings above the human level of thinking, feeling and willing. Man can familiarize himself with these entities when he immerses himself as a microcosm in the macrocosm. But then we must speak of this macrocosm as if it were not only a spatial macrocosm, but as if time in its course has significance in the life of the macrocosm. Just as man must withdraw from all the impressions that can be exerted on his senses from his surroundings, just as he must create darkness around him by closing his sensory perception in order to light the light of the spirit within when he wants to descend into the depths of his soul, so must the spirit that we can call the earth spirit be closed off from the impressions of the rest of the cosmos. The least degree of influence from the outer cosmos must be exerted on the earth spirit so that the earth spirit itself can concentrate inwardly, contract its abilities inwardly. For then the secrets are discovered that the human being has to go through with this earth spirit because the earth is separated from the cosmos as earth.

One such time when the greatest degree of influence from the external macrocosm is exerted upon the earth is the summer solstice, the time around the summer solstice. Many messages from ancient times remind us of this, which are linked to representations and celebrations of festivals, how such festivals took place in the middle of the summer season, how the soul in the middle of summer, by renouncing the ego and merging with the life of the macrocosm, is drunk on the impressions of the macrocosm.

Conversely, the legendary or other representations of what could be experienced in prehistoric times remind us that when the slightest measure of impressions from the macrocosm comes to earth, the earth spirit, concentrated within itself, experiences the secrets of earth soul life in the infinite universe, and that man, when he enters into this experience at the time when least light and warmth is sent from the macrocosm to the earth, then also experiences the most sacred secrets. That is why these days around Christmas have always been held in such high regard, because man, when he still had the ability in his organism to witness earthly life at the time when it is most concentrated, could be with the spirit of the earth.

Olaf Åsteson, Olaf the Earth-son, experiences many secrets of the universe in these thirteen shortest days, while he is absorbed in the macrocosm. And the Norse legend, which has been rediscovered in recent times from ancient records, tells us of the experiences that Olaf Åsteson had between Christmas and New Year's Day until January 6. And we have good reason, my dear friends, to remember this ancient way of integrating the microcosm into the macrocosm more often; our contemplation will then be able to tie in with such things. But for now, let us hear the legend of Olaf the Earth-son, who in the time in which we now live experienced the secrets of world existence by living with the Earth Spirit. So let us hear about these experiences.

The recitation followed.

My dear friends, we have heard how Olaf Åsteson fell asleep in that sleep that was to become a revelation for him of the secrets of those worlds that are withdrawn from the life of the senses, from ordinary life on the physical plane. In the legend, we have received the knowledge of those ancient realizations, of those ancient insights into the spiritual worlds, which are to be regained through that which we call the spiritual-scientific worldview.

The saying that runs through all the rallies dealing with the entry of the human soul into the spiritual world has often been quoted, and it states that man can only see the spiritual world when he comes to the gate of death with his experiences and then submerges into the elements. So that he does not have the elements of earthly existence around him as they are in the ordinary life of the physical plane, as the earth, the water, the air, the fire, but that he is lifted out above this outside, this sensual outside of the elements, and immersed in what these elements are when you get to know them in their true nature, their next true nature, where beings are present in them that are related to the experience of the human soul.

That Olaf Åsteson experienced something of this immersion in the elements can still be felt where it is first told how Olaf comes to the Gjallarbridge and how he walks over the bridge in the paths of the spiritual world that stretch far and wide. How vividly is the experience with the earth element described to us, how he immerses himself in the earth element. This is brought to such a vividness that it tells us that he feels earth in his mouth like dead people lying in graves. And then it is clearly indicated to us how he experiences the water element and everything that can be experienced in the water element when one experiences this water element at the same time with its moral content. Then again it is indicated how man comes together with the fire element, with the air element.

All this is described and brought together in a wonderfully vivid way in the experience of the human soul's union with the secrets of the spiritual world. The legend was found later; it was collected where it was still alive on the lips of the people. And there is much in this legend, as it is today, that is no longer as it originally was. Originally, there was undoubtedly only a vivid description of the experiences in the earth region, then of the experiences in the water region. And then the experiences in the air and fire regions were probably much more differentiated than is the case in the faint echoes that were found after centuries and that are presented to us today.

Likewise, the ending was undoubtedly much grander and less sentimental. The ending as it appears today no longer resembles the original's tremendously grandiose language, the superhumanly moving lay in such folk legends, while today's ending is only humanly moving; moving because it is connected with such deep secrets of the macrocosm and of human experience. |

In such times as these, in such seasons, if we understand them correctly, there is much reason to remember the fact that humanity - albeit with a different, more dull, more dim realization - was steeped in knowledge in the distant past that has been lost and must be regained. And here the question may arise again before our soul: Since we can already see today how such knowledge must come again for the good of humanity, must we not regard it as one of our most urgent tasks to do everything that such knowledge can bring about, that present-day human culture can permeate with such knowledge?

Various things will be necessary for this just hinted at change to occur in the right way in the whole human, I would now like to say, world-view feeling. Above all, one thing will be necessary; I say one, because it is one among many; but you can only take one at a time. What will be necessary is for human souls to acquire reverence and devotion on the basis of our spiritual-scientific worldview, in the face of what has been known in ancient times in the old way, the great secrets of existence. One must come to the realization of how this reverence and devotion has been neglected in materialistic times, and develop it in the soul.

One must get a sense of how dry and sober this materialistic time is, and how arrogantly humanity in the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period stood in the face of the revelations of ancient religions and ancient traditions of knowledge, which truly, if approached with the necessary reverence, give a sense that deep, deep wisdom lies within them. How irreverent we are, in fact, when we approach the Bible today! I will not even speak of that kind of modern abomination research that dishevels and frays the entire Bible. I will speak only of the sober, dry way in which we approach the Bible today, as it were equipped only with sensory knowledge and the ordinary powers of the mind, and how we can no longer muster an appreciation for the tremendous grandeur of human contemplation that confronts us in some passages. I would like to point to a passage from the Book of Exodus, chapter 33, verse 18: And Moses said to God: “Show me the form of your revelation.”

Whereupon Jehovah said: “I will pass by and let all my goodness pass before you, and I will call the name of Jehovah before you and will be gracious to whom I may be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I may show mercy.

But then Jehovah says: “You cannot see my face, for no one who can still live sees me.”

And Yahweh said: “Here is a place by me; stand on the rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a crevice of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand, and you will see my back side, but my face cannot be seen.

When we take into account many things that have entered our souls and hearts over the past years of our spiritual striving and approach this passage, we may have the feeling: Yes, what infinite wisdom speaks from this passage, and how deaf are the human ears of the materialistic age that they can hear nothing of the infinitely deep wisdom that speaks from this passage. At the same time, I would like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to a little book that has been published with the title “Words of Moses” by Bruns' Verlag in Minden in Westphalia, because some of the material in this little book is better translated than in other editions of the Five Books of Moses. Dr. Hugo Bergmann, who is the editor of the “Words of Moses”, has put a lot of effort into the interpretation.

We have often emphasized that, if man wishes to enter the spiritual worlds, he must acquire a completely different way of relating to the world than he does to the sense world. The sense world is around man. He looks at the sensory world, he sees it in its colors and forms, hears its sounds. The sensory world is there; we face it; it affects us; we perceive it, we reflect on it. This is our relationship to the sensory world. We are passive; it works its way into our soul, as it were. We think about the sensory world, we imagine the sensory world.

Our behavior is quite different when we live our way up into the spiritual world. This is one of the difficulties in gaining correct ideas about what a person experiences when he enters the spiritual world. I have tried to characterize some of these difficulties in the booklet: “The Threshold of the Spiritual World.” We present the sensory world, we think about the sensory world. When we go through everything that one has to go through who wants to walk the path of initiation, then something occurs that can be characterized as follows: the way the things around us relate to us, that is how we relate to the beings of the higher hierarchies: they present us, they think us. We think the objects outside of us, the minerals, plants and animals: they become our thoughts. We, in turn, are the perceptions, thoughts and perceptions of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. We become the thoughts of the angels, archangels, archai and so on. We are absorbed by them, as we ourselves absorb plants, animals and humans. And we must feel secure in knowing that the beings of the higher hierarchies think us, imagine us. These beings of the higher hierarchies take hold of us with their souls. Yes, we can almost imagine: when that Olaf Åsteson fell asleep in front of the church door, he became an idea of the spirits of the higher hierarchies, and while he slept, the beings of the higher hierarchies experienced what the beings of the earth spirit experience, which for us is, after all, a plurality. And as Olaf Åsteson sinks back down into the physical world, he remembers what the spirits of the higher hierarchies experienced in him.

Let us imagine: we are embarking on the path of initiation! How can we relate to the spiritual worlds into which we want to enter as a sum of spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies? How can we relate to them? We can address them and say: How do we enter into you, how do you reveal yourselves to us? And then, when we have gained an understanding of the different way in which the human soul relates to the higher worlds, we will, as it were, hear a response from the spiritual worlds: Yes, just as you perceive the world of the senses, that it appears before your eyes, comes before your senses, so you cannot perceive the spiritual world. We have to introduce you to it, and you have to feel yourself in us. You have to feel yourself as the thought you think in the world of the senses would experience itself if it could experience itself in you. You must give yourself up to the spiritual world, then everything that can reveal itself to you of the higher hierarchies will move into you. Then it will flow into your soul and think graciously in the sensory world. If the spiritual world wants to pardon you, then it will permeate you with its love! If it wants to have mercy on you and permeate you with its love.

You must not think that you can place yourself in the position of spiritual beings in the same way as in the world of sense. As Moses had to enter into the cave, so you must enter into the cave of the spiritual world. You must place yourself in it. As the thought lives in you, so you must live yourself into the spiritual beings. You yourself must live in it as a world thought in the macrocosm. You cannot experience what you experience of your own accord during your life on earth between birth and death; you can only do so after death, when you have died. No one can experience the spiritual world in this way before he has died, but the spiritual world can pass before you, granting you mercy, flooding you with its love. And then, when you develop your earth consciousness afterwards or while you are in this spiritual world, what the spiritual world is shines into your earth consciousness.

What the object is outside and how man faces the object, how the object intrudes into his consciousness and is then in it, so is man with his soul in the hollow of the spiritual world (drawings 1 and 2).

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The spiritual world passes through him. Here man is before things. When man enters into the spiritual world, the entities of the higher hierarchies are behind him. He cannot see their faces, just as thoughts do not see our faces when they are within us. The face is in front; the thoughts are behind, they do not see the face. The whole secret of initiation rests in the words that Yahweh speaks to Moses.

And Moses says to God: “Show me the form of your revelation.”

Whereupon Jehovah said: “I will cause all my goodness to pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of Jehovah before you, and I will show mercy upon whom I shall be merciful, and will shew compassion on whom I shall shew compassion.

But then Jehovah says: “You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live.”

One comes to the gate of death through initiation.

And Yahweh says: “Here is a place with me. Stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I will put you in a hollow of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then, when I remove my hand, you will see my backside, but my face cannot be seen.”

It is the opposite way to perceive the sensory world. One must summon up much of what one acquires through years of spiritual striving in order to stand in the right way in awe and devotion before such a revelation. But then, little by little, this feeling of reverence for these revelations comes into the human soul, and among the many things we need for the change in spiritual human culture to take place, this reverence, this devotion, is one.

The time when the least amount of impressions from the macrocosm come to Earth, the time from Christmas until after the New Year, approximately until January 6, is well suited not only to remember the objectivity of spiritual knowledge, but also the feelings that we must develop within us by absorbing spiritual science. We must truly live our way back into the spirit of the earth, with which we together form a whole, and with which the old clairvoyant knowledge lived, as it is presented to us in this legend by Olaf Åsteson. In the materialistic age, humanity has often forgotten reverence and devotion to spiritual life. Above all, it is necessary to ensure that this reverence and devotion comes again, because only in this way will we be able to develop the right mood that will bring us to the new spiritual science. For the time being, there is still the mood that approaches this spiritual science in the same way as one approaches other, ordinary science. In this respect, however, a fundamental change must take place.

Because humanity has lost its insight into the spiritual world, it has also lost the right relationship of the human being to the whole of humanity, to humanity. The materialistic world view produces chaotic feelings about the existence of the world. These chaotic feelings about the existence of the world and humanity were bound to arise in the age of materialism. Let us take a time – and this time is ours: it is the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period – when people no longer had any real idea that the human being has a threefold nature: the physical, the soul and the spiritual being. For truly, it is so. What must be one of the first elements of spiritual scientific knowledge for us — the threefold nature of the human being in body, soul and spirit — was completely unknown from the first four centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period until our own time. Man was simply man, and all talk about a human structure of the kind we have in body, soul and spirit was considered foolish, fantastic talk.

One might think that these things are only significant for knowledge. But they are not. Not only are they significant for knowledge, but they are also significant for the whole way in which man places himself in life. In the third century of modern development, or, as we say in our language, of the development of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, three powerful words broke into this time, in which, so to speak, this time understood or at least tried to understand the center of human will in earthly life. These three words are significant, but they acquired their special character through their breaking into humanity at the time when the threefold nature of human nature was not yet known. Humanity heard about freedom, equality and brotherhood.

It was a profound necessity that these words should resound in modern culture at a particular time. We will only truly understand these words when we understand the threefold structure of human nature, because only then will we know what meaning these words can have for human nature in the true sense of the word. As long as one fills these three words with those chaotic feelings, which arise from the thought that man is man and the threefold nature of man is a foolish delusion, one cannot find one's way within the scope of the guideline of these three words. For just as the three words confront us, they cannot be applied directly, one might say, to the same level of human experience. They cannot. Simple considerations, which perhaps because they are so simple do not immediately appear before the eye of the soul in the gravity of what they mean, can suggest to you how, on the same level of life, what these three words mean can come into serious life conflicts.

Let us first take the area in which fraternity comes to us most naturally in the world. Let us take human blood relationship, the family, where we do not need to establish fraternity first, where it is innate in man by nature, and let us consider how it speaks to our feelings when we can see that genuine, true fraternity reigns in a family, that everything is connected fraternally. But now – without having to dampen in the slightest the wonderful feeling we can have of this brotherhood – let us take a look inside to see what can arise within the brotherhood of the family precisely because of the brotherhood of the family. There may be a member in the family who, precisely because of the brotherhood justified within the family, does not feel comfortable, longs to be outside the brotherhood of the family, because he feels that he cannot develop his soul within the brotherhood of the family, because he feels that he has to get out of the family, in which he can live so fraternally, in order to develop his soul freely. We see: freedom, the free development of the soul, can come into conflict with the most well-intentioned brotherhood.

Of course, the superficial person can say that this is not the right kind of brotherhood, that it is incompatible with the freedom of a soul within brotherhood. But you can say anything you can imagine. You can say that everything goes together, there is no doubt about that. I recently came across a dissertation. Among the theses to be defended, the thesis was put forward that A triangle is a quadrilateral. Of course, one can also defend that – yes, one can even rigorously prove that a triangle is a quadrilateral! In this way, one can also fully prove that fraternity and freedom are compatible. But that is not the issue; rather, the issue is how, for the sake of freedom, some areas must and will abandon fraternity. We could cite many other examples.

If one wanted to list the discrepancies between fraternity and equality, one would have to talk for a very long time about it. Of course, in abstracto one can again imagine: everyone can be equal, and one can show that fraternity and equality go together. But we are not dealing with abstractions, but with the observation of reality, if we take life seriously and honestly. The moment we know that the human being consists of the physical, which lives out on the physical plane, the soul, which actually lives out in the soul world, and the spiritual, which lives out in the spiritual world, At this moment the correct perspective for the context of the three powerful words that we have mentioned also opens up. Brotherhood is the most important ideal for the physical world. Freedom for the soul world, and - insofar as the human being is in the soul world, one should speak of the freedom of the soul, that is, of a social condition that fully guarantees the freedom of the soul. And when we consider that each of us must strive from our individual point of view for spiritual knowledge, for the development of our spirit, in order to stand with the spirit in the realm of spirits, it will very soon become clear to us where we would end up with our conception of the spirit if each of us sought only in his own way and each of us came to a completely different spiritual content.

We can only find ourselves as human beings in life if we can seek the spirit — each for himself — and ultimately arrive at the same spiritual content. We can speak of the equality of spiritual life. Of brotherhood on the physical plane and in relation to everything that is connected with the laws of the physical plane and lives into the human soul from the physical plane. Freedom in relation to everything that lives into the human soul as laws of the soul world; equality in relation to everything that lives into the human soul from the laws of the spirit world.

You see, a world new year must come in which a sun will grow in terms of its warming and illuminating power: that sun, which must give its illuminating warmth to much that lives in the time of darkness, but lives misunderstood. That is precisely the peculiar thing about our time: that much is striven for, much is said, without being understood.

But this too can lead us to reverence and devotion to the spiritual world. For when we consider that many in the third century of the fifth post-Atlantic period strove for and spoke the words brotherhood, freedom and equality without them being fundamentally understood, then we already have the opportunity to understand and find an answer to the question: where did these words come from? The order of the spiritual world, which is divine, has implanted them in advance in the soul of man, which does not yet understand, so that it may cling to such guiding words and so attain a true understanding of the world. Even in such facts we can observe the wise guidance in the evolution of the world. We can observe this guidance everywhere in times that are more or less distant or near; we can observe how we often only realize afterwards that what we did before was actually more full of wisdom than we could have done with the wisdom of the time that we had mastered. I drew attention to this right at the beginning of my writing on “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity”.

But if you take something like the fact that in the development of the world, in the development of man, there are words of direction that can only be understood little by little, then you will probably become aware of a picture that can be used to characterize this elapsed period of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch. In fact, in relation to certain things, it can be compared to the time of Advent, when the hours of daylight grow shorter and shorter. And now, in our time, in which we can again know something of the revelations of the spiritual world, development is entering a phase in which we can gain the idea that the times of light are becoming longer and longer, and we can speak of the fact that this course of time can really appear analogous to the thirteen days and the re-entry into the days that are growing again.

But the matter goes even deeper. It is not right, not at all right, for us to have only negative things to say about the materialistic age of the last four centuries. This new era arose from the fact that great discoveries and inventions were made, as they are called “great” in the materialistic age, for example, that the earth was circumnavigated, countries were discovered that were previously unknown, and that colonization of the earth began. That was the beginning of material culture. And then, little by little, the time drew near when people were almost suffocated by material culture. The time came when everything that was available in the way of spiritual powers was applied to understanding and grasping material life. More and more, as we have seen, was forgotten that which was available in insights and visions into the spiritual world from ancient knowledge. |

But it is not right to have only bad words for the materialistic age. Rather, another thing is right; it is right to consider that this human soul thought materialistically in its waking part, was materialistically minded, that it founded science and culture materialistically, but that this human soul is a whole. One could say: the one part of the human soul founded materialistic culture. In the past this part was inactive, people knew nothing of external science, knew nothing of the outward material life; then the spiritual part was more awake. (It was drawn.) In the last four hundred years it was just that part that was awake and founded materialistic culture; but the other part slept. And truly, the forces that we are now developing in humanity in order to work our way up to spirituality again were laid down in the time of materialistic culture in the parts of the soul that slept below. Humanity was truly in relation to spiritual knowledge in those times: Olaf Åsteson. It really was. It is just that humanity has not yet awakened! Spiritual science must awaken it.

The time must come when young and old alike will hear words spoken from that part of the human soul that has been asleep during the dark ages. This human soul has been asleep for a very long time, but the world spirits will approach this human soul and call out to it: Awake now, O Olaf Åsteson! — We must prepare ourselves in the right way so that we are not called: Awake now, O Olaf Åsteson! — and do not have ears to hear. We are pursuing spiritual science so that we have ears when the call for spiritual awakening in human development will sound.

It is good for human beings to remember from time to time that they are microcosms and that many an experience can be had when they are absorbed in the macrocosm. And we have seen that the time and season are favorable for us now. Let us try to let this New Year's Night be the symbol for the New Year's Night necessary for the development of humanity on earth, in which the new epoch of time will approach, in which the light, the soul light, the seeing, the recognition of that which lives in the spiritual and from which the human soul can be imbued and flooded with the spiritual will grow and grow more and more. If we bring the microcosm of our experience on this New Year's night into connection with the macrocosm of human experience across the earth, then we will be able to experience what we are meant to experience in terms of feelings, because we can sense something of the dawn of the new great world day in the fifth post-Atlantic period, the dawn of which we are standing at, whose midnight we want to experience worthily.

A significant folk tale is to be presented: It is about the young Olaf Åsteson, who lives in the saga of the Norwegian people. A dream of this Olaf Åsteson is told in a truly folksy poetic form. A dream that the people imagined filled a long sleep of thirteen days and nights, those thirteen nights and days that lie between Christmas Eve and Epiphany, on January 6. These thirteen days play a role in many folk traditions. To understand what is expressed in such traditions, one must imagine how, relatively recently, people in rural and mountainous areas felt an intimate connection with the course of nature. They felt differently when the plants sprouted out of the earth in spring than when the ground stretched bare in autumn; differently when the sun burned hot in the sky at Midsummer, and differently when the snow clouds hid all the sun's rays in December. In summer, the soul lived with nature; in winter, it withdrew into itself, lived within itself. This withdrawal of the soul became particularly intense towards Christmas time, when the nights are longest. And then it was so for the soul that it withdrew from the outside world as in falling asleep, when the eyes no longer see and the ears no longer hear. A brooding of the soul occupied with itself occurred, which became like a dream in particularly predisposed people. Then some souls experienced their immersion in the spiritual world particularly vividly. Everything they felt, about guilt and sin, about hope in life and worries of the soul, came before them. And just as dreams take on special forms when morning approaches and the first ray of sunshine falls on the dreamer's still sleeping face, so the brooding and dreaming of the soul takes on a special form when, from Christmas onwards, the sun begins to appear earlier in the day, when the approach of the new dawn is felt. Anyone who has ever lived with mountain or rural people is familiar with the dream experiences that we are considering here, which introduce the folk soul to other worlds. Nowadays, however, such experiences are no longer common. They are actually disappearing as locomotives and factory chimneys invade the landscape. In many areas, even the legends of those old dream worlds have already faded away. In areas that have been less influenced by modern industrial and transportation culture, such as certain areas of Norway, beautiful parts of that mythology have been preserved, as in our song about Olaf Åsteson. It comes from ancient times, but was recently rediscovered by the Norwegian people and is spreading quickly, so that many people know it again today, after it was long lost.

It tells of a long dream that Olaf Åsteson dreams in which he experiences the fate of souls after death. The idea behind it is that after death the soul wanders among the stars, that it comes, for example, to areas where the constellations of Taurus, the Serpent, and Canis Major are close, that it comes into the spiritual proximity of the moon. The soul enters these worlds by crossing the Gjallarbridge, which connects the earthly world with the spiritual. In many folk tales, the rainbow is presented as this bridge. Part of this spiritual world is Brooksvalin, where the deeds of the souls are weighed and retribution is meted out to them. The way the song presents the experience points to the time in which it was formed through folk poetry. The ideas about life after death are not yet entirely Christian; they are partly those that were still formed in the old pagan times. However, the time in which Olaf experiences his dream is already presented as Christian. This is evident not only from the fact that he tells his dream at the church door, but also from the fact that Christian ideas of Michael and Christ play into the pagan ideas of the Gjallarbridge and Brooksvalin. Indeed, one can immediately recognize the penetration of Christianity into Norway from the south in the approach of Christ from the south. We are dealing with a folk tale that is probably eight to nine centuries old, because that is how long ago Christianity entered Norway.

By presenting this poetry, we would like to draw your attention to the life of the folk soul, which, through the formation of legends such as that of Olaf Åsteson, shows that it was aware of its connection to the spiritual world, which inwardly experienced images of this connection that gave it the certainty that the spiritual world exists. For anyone who approached Olaf Åsteson and said, “There is no such thing, science has proven that,” would have been looked at quite sympathetically by Olaf Åsteson, who would then have smiled sympathetically and said, “There are more things in heaven and on earth than you can dream of in your school wisdom.

We are trying to penetrate the theosophical life and knowledge bit by bit, but often during this penetration we have a heartfelt need to ask ourselves: why do we want and seek theosophy in the spiritual life of the present? We need not strain our minds or hearts too hard when such a question arises, and a word will come into our soul that will immediately have an enlightening and even more enlightening effect on our feelings: the word responsibility. Responsibility! This word should give us something that should exclude from the outset in our soul, in our hearts, that we are pursuing Theosophy out of some personal longing. If we observe what may befall us, perhaps without our being properly aware of it, when we hear the word responsibility in relation to the spiritual life that we call theosophical, then we will increasingly come to realize that we owe it to present-day humanity and to the best in us, which can serve this present humanity, to concern ourselves with 'theosophy'. We must not practise Theosophy just for our own pleasure, to satisfy ourselves somehow because we have this or that personal yearning, but we must feel that Theosophy is something that present humanity needs if the process of human development is to continue at all. We need only realize that without Theosophy, or whatever one might call it, without that spiritual life which we mean, humanity on earth would have to face a bleak future, truly a bleak future. This is so for the simple reason that all the spiritual impulses of the past, all that could be given to man in the past in the way of spiritual impulses, has been exhausted. It is gradually living itself out and can bring nothing new into the evolution of humanity. What would have to come if only the old impulses were to continue to work would be something that is perhaps still undreamt of today: not only an overwhelming, externally overwhelming, but numbing domination of mere outward technique, but also a perishing because all religious, scientific, philosophical, artistic and also, in the higher sense, ethical interest is moving out of the human soul. People would become a kind of living automaton if new spiritual impulses did not come. This is how we must feel when we think of Theosophy, as those whom their karma has brought to know that humanity needs new impulses.

We may well ask ourselves: What can we, each one of us, do according to our particular qualities and abilities, in the face of this general sense of responsibility? The way in which Theosophy has come into the world in recent times, and how it has developed over the last few decades into our days, is instructive for answering this question of the heart and soul, perhaps especially for you, my dear friends. We must never forget that the way the word Theosophy has entered the world in modern times is something of a spiritual miracle of civilization. This spiritual miracle of civilization is linked to a personality who, as a personality, is indeed close to you, my dear friends, since she drew her spiritual roots from your national heritage in a certain way. I am talking about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. And for Western Europeans it is undeniable, in every respect undeniable, that the body in which the individuality, who in this incarnation was called Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, was enclosed, could only have come from the environment of Eastern Europe, from Russia. For she had all the Russian characteristics. But Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was taken from you by very special circumstances; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was transferred to the West by the special karmic conditions of the present time. Now, let us consider what a strange cultural miracle actually took place.

Take this personality of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She was a personality who, basically, remained a child throughout her entire life in many, many ways, a real child; a personality who, throughout her entire life, did not learn to think logically; a personality who, throughout her entire life, has not learned to control her passions, urges and desires to any extent, and was always able to fall into extremes; a personality who basically had very little scientific education. Through this personality, it is revealed to the world, one might say, as it could not be otherwise, through the medium of such a personality, in a chaotic, mixed-up, colorful way, a sum of the very greatest eternal wisdom of mankind. And anyone who is well-versed in these matters will find in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's works wisdom, truths, and insights of humanity that could not have been understood by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's intellect and soul, not even remotely. There is nothing clearer, if one only approaches all the facts impartially, than that for everything that was in the work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the outer soul, the outer intellectuality of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was only a detour, only a means by which significant, great spiritual powers could communicate with humanity. And there is nothing clearer than that in the way it was to happen at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, it could not have happened to anyone in Western Europe. It took the very special, on the one hand selfless, almost des-ensouled, and on the other hand again radically selfish, egoistic nature of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, to allow what happened to happen through higher spiritual powers. The selfless nature for the reason that every Western European mind would have brought into its own forms of thinking, into its own intellect, what had been revealed. And it needed the completely selfish, egotistical kind, because in the coarse, materialistic way of life in Western Europe at that time, there was no possibility of doing otherwise than to make, one might say, iron fists out of such a radical state of mind, out of such delicate hands, which had to cultivate and care for the occultism of modern times. It is a peculiar phenomenon. But, my dear friends, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky went to the West, went to that cultural center which, in all its idiosyncrasy, in its entire structure and configuration in all fields, except America, is the most materialistic cultural area of our time, a cultural area that lives in its language, in its thinking, absolutely in materialistic thoughts and in materialistic feelings. It would be going too far here to discuss the power that led Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to England in particular. And so we see that the sum of occultism, which expresses itself in a culturally idiosyncratic way in a medium – I do not mean this in a spiritualistic sense – initially strives for the western part of Europe.

Within this European West, the fate of this occultism was initially sealed in a certain direction, because there was no way around the fulfillment of a significant karma in this materialistic European West with the founding of the Theosophical Society. This karma was also fulfilled. This Western Europe has a heavy karmic debt; it cannot penetrate the secrets of existence without this karmic debt asserting itself in a certain way. When occultism is involved somewhere, karma immediately deepens, and forces are brought to the surface that would otherwise remain hidden. And not to criticize anything in particular, but to characterize, it is said what is to be said: The European West, in carrying out something that is historically necessary, has perpetrated countless injustices against the bearer of ancient spiritual culture, against the bearer of ancient occult secrets, in whose life, although spiritual things have become rigid and no longer exist for the present, they live at the bottom of the soul. — For that is the truth in India, in South Asia. The moment occult impulses came to Western Europe, a reaction immediately set in against the spiritual forces at work in the depths of Indian culture, and it became impossible – it was already impossible in the time of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – to retain what was indeed intended by certain spiritual powers as the actual spiritual movement necessary in our present time. It was impossible to hold on to that. The intention was to give humanity a body of occult teachings that could fit all people, all hearts, that everyone could go along with. But because of certain necessities, the impulse was transplanted to Western Europe, and an egoistic reaction asserted itself. Those spiritual powers that wanted to give the world a new impulse without distinction of any human differences were pushed back, and India, once suppressed in its occultism, took revenge karmically by infiltrating its own national egoistic occultism at the first opportunity when occultism appeared in the West. And that happened in the days of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. This was already happening when Helena Petrovna Blavatsky summarized the great truths and wisdoms of her “The Secret Doctrine”. Her first work, “Isis Unveiled”, shows only the very chaotic and illogical and passionate and confused nature of her being, but shows everywhere that behind her there are watching powers that want to guide her towards the general human. In the “Secret Doctrine,” alongside the self-evident greatest good, there is everywhere a human special interest, such an interest that emanates from certain occult centers that do not have the general human interest in mind today, but a partial, a special interest. Tibetan, Indian, and also Egyptian initiations today everywhere have only a partial human interest in mind, and want only to avenge the suppressed Eastern occultism in the Western world, to avenge the fact that the Western world has triumphed over the Eastern world through materialistic factors. It has triumphed over the Eastern world through materialistic factors; it has triumphed in so far as Christianity has been adopted into the actual progressive culture of human development, into the progressive life of human development. Christianity has not gone east of Asia, nor south of Asia; Christianity has gone west.

Now you might say, my dear theosophical friends: So it is good. Then the West accepted Christianity, and since Christianity is a stage in the onward progress of humanity, it is natural that the West should have triumphed over the East. — Yes, if that were so! If it were so, it would be self-evident. But it is not so. Christianity, which was prepared for centuries and millennia and which came into the world, has not yet triumphed anywhere on earth. And anyone today who would believe that they could truly and genuinely represent the Christ principle and the Christ impulse in the present would have fallen prey to an indescribable arrogance. What has happened so far? Nothing more than that the Western nations have adopted certain externalities of Christianity, have occupied the name of Christ and have clothed their old cultures, which had been established in Europe before Christianity, with the name of Christianity. Does the Christ reign within Christian Europe? No follower of occult movements will ever admit that the Christ reigns within Christian Europe, but will say: You speak of the “Christ”, but you still mean the same as the ancient Central European peoples meant when they spoke of their god Saxnot. — The symbolum of the Crucifixus stands over the European peoples. In a certain respect, however, the traditions of the god Saxnot prevail, whose symbol is the former short Saxon sword, which was there for the expansion of only material interests, because that was the occupation of the European peoples. Therefore, this occupation has also produced the noblest flower of materialistic culture, an appearance that is noble in the realm of materialistic culture: chivalry. Where in any culture can we find anything similar to the knighthood of Western culture? It does not exist anywhere else. No one would think of comparing the heroes of the Trojan War with the medieval knights. The Christ still lives little in people. People only speak of the Christ. When Westerners speak of Christ, Eastern peoples feel that they, the Eastern peoples, are far, far ahead in terms of their spiritual understanding of the world, in terms of what these peoples know of the secrets of existence. These Eastern peoples know this.

Even ordinary people can explain to you that, in a certain way, Eastern peoples can already appreciate their spiritual advantages. What do the Western peoples still do today in their masses, in their majority, when the secrets of existence are revealed? Well, we still sit together in quite small groups when we speak, we speak of something like what was spoken about last night, of the ruling spiritual powers and secrets that surround us everywhere. To the average Western European, this is folly or madness, for he still cannot understand Paul's words: “What wisdom is with God is often folly with men, and what is folly with men is wisdom with God.” And only those who have been infected by Westerners in the East would dare to question even the slightest of the profound truths about the spiritual secrets of the cosmos, as we try to reveal them when they hear them, because such things, as they were said yesterday, for example, are taken for granted by those who are immersed in the Eastern spiritual life. Therefore, let us not be surprised that it often seemed to these eastern peoples as if the Europeans had attacked them, as it seems to a group of people when a herd of wild animals approaches them, against which they defend themselves, which they do not resent for what they do, but which they regard as something inferior. We Westerners are, for the reasons indicated – whether this is justified today or not is not the point here – and according to the traditions of the East, naturally regarded as inferior by every member of the Brahmanical caste, for example.

And if we disregard Brahmanism and look, for example, at the cultures of Central Asia, at Tibetan or Chinese culture, which in the near future will gain in importance for the world in a way that people today would never dream of Nevertheless, we are only a short time away from this, when we see and become aware of how the souls of many Zarathustra disciples are still embodied in these cultures, then we will be tempted to take these things very seriously. We will also be able to understand that the Indian, Tibetan and Egyptian occultists could have been tempted to channel their own wisdom out of her soul into that which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was able to give, but that which is her own belongs to a past human development process. And we must recognize the character of the past of these oriental wisdom teachings, which are contained in the Blavatsky teachings. We do not need to misjudge the value of such a matter, we do not need to misjudge that when Chinese culture, which one might say has broken its fetters, now floods over the Western world, then a spirituality comes with it that is truly the successor, in many respects still the unadulterated successor, of the old Atlantean culture. It will have the effect of something bursting open that has been held together, and which can spread to all the world; so it will pour out – on a small scale, ancient Indian culture has poured out at the first opportunity.

Therefore, my dear Theosophical friends, it was possible that from that time on, everything that was referred to in all occultism came to pass, and that from then on, the Theosophical movement was no longer a suitable instrument for the advancement of European culture. Every occultist is well aware of the saying that goes: the guiding powers of occultism or those who are in any way occultly active must never allow any special interest to prevail over the general interest of humanity. There is no possibility of working occult favorably when a special interest outweighs the general human interest. The moment a special interest takes precedence over the general human interest in occultism, the possibilities for real error are given. That is why every possible error has been able to enter the theosophical movement since that time. Due to the way in which England is connected to India karmically in the world context, there was simply the possibility that those exalted powers, which are at the starting point of the theosophical movement, were falsified. For it is a common occurrence in occultism for powers that want to pursue their special interest to take on the form of those who have given the actual impulses before. From a certain point in the theosophical movement, there was no longer any possibility of simply accepting everything that lay within this theosophical movement, and karma has willed that this has become less and less possible. And so, when the call came to us to unite with this Theosophical movement, nothing else could be done but to go back to the original sources, to those sources which, in contrast to the specific ones, we can call the general human ones. And so you have perhaps seen in Central Europe that we are trying to get at the occult sources in such a way that you will not notice in all that you are encountering that some special interest is connected with it. You may try to compare everything that can be found in Central Europe in the way of special interests with the kind of Theosophy that is practiced among us: The two things really cannot be brought together. You can take this Theosophy and probably find nothing German in it, except that, because it has to be written in a language, the books by myself are written in German. You will find nothing German in Theosophy, nothing that is somehow connected with the external traditions of Central Europe. And wherever a tendency to connect Theosophy with a special interest arises, it is immediately recognized as an impossibility.

This has now been the special task of Central Europe, to free Theosophy from the special peculiarities that it has acquired in Western Europe. It was our mission to purify Theosophy, to completely detach it from all special interests. And the more you go into the matter, the more you will find that I myself was able to detach everything that I was allowed to bring theosophically from any special interest. This is a symbolic indication, my dear Theosophical friends, but symbolically speaking – I only needed to be guided by what was present as an immediate impulse in the present incarnation, do not misunderstand, it only reflects a fact – those who were the external bearers, for example, of the blood from which I descend, they came from German areas of Austria; I could not be born there. I myself was born in a Slavic region, in a region that was completely foreign to the whole milieu and the whole idiosyncrasy from which my ancestors came. Thus it was that at the starting point of my present incarnation, I was symbolically impelled to detach myself from all special interests, so that in Central Europe, Theosophy really stands before us in Central Europe as a goddess, as something divinely detached from all humanity, that has as much to do with the person who lives there as with the person who lives there, and that will always have to remain.

The ideal we have, my dear Theosophical friends, as simple as it is expressed, will always have to stand before us because it is harder to fulfill than to express. It will have to stand before us as our ideal, the truth and sincerity, the unadulterated divine truth. Perhaps just when we strive for it, we will find the way, not for us, but for what was impersonal in Central Europe after the whole mission of Europe, for this divine theosophy to the East. And there, if I may now describe the way in which Theosophy has taken hold in the West, is passing through Europe and is to come to the East, I would again like to emphasize the word here: the word 'responsibility'. The cultures of the world develop in such a way that, as it were, one culture develops with another in a spiritual shell. One culture connects to another. The fact that Theosophy had to be so impersonal in Central Europe has given it a certain character of spirituality, of spirituality detached from all interests. This Theosophy has, my dear Theosophical friends, something brittle about it; it has the brittleness that comes from being untouched by special interests; it will therefore not appeal to those who cannot open their hearts to that which does not serve any particular interest.

But the spiritual content, this theosophy, can be found by the soul that thirsts for this spiritual content, that longs for this spiritual content. And here I must say, my dear theosophical friends, that I myself have met a soul from the spiritual world that longs for the spirit that expresses itself through theosophy. I have met this soul in the purely spiritual world. If we go up in the order of the hierarchies to the individual spirits of nations and speak within the individual spirits of nations of the national souls, then we also come across the Russian national soul, which is still young, so to speak, and which still has to develop further, as every being must develop. I know that this Russian national soul longs for the spirit that is expressed in Theosophy. It longs with all the strength it can develop. I speak of the sense of responsibility because you, my dear Theosophical friends, are children of this Russian national soul. It rules and works in you and you have a responsibility to it. The responsibility is to understand it! Don't be offended; this Russian national soul could often tell me many, many things. Most tragically, what this Russian national soul could tell me became clear to me around the year 1900. It became most tragically apparent at that time because one could notice something that I myself could only interpret in the right way long afterwards, because one could notice how little this Russian national soul is actually understood today. We in Western Europe have become acquainted with much, much from Russia, and much, much from Russia has made a great, powerful impression on us. We have become acquainted with the great impulses of Tolstoy, we have become acquainted with the psychology of Dostoyevsky, which has so deeply moved Western Europe, and finally we have become acquainted with a mind like Solovyov's, a mind that, when you let it take effect on you, makes the impression everywhere: that is how he is, as he has written. And what he has written only becomes truly clear when you stand behind him and feel the Russian national soul. And this Russian national soul has much more to say than even Solowjow knows how to say, because there is still much too much that comes from Western Europe before our hearts. Think, my dear friends, of the word sense of responsibility, think of the fact that you have this task of showing yourselves worthy of the Russian national soul, and that you should get to know the longing of the Russian national soul for impersonal theosophy. When you get to know Theosophy in terms of its innermost impulse, then, my dear friends, you will have all kinds of questions that can only come from a Russian soul: questions of the soul about the spiritual issues of Theosophy. I have found that so much noble, glorious, beautiful feeling has come to me from Eastern Europe: so much genuine, true human love and kindness, human compassion, overflowing feeling, subtle, intimate observation of what is in the world, and intense personal connection to the powers of existence. And from such loving, beautiful and noble feelings, many, many questions have been put to me by members of the Russian people, many questions – questions that must be asked one day because they are questions that humanity will not be able to live with in the future without answering. Questions that can only come from the east of Europe; so far only the Russian national soul has put them to me, the Russian national soul on the higher planes. I have often thought that the children of this national soul still have a long way to go to understand their national soul, to understand what this national soul actually longs for and how much still separates them, these children of the national soul, from the national soul itself. Therefore, do not be afraid to seek the path you can find, if you want, to your national soul. From your national soul you will find the questions without whose answers the humanity of the future will not be able to exist. But do not be afraid to go beyond personal interest, for be mindful of the great sense of responsibility that you should have towards the Russian national soul, be mindful of this feeling, for in the future the national souls will need their children, the people, to achieve their goals. And do not forget one thing. That which can carry you the highest, which can take you to the most beautiful, most luminous heights in the world, is most exposed to the danger of falling into error. You, my dear Theosophical friends, are to infuse the soul into the spiritual. You are to find the soul to the spirit. You can do it because the Russian national soul has immeasurable depths and possibilities for the future. But it is necessary that you are aware that the soul, which can rise to the spirit, has to inspire the spirit itself, and that you face the great danger of losing yourselves and getting stuck in the personal, in the individually personal, losing yourselves in the personal as such. Then the personal becomes strong when it comes from the soul.

You will not experience the obstacles that so many people in Western and Central Europe face. You are less born to skepticism; skepticism can only come to you from the West through indoctrination. You will learn to distinguish truth from untruth and dishonesty through a certain feeling in the field of occultism, where charlatanry and truth stand so close together. Not skepticism, but cynicism will be your danger. Your danger will be that the soul-spiritual, the powerful of your personalities, can spread clouds around you, astral clouds through which you then cannot penetrate to the objective-spiritual. Powerful of your personalities can spread clouds around you, astral clouds, through which you then cannot get through to the objective spiritual. Your fire, your warmth, they can spread around you like a cloudy aura, not letting the spiritual through, because you think you are enthusiastic about the spirit, but because of your enthusiasm you prevent the spirit from finding its way to you. So try to realize that you have a great advantage – now in the ideal spiritual sense – of being able to have a special interest because you are predestined, that is, your national soul, to receive the special interest of the Russian people to receive theosophy, which in Central Europe still had to be taken entirely as a divine power exalted above all human things, as something that you can receive as your own, as something that you can cherish and cultivate as your very own. For by your predestination you are endowed to breathe soul into the spirit. This has often been said in our ranks, but it is up to you to seize the opportunity as soon as possible, not to miss it, not just to develop feeling and will, but above all to develop energy and perseverance, less - if a word is to be said about the practical — to speak a word with regard to the practical side — talk about the way in which Theosophy must be in the West and in Russia and so on, and what is good for the one and the other, but first take in Theosophy, take it in, unite with the soul, with the heart. The rest will follow; it will follow for sure.

This, my dear friends, is something I wanted to talk to you about, wanted to talk about because wherever I am to speak directly to people, I have to face the sense of responsibility that we have towards people of the present day with regard to Theosophy. In the West, people should feel that they are sinning against humanity if they can have something of Theosophy and do not want it, reject it – sin against humanity! Sometimes it is quite difficult to grasp, because one must have an almost transcendental sense of duty, my dear friends, if one is to have such an obligation, such a sense of responsibility towards humanity. Your national soul tells you that it, this national soul itself, is indebted to you. The national soul has already assumed this obligation to humanity for you. You need only find this national soul. You need only let it speak through your thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, and when you feel the responsibility to the national soul, you will at the same time fulfill the duty to humanity. Therefore, you are also placed in a geographical position between the European West, which must have Theosophy, but for which it cannot become a personal matter to the same extent as for you, and the Asian East, which has had occultism and spiritual culture since time immemorial. You are placed in the middle. You would perhaps never manage to fulfill your task towards the spiritual culture of humanity in this geographically difficult situation, I would say, if you only had to think of your obligation to humanity. Because the temptations will be tremendously great when, on the one hand, not only the European West is at work, which has basically made many of the children of your national soul unfaithful to itself. In the face of a great deal of what is written by Russians and brought to us in the West, we have the feeling that it has nothing to do with the Russian national soul, but is a reflection of all kinds of Western things. The second temptation will come from the East, when the power of spiritual culture arises. There it will be our duty to know that, however great the spiritual culture of the East may be, the man of the present must say to himself: It is not the past that we have to carry into the future, but new impulses. It is not just any old spiritual impulse from the East that we have to take up, but to cultivate what the West can bring forth from its own spiritual sources. Then the time will come when Europe, if you also fulfill your duties towards your national soul, will begin to understand a little of what the Christ impulse actually is in the spiritual development of humanity. Seek, my dear friends, to understand everything that I have tried to express with and in these words, and above all seek in these words that which can become an impulse within you, not just to feel and sense that Theosophy is something something significant and great, but above all seek to take Theosophy into your soul and to organize your life and your deeds out of it.