The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The expression occurs in an old legend of Parsifal written in the Nordic language (akin to modern Icelandic). The legend originated in the 13th century and was probably based on Chrestien de Troyes. The Grail is here called “ganganda greida”—from gehend, moving or going about, and greida, meaning literally “things” and in this context indicating “provisions” or “nourishment”.

The legend is from a collection entitled Riddararsögur (Rittersagen = Legends of Knighthood), ed. by Dr. Eugen Kölbing, Strassburg, 1872.

For readers of German a most valuable book on the tremendous subject of the Grail is Dey Gral und seine Hüter (The Grail and its Guardians) by Dr. Rudolf Meyer (Verlag Urachhaus, Stuttgart, 1956). See pages 25 and 289.

The following passages from lectures 6 and 7 of the lecture-course given by Dr. Steiner at The Hague, March 1913 (The Effect of Occult Development upon the Self and the Sheaths of Man) help to convey the aspect of the Grail specifically conveyed in the expression “ganganda greida”—i.e. Wegzehrnug, nourishment or food while journeying along a path:

“The legend of the Holy Grail tells us of that miraculous food which is prepared from the finest activities of the sense-impressions and the finest activities of the mineral, extracts, whose purpose it is to nourish the noblest part of man all through the life he spends on earth; for it would be killed by anything else. This heavenly food is what is contained in the Holy Grail ...” (from lecture 6.)

“... We have heard what the Holy Grail contains. It contains that by which the physical instrument of man on earth must be nourished: the extract, the pure mineral extract which is obtained from all foods and which unites in the purest part of the human brain with the purest sense-impressions, impressions which come to us through our senses. Now, to whom is this food to be handed? It is really to be handed—as is revealed to us when from the exoteric story we enter into the esoteric presentation of it in the Mysteries—it is really to be handed to the human being who has obtained the understanding of what makes man mature enough gradually to raise himself consciously to what the Holy Grail is ...” (from lecture 7.)

Notes from a lecture

Our life must, so to speak, represent what we can become through anthroposophy. This requires a clear view of life and a healthy judgment about it. In our time, life is more complicated than it was in the previous age. Even in periods of time that lie just behind us today, it was much less complicated. This was due to the simple circumstances. At that time, the soul and the qualities associated with it were more widespread in humanity than they are today. But many other things have also changed significantly. And we all live in this changed life and must try to penetrate the sphere of life in which we live as it is necessary. It is precisely part of contemporary life that we achieve harmony of soul and inner unity of mind despite the fragmentation of modern life.

This cannot be fully explained in a lecture; we can only highlight a few points. Today we find materialism everywhere, including a materialism that permeates all of practical life, brought about by machine operation. The latter has made the conditions of business life, of life in general, much more complicated, has given rise to the hustle and bustle in which humanity must live and not come to its senses. People often do not even realize how their entire labor, their entire thinking and pondering from morning till evening is devoted to material needs. It is only natural that in the age in which we are surrounded by machines, people begin to think materialistically about all matters. Truly, the spread of materialistic and monistic worldviews would be impossible in any other age.

We anthroposophists stand in a new worldview. The spiritual movement is entering the world. Consider the difficulties we face, consider how small spiritual science has remained despite its magnificent potential. Let us compare what prevails in the world as religious denominations, which are to be seen as remnants from times gone by. We find many religious aspirations. We should certainly take a look at them. We find a very intellectual approach to religion. There are preachers, Christian ones, who no longer believe in a human Christ, no longer believe in immortality. People are happy when a Jatho movement and the like appears and is presented as rationally as possible. All old authorities can no longer prevail against the blind faith in what science has proven. These phenomena are all related to moral concepts. Anyone who works in a business will confirm how little truth there is in today's interactions between salespeople and customers. Many a person who stands in between suffers as a result. Do the cobweb-thin concepts of such rational preachers have any moral force in them? Even the public opinion of which we are so proud today did not exist in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as it does now through the newspaper system. Great philosophers have long since said: Public opinion is private error. Who could possibly make an Ostwald and the like believe that spiritual entities have anything to do with him? But by denying them, he is summoning very specific spiritual entities. Behind every Ostwald there is an army of very specific spirits. The spirit lives in all matter. There is a spirit that has every interest in denying its spirit, and that is Ahriman. When man directs all his attention to the material laws, he does not banish the spirits, but conjures them up; they creep into the minds of the materialists. Mephistopheles sends Faust to the realm of the Mothers and says: There you will find the Nothing. — Faust answers him: “In your Nothing I hope to find the All.” — But humanity today does not answer like Faust, for materialistic people are obsessed by Ahriman.

In the religious-rationalistic direction, on the other hand, another spirit is at work, namely Lucifer. Through abstract, cobweb-thin concepts, he detaches people from the real spiritual. Ideas are now supposed to live in history, which is just as clever as expecting a painter who is only painted to paint pictures. This amalgamation with matter had been in preparation for a long time, and today it has reached a preliminary climax. Heraclitus diluted Theosophy into philosophy through the influence of Lucifer. This is expressed figuratively in the saying that he offered his book as a sacrifice to Diana of Ephesus.

Now let us look at public opinion. It arises from the law that Lucifer and Ahriman had to intervene in the world view. In the past, instead of public opinion, there were people whose spiritual life extended to the spiritual mysteries. For better or for worse, these personalities had an influence on world life. This can be understood by studying the history of Florence between the years 1100 and 1500, for example. Today, this influence corresponds to those people who strive to achieve a connection with the spiritual. However, the luciferic beings who have remained behind on the moon and determine public opinion have not progressed to this point. As a result, public opinion is about a thousand years behind. The very lowest among them, the recruits, so to speak, of the luciferic army, work on public opinion. Beings are formed in them that will later appear as powerful entities. They sit behind the editorial desk, they stand behind the popular speaker and so on. These are just beginning luciferic spirits, actually still little ones.

To know about life, that is part of practical spiritual science. Man forms his image of the world with his mind. What now arises from this knowledge of the mind and senses? There is an old word for it. Not even the appointed representatives can grasp it. The serpent says: You will be like God, knowing good and evil. All intellectual and sensory knowledge is Luciferic, is its actual hallmark. The insistence on external experience, which does not recognize anything other than atoms, is a fantasy. Behind Maya are not atoms, but spiritual realities. All the phenomena that are described are not realities; the realities are the spiritual beings. The monads do not exist if we do not grasp them in reality as the higher hierarchies. There are many hierarchies, among the highest are also the deities of the Trinity. Philosophy speaks only of one unity. But the spirits are many, and unity exists only in the souls of the spirits. Those who have become accustomed to thinking in such a way that they know themselves to be in the community of spirits have the moral laws. Ahriman lets human beings sink into the swamp of matter; Lucifer draws them away from the truth, preventing them from realizing that they are lost in an illusory world. Maya has a right to exist if it is understood as an expression of the reality behind it.

If you give a public anthroposophical lecture today in our present time - and what is said here in relation to a public lecture must be taken into account in everything we bring from anthroposophy to the outside world, to people who do not join an anthroposophical Society, then we must always bear in mind that although the souls of people today have a great longing for anthroposophy in their depths, in their subconscious, there is very little connection with spiritual truths in those parts of their soul life of which they themselves are aware. Therefore, in a public lecture, it is not important to pay attention to what is popular or unpopular with such personalities. One should never ask oneself what they like or dislike to hear, but one must take into consideration that our age has habits of thought and ways of imagining things that are in many ways directly opposed to what we are working towards through anthroposophical knowledge. I always try to pay careful attention to the aspects that need to be considered when I try to determine the difference between the tone in which a public lecture must be delivered and the tone in which we can speak to our anthroposophical friends. And we should get used to really observing this distinction. Even if people who are still far from anthroposophy are perhaps unpleasantly affected by what they are told, this need not trouble us in any way, as long as we are aware that we have brought them what is good for their souls. But then, when we are among ourselves, we must try to penetrate deeper and deeper into the things. We can, among ourselves, discuss certain very definite truths that are already extraordinarily important and significant for our present time. We must discuss them among ourselves so that they can penetrate deeper and deeper into the spiritual life of the time, and then, so to speak, we can bring them to the outer world in clearly formulated words.

We must understand this matter quite correctly. Let us assume that we are talking about what constantly plays a role in human life, about the fact that all human life on earth is permeated by the Ahrimanic, by the Luciferic forces, or we are talking about certain things that relate to life between death and a new birth. What should prevent us from speaking so readily about these things to the unprepared should not be what often occurs in a society like ours, and what could be called a certain secrecy, where most people do not even have the right idea of why it is done. What should prevent us from speaking about these things to the unprepared is that people who are unprepared cannot take things seriously enough, cannot take them deeply enough. The words Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces should gradually become something so significant for the life of the anthroposophist, something that so deeply moves his feelings and perceptions when these words are spoken that one has the feeling: If you throw these words at the head of the unprepared, the inner power that you are supposed to feel when they are spoken is taken away, and we also harm ourselves if we use these words in ordinary life on every occasion that suits us. For example, when we reach into our wallet and have to deal with money, we are indeed dealing with Ahrimanic forces. But it is not good to apply the word 'Ahrimanic' so readily to everyday situations. When we apply such words to everyday situations, they become dulled for our perception, for our feeling, and we then no longer have the possibility of having words that, when we think or speak them, exert on us that elementary, significant meaning that they are meant to exert. It is extremely important that we do not get too casual about these things in our daily lives, for we will gradually lose the best and most effective that anthroposophy can give us. The more we use anthroposophical words in our daily lives, the more we deprive ourselves of the possibility that anthroposophy will truly become something that supports our soul and deeply permeates our soul. We need only consider the power of habit and we will see that there is a difference when we use words, such as, let us say, the words 'aura' or 'Ahrimanic forces' or 'Luciferic forces', with a certain sacred awe, with a certain awareness that we are speaking of other worlds. If we always feel that we have to stop before using such words, and only use them when it is really important for us to consider our relationship to the supersensible world, then it is quite different from speaking of these things of the higher world in everyday life and constantly using words taken from these worlds.

I had to give this introduction because, in this hour, we want to point out something in the human soul that should always be present in our consciousness, but which we only truly contemplate when it is done with a certain sacred awe. Take in hand the little book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. There you will find a description, so to speak, of the processes that take place in a developing human being from seven to seven years. It shows that up to the age of seven, until the change of teeth, we are mainly dealing with the development of the physical body; that in the next period, from the age of seven to fourteen, until sexual maturity, we are dealing with the development of the etheric body and so on. If you consider this development of the human being from seven to seven years, then you are primarily dealing with what the, so to speak, normal beings of the higher hierarchies bring about in human evolution. This is the true progressive evolution that takes place from seven to seven years, so that we can say: the actually progressive divine-spiritual powers guide and direct this evolution from seven to seven years. If only these progressive divine spiritual powers were active in man, then the whole of human life would take a completely different course, a completely different course from the one it actually takes. Above all, man would approach a small child in a completely different way. He would always have the feeling that a spiritual individuality was speaking through the child. One would even always have the feeling that the small child, in everything it does, receives the impulses from higher worlds. And people would certainly have no other feeling than that the child acts out of far higher impulses than those that they themselves can penetrate with their minds. And that would take quite a long time in relative terms.

What seems so desirable to people today, that children should be clever in a human and earthly sense as early as possible, would then seem highly unwelcome to people, because of a child that causes the delight of those around it today because it already or did, would be a child that would be guided by the progressive divine-spiritual powers according to the seven-year periods. If people had only children, they would say, if the child spoke cleverly in the modern sense as early as possible and they were accustomed to the different circumstances: How godforsaken the child is! What is considered delightful today would be seen as a punishment. And a young person of fifteen who was as clever as is expected today would be seen as a completely godforsaken being. For it is only through the progressive divine spiritual powers that the human being is actually called upon to gradually emerge completely with his ego between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight; and before that, what he does would appear much more as if higher spiritual, supersensible impulses were working through him. Of course, a certain dreamy life would be characteristic of the children; but this dreamy life would be felt as a blessing from God or the spirit, and there would be no attempt to educate the children to be precocious in the modern sense.

Now, as we know, something else also occurs during these developmental periods of the human being. This is what we have often emphasized: the development of self-awareness in the third, fourth, fifth year, at that point in time that we can generally characterize by saying: it is the point in time up to which a person remembers in later life. It is the occurrence of that moment from which the person begins to say “I” to themselves. You must now actually think of the whole development of man as two currents: as that of evolution, in which the progressive divine-spiritual entities are at work, and in addition the other current, through which man, within the first seven-year period, begins to develop an inner self-awareness, to develop a memory that later allows him to consciously remember back to that point in time. This does not come from the progressive divine spiritual beings. They would let us dream for much longer and would work through us into the world. The fact that we become self-aware so early and say 'I' so early is purely the result of the forces of Lucifer working in people. Thus we are dealing with two currents, with a regular progressive divine-spiritual current, as it were, which would actually only lead us to a clear, distinct sense of self between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, and with a Luciferic current within us. This luciferic current works in us in such a way that it completely crosses the other current, so that it does something completely different in us than what the progressive divine-spiritual beings actually want from us. They work in such a way that we learn to say “I” to ourselves in the midst of the first period, learn to develop our egoity inwardly, soul-wise, and to remember back in our memory.

If we really consider this, we can get an idea of our ongoing development. Imagine for a moment the luciferic influence just characterized away and only what the progressive entities would make of man as a calmly flowing water. We think of this calmly flowing water as an image of the progressive life stream of man under the influence of the actually good divine entities. And now let us take the water that flows so calmly for a walk, then take a blue or red substance, pour it into the calmly flowing water and, choosing a chemical liquid that can be kept separate from the clear water, let a second current flow alongside the first current from a certain point on. Thus, in our own true, calmly progressive, we might say, “Yahweh-Christ” current, the Luciferic current flows with us from about the middle of our first seven-year period. And so Lucifer lives in us. If Lucifer did not live in us, we would not have this second current. But if we only lived in the first stream, then we would have the consciousness until well into our twenties: we are actually a member of the divine-spiritual powers. We attain the consciousness of independence, of inner individuality and personality, through the second stream. Thus we see at the same time that it is full of wisdom that this Luciferic stream pours into us.

But in the second seven-year period, too, something occurs that we can, in a sense, understand as a current that is not connected with the merely progressive divine beings. From a certain point of view, this has already been repeatedly characterized in us. It occurs around the ninth or tenth year, that is, in the second seven-year period. For some, the perceptive people, the experiences come as I have mentioned them, for example, with Jean Paul. For him it occurred perhaps a little earlier, for others it usually occurs around the ninth or tenth year. There can be a significant intensification, one might say a condensation of the sense of self. But the fact that something special is happening can also be established in another way. However, I would not recommend that this other way should become a particular educational rule. It can only be said that once it happens, one might say, of its own accord, it can be observed, but one should not play with it, one should not make it a principle of education. If you let a child, especially around the age of nine or ten, look at himself naked in the mirror, and the child is not jaded by our often strange educational principles today, he will always feel a certain fear in a natural way at the sight of his own body, a certain fear if he has not been made flirtatious earlier through looking in the mirror a lot. This can be observed especially in naturally sensitive children who have not looked in the mirror much before, because during this time something grows in the human being that acts as a kind of counterbalance to the luciferic current that is present in the first period. In this second period, around the ninth or tenth year, Ahriman takes hold of the human being and forms a kind of balance with his current to the luciferic current. We can now accomplish that which does Ahriman the greatest favor if, at this very time, we develop the mind of the growing child, which is directed towards the external sensory world, if we say to ourselves: During this time, the child must be trained in such a way that it comes to its own independent judgment in everything. You know that I am mentioning an educational principle that is now quite generally accepted in pedagogy. The almost universal demand today is to foster independence, especially in these years. They even put adding machines in front of children so that they are not even encouraged to learn the multiplication table by heart. This is based on a certain benevolence of our age towards Ahriman. Our age wishes, unconsciously of course, to educate children in such a way that Ahriman can be cultivated as strongly as possible in the human soul. And when we go through the current educational methods today, we say to ourselves as occultists: These people who advocate these educational methods are only bunglers. If Ahriman himself were to write these educational principles, he would do better! But what is said there about children's independence and their own judgment is a true discipleship of Ahriman. What is implied here will become more and more prevalent in the near future. Ahriman will become a good guide for the external powers and spiritual guides of our age.

Now take a matter such as we have just mentioned. We must regard it as something quite natural and self-evident that it should appeal to man; that man feels Lucifer and Ahriman approaching him. It would be quite wrong to believe that it would be better if we were now to eliminate Lucifer and Ahriman altogether. That would be quite impossible. The following reflection can show you how impossible it would be. If our life were not regulated, as it were, by the interaction of the progressive divine spiritual beings with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, if only the progressive powers were to work on us, then we would come to a certain independence much later and we would also have this independence in such a way that, just as we now perceive colors and light, we would then no longer doubt that divine spiritual entities also really prevail behind colors and light, behind that which we perceive externally. We would perceive the thoughts of the world simultaneously with our sense perceptions. We would only come to our independence in our twenties, but then we would also perceive world thoughts externally. We would then dream away our youth because divine spiritual powers would be working in us, and when these would cease to work from within, they would then confront us from without. We would perceive their thoughts from the outside as we now only receive sensory perceptions. We would therefore, with the exception of a few years, towards the twentieth year, when we would become visible, otherwise never have any proper independence at all. As children we would be dreamy beings, in middle age we would not be able to make our own decisions and determine our own course, but wherever we encountered the outer world we would simply see what we had to do, as the people of ancient Atlantis could still do. Independence flows into us through the working of Lucifer and Ahriman within us.

Of course, it is extremely important that we do not speak in the same way as today's foolish pedagogy speaks about the human being, which always speaks of development, as if one were to extract the inner being from the human being. In an educational sense, we only speak meaningfully about the human being when we know that three things are involved in his soul: the progressive good divine spiritual beings, and Lucifer and Ahriman, and when we can distinguish between them. It is now of particular value to first take the main point of view of the progressive divine spiritual beings and consider above all: What are the requirements when we look at the seven-fold periods of human development? For in this respect we can really help every human being simply by behaving in the right way towards this child of man. If in the first seven years of the child's life we bring about conditions in which it lives in an environment that has a healthy effect on its physical body, we are doing something good for the child under all circumstances. If during the second period we create around the human being good authorities, authorities that may be called such in the noblest sense, so that the human being does not become a clever talker in these times, but rather a being that builds on the people around him as authorities, the child has respect for and devotion to, then we are doing something good for him under all circumstances. We are doing something good when we educate children who, in their ninth or tenth year, do not already want to know everything themselves, but who, when asked, “Why is this or that right or good?” they will say: because their father or mother said it was good, or because their teacher said so. If we educate our children in such a way that the adults around them are seen as self-evident authorities, then we are doing our children a favor in all circumstances. And if we violate these seven-year periods, if we bring about a situation in which children begin to criticize those who are self-evident authorities during this period, if we do not avoid this criticism, then we do something bad for the growing person under all circumstances. And if we do not find the opportunity to speak to a person between the ages of fourteen, fifteen and twenty-one in such a way that we can naturally rise with him to ideals, to ideals that fill the heart with joy, then we are not doing this young person any good either. With people in these years, one must speak of ideals, of what later life must bring under all circumstances to the person growing up properly. One may say: Today, one's heart could really break sometimes when eighteen-year-old boys – pardon me, personalities – come and already carry their feuilletons into the newspapers. If, instead of accepting something from them, one were to talk to them about things that do not yet interfere with their outward lives, but which they are only to realize later, if one were to talk to them about the great ideals of human life and be inspired by them, then one would relate to them in the right way. Actually, anyone who, as an editor, accepts the feature section of a person who has not yet reached the age of twenty, does something worse under all circumstances than someone who, when the young person comes up with this feature section, says to him: Yes, look, that's very nice what you've done. But when you are ten years older, you will have completely different ideas about it. Now put it nicely in your drawer and take it out again in ten or twelve years. The person who does that, then takes a look at the manuscript and talks to the person concerned about the ideals of life that can be associated with it, does something good for him.

I just want to characterize that the things that were said in my writing “The Education of the Child” should always be taken into account in education under all circumstances. Everything else, where Lucifer and Ahriman are involved, does not allow for general rules, it is actually different for every person, because it relates precisely to the personal. In many cases, it is a matter of the educator's personal tact, and one cannot intervene in these matters with all kinds of pedantic rules. I wanted to give you a characterization of what is in the human soul, and how we must take into account Lucifer and Ahriman if we want to understand the full human nature, if we really want to consider everything, not just look at it and say: we must fight Lucifer and Ahriman. If we wanted to fight Lucifer at all costs, we could do so in a very sure way: we would only have to prevent people from developing a memory. For just as it is true that certain lunar beings were brought into our earthly development, it is equally true that all memory is a Luciferic power. So we would simply have to avoid developing our memory! We must, however, realize that we have to develop this memory in the right way. And that is why it was said in that writing that the right period for the education of memory is between the ages of seven and fourteen. In the previous period, we do not particularly need to systematically educate memory, because it develops itself then, because that is when Lucifer is most present in man. We leave the children to themselves. But then, after the change of teeth, when Ahriman has most clearly taken hold of the human being, we begin to train the memory. For by then Ahriman has already created his counterweight to Lucifer, so we no longer work directly in the service of Lucifer when we train the memory. We must not even entertain the idea that we want to fight Ahriman. There would be a very simple way to combat the grossest Ahrimanic effects, but it would not do the human being any good. When the human being gets his second teeth, they would have to be hammered in, because that is when the most intense Ahrimanic effects occur. Of the progressive powers, man has only his so-called milk teeth. What man receives as his independent teeth throughout his life has a purely Ahrimanic effect.

Thus we must realize that much of what is in us at all can only be in us because the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer are in us. Sometimes we even succeed in being quite dissatisfied with our unconscious counteraction to Ahriman. In the course of our lives, we prepare ourselves to have certain powers when we have passed through death, so that Ahriman cannot do too much to us between death and a new birth. But sometimes we clearly show ourselves that we do not even welcome the fight against Ahriman, for example when we regret every tooth loss. But with every tooth that falls out, we gain a power that we can put to very good use. I am not, of course, speaking against the filling or insertion of teeth, because nothing Ahrimanic grows in us through this, at most the gold itself, but that is not the point. So there is no question of this being a bad thing. The fact that we gradually lose our Ahrimanic teeth is due to the fact that in evolution we also receive certain impulses that defeat Ahriman. And regardless of whether we have a tooth inserted again or not, once it has been lost, we have gained an impulse that helps us in the forces that we have to develop between death and a new birth at the very lowest level. It is a small thing at first, but it can show us how, when we approach reality and look beyond the appearance and the great deception that usually surrounds us, we really have to get into the habit of looking at things in life quite differently than they are usually looked at. And even the weakness of old age, for example, is a strength that, by feeling it, we gain directly to have something against Ahriman when we have passed through the gate of death. While we can indeed be angry here between birth and death if we age prematurely, in terms of what we want after death to cope with Ahriman, we have to be glad that we age.

And now you see how wonderfully beautiful it is that our inner spiritual and soul core remains, which, by developing between birth and death, has everything to do with the progressive powers. For this germ, which passes through the gate of death, is there, where it has developed its strongest inner powers of tension, purely dominated by the progressive powers. That which is outside of it, which withers away externally, that is where the Ahrimanic powers are. And we must now consider what the seer of this Ahriman actually is.

When our plants grow out of our soil, wither towards autumn and the leaves fall, then the elemental spirits that Ahriman sends to the earth's surface appear everywhere. There he reaps the first dying; he reaps it through his elemental spirits. When one walks through the fields in autumn and clairvoyantly sees nature dying, then Ahriman is stretching out his forces everywhere, and everywhere he has his elemental messengers to bring him the withering physical and etheric entities. But as human beings, we are actually also in a kind of autumn and winter mood throughout the day. Truly, the soul's summer mood is actually only present when the soul is asleep. It is really the case that the sleeping human body, physical body and etheric body, is of the same value as a plant; and what is outside, the I and the astral body, reflect their rays back onto the physical and etheric body, acting like the sun and stars and causing the forces that we have destroyed during the day to sprout out. Vegetable life grows, and the thinking during the day is actually only there to remove what the night has caused to sprout. When we wake up, we flit over our vegetative life, just as autumn flits over the plants of the earth. And what winter does to the vegetation of the earth, we do in exactly the same way to our physical and etheric body when we wake up, to that which they bring forth in the summer time of the soul, namely during the time when we are asleep at night. When we are awake, it is wintertime, the soul's real wintertime, and if we want to have the soul's springtime, we have to fall asleep. It is so. And from this point of view, it is actually easy to understand why people who do not at least mix something from the soul's summertime into their waking lives dry up so easily. Dry scholars, scrawny little professors, they are those who do not like to take in what is not fully conscious, who do not like to take in something of the soul's summer time. Then they dry up, then they become quite pronounced winter people. And to the seer, the whole development of human daily life presents itself as quite similar to what I have just said for nature. When man forms his ordinary thoughts that relate to the external, when he thinks only in a materialistic way about what happens externally, then his thoughts engage the brain in such a way that the brain secretes substances that Ahriman can put to good use, so that Ahriman actually accompanies the waking life of the day. And the more materialistic we are, the more possessed we are by Ahriman. No wonder it is true that materialism is connected with fear. If you remember the “Guardian of the Threshold”, you will realize how fear is in turn connected with Ahriman.

We should get the feeling that we are indeed facing complicated spiritual worlds in life. And what we should get from anthroposophy is not just that we know this or that, that we know there is Ahriman, Lucifer, a physical body, an etheric body. That is the very least. What we are to acquire from anthroposophy is a certain mood of the soul, a basic feeling for human life, what is actually there in these depths of the soul. Therefore, it is necessary that we keep the words that are connected with these higher things with a certain sacred awe. If we always have them on our lips, then it all too easily happens that their seriousness and dignity become dulled for us.

Thus we see man between birth and death, in his relationship to the progressive spiritual entities, standing in a certain way between Lucifer and Ahriman. And in order that the entire development of man may take place in the right way, this relationship must remain the same between death and a new birth, only that which is inward between birth and death becomes outward between death and a new birth. Inwardly, from the moment we can remember back, Lucifer has joined his claws to the human soul. Inwardly, man knows nothing about it unless he learns something through spiritual science and learns to feel about it. After death, the matter is different. At a certain point in time, Lucifer makes his appearance, just as surely as inwardly between birth and death, outwardly in the life between death and a new birth. So he stands there in full form before us, so he stands by our side, so we walk with him! Just as little as man knows Lucifer before he has stepped through the gate of death, so surely and clearly does he know him when he walks by his side between death and a new birth. Only that in the present cycle of time this consciousness can become a rather unpleasant one. We can pass through the region between death and a new birth in such a way that we have Lucifer beside us, so to speak, and realize his necessity for the world. The time is drawing near when people will only be able to pass through the life after death with Lucifer if they have already properly sensed and recognized the Luciferian impulses in the human soul here in life. Those people – and there will be more and more of them in the future – who want nothing to do with Lucifer, and that is probably the majority, will know all the more about Lucifer after death. Not only will he stand by their side, but he will continually tap their soul-forces, he will vampirize them. This is what man, through ignorance, prepares himself for, to be vampirized by Lucifer. In this way he robs himself of strength for the next life, for he gives it, in a sense, to Lucifer.

It is very similar with regard to Ahriman. With regard to him, the matter is as follows. The two spirits are always there between death and a new birth, but one time one is more present and the other less, the other time it is the other way around. We go there, and then back again in life between death and a new birth. At the time of passing away, Lucifer is especially at our side, and at the time of returning towards a new birth, Ahriman is especially at our side. For he leads us back to the earth, and he is an important personality in the second half of the return journey. And he too can, as it were, do harm to those people who do not want to believe in him in their life between birth and death. He gives them too much of his powers. He gives them what he always has left over, those powers that are connected with earthly heaviness, that bring illness and premature death upon people, that bring all kinds of misfortunes that look like coincidences into earthly existence, and so on. All this is connected with these Ahrimanic powers.

From a slightly different point of view, I presented the matter over in Munich. There I pointed out that after death the human soul can be the serving spirit for the powers that send illness and death from the supersensible worlds into the sensual. What makes life weak is what Ahriman welcomes so much and what makes it possible for him to further weaken our lives. But again, we must not judge one-sidedly. It would be quite wrong to say: So it is very bad that Ahriman has introduced us into life and that we have to suffer from his after-effects in life. — No, that is good, because under certain circumstances an effect of illness can be what contributes most to our ascending development.

It is always the case that when we approach the threshold that separates the supersensible from the sensory world, we must be prepared to modify our judgment somewhat and not to judge as we are accustomed to doing in the ordinary physical world. For it is true, in the physical world, there is indeed Maja in abundance. Where does materialism come from in the physical world, that materialism that says: There is no Ahriman, there is no devil at all! Who shouts the loudest: There is no devil? — He who is most possessed by him. For the spirit we call Ahriman has the greatest interest in having his existence most of all denied by the one who is most possessed by him. “The devil never senses the little people, even if he has them by the collar!” So not believing in Ahriman is a bad Maja, because he has you by the collar most of all when you don't believe in him, because then you give him the greatest power over you. So that you judge wrongly when monists appear and rail against the devil, and you say: They are fighting the devil. No, a materialistic-monistic gathering that rails against the devil is set up to conjure up the devil. And the modern materialists conjure up the devil much more than the old witches are said to have done, much, much more! That is the truth and the rest is Maya. So we must learn to judge differently. And anyone who goes to a monistic meeting that is nuanced in a materialistic way is not telling the truth when they say: People free people from the devil. — They should say: Now I am going to a meeting where the devil is being invoked into human culture with all the powers that people have. That is what we should really come to realize: that we, as we grow into spiritual life, not only learn to absorb concepts and ideas, but we also learn to think and feel differently. And yet, when we face the external world, we remain rational enough not to mix this external world all the time with what is true for the supersensible worlds. When people constantly use words in relation to the external physical world that actually only have the right value for the supersensible worlds, then they take away what is most important: that we learn to distinguish between the sensory and supersensible worlds, that we learn to apply the words in the right sense.

This is the single thing that should be hinted at today, when we have gathered here, for the first time in such large numbers, with friends from outside the city, at our recently established Augsburg branch. And today, when we wanted to gather our thoughts here in our souls, which should help us in our work in this place, a serious word, a very serious word, should also be spoken as a kind of opening word for our Augsburg branch. For then, under the guidance and direction of the masters of wisdom and harmony of feeling, who serve the advancing divine-spiritual beings, the work of a branch will flourish quite surely when this spiritual work harmoniously integrates itself into a larger spiritual stream of work. And our friends from outside have come here to you, my dear friends from Augsburg, in order to develop thoughts of love and devotion for the general anthroposophical cause and for each individual anthroposophical striving person here with you in their souls, and this will remain in these souls, which from this hour has taken its starting point and developed like a source of togetherness in these souls. You will, my dear friends in Augsburg, continue to work here alone from week to week, from time to time, but only seemingly, only outwardly and spatially alone. The fact that many friends are together with you will be the starting point for those strengthening forces that can actually flow That is why it is so wonderful when the opportunity arises for our friends to come together with a young branch in larger numbers. Because then the point at which they come together in time is also an outward sign, which we as human beings need, that from there the will can really go to And if you, my dear friends in Augsburg, who have been working faithfully on anthroposophy for some time now, continue to work faithfully in the future, remember that there will be friends all over the world who will think to you with the intention that your work may be a worthy In this way we practise our togetherness and never lose sight of our togetherness in spirit. Let us always keep it clear, but also strongly present, for only in this way can we really be helped by those powers that prevail over our true work, the forces of the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. These forces will invisibly flit through your thoughts when you The dear local members have shown through so much in their anthroposophical work and activities how faithfully and truly they want to work with us. And so we are all doing something important when we now, through this gathering, have the opportunity to unite our thoughts in the goal that has brought us together: May the work of our Augsburg sisters and brothers be blessed and strengthened by the powers to which we always appeal! It is in this spirit that I invoke the blessing of the Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings upon this branch, that blessing which I know is with us in our work if we make ourselves worthy of it.

It may remain undecided how many hearts in Western Europe today still feel so much connection between the spiritual and soul and the divine and natural that on this day, on this feast of hope for the future, in this year, the thought passes through the soul, how we are living in a year in which this festival of springtime hope may enter as early as possible into the time when the fresh shoots of the year sprout from the womb of our mother earth, when what we call spring enters into human life. In such years as this one is, three days that are otherwise far apart from each other are crowded together in a row. Easter Sunday, after all, is the Sunday that follows the full moon, which in turn follows the beginning of spring on March 21. Three days that can be relatively far apart follow each other this year: the beginning of spring the day before yesterday, the full moon of spring yesterday, Easter Sunday today. In such years, a very special writing is inscribed in the universe for those who are entering into the spiritual knowledge of the world, and especially on this day of such a year, it behoves the soul, which strives to learn to understand the spiritual secrets of the universe and the becoming of time, also to learn to understand what should be written into our human development on earth with this spring festival.

The person who knows the connection between the sun and the moon, as can be known by beholding the interaction of the sun and the moon with the Earth in the secret-scientific writing, also knows the deep secret that reigns between the Earth Spirit, Christ, and the Spirit whom we express with the words Jahve, Jehovah. And anyone who knows the connection between the sun and the moon hears with an understanding-awakening sound the legend of the Fall of Man and their seduction by Lucifer, of the words of God resounding in divine justice. Those who try to understand some of the things contained between the lines of my “Occult Science in Outline” can sense the connection between the sun-moon mystery and the mystery that is usually characterized as the temptation of Lucifer and the influence of Yahweh-Jehovah.

Today, however, we want to focus more on the fact that the sun and moon, as they follow each other in their effect on the earth, from this Good Friday to this Holy Saturday, appear to the occultist in their writing in the cosmos appear as a question mark, written in a deeply mysterious way into the spiritual universe, and the answer is given to us this year, as soon as possible, by the immediate sequence of Easter Sunday following the Saturday of the spring full moon: Easter Sunday, the day of remembrance and the day of hope, the day that symbolically expresses the mystery of Golgotha. Many secrets are hidden behind what surrounds us in the outer physical-sensual nature, and the unveiling of such secrets always brings us in a certain way close to the strict guardian of the threshold. The Easter Mystery is also one of these, which, in a certain sense, requires the maturing of the human soul in order to be understood, although in the instinctive feeling everyone can always perform the inner devotional sacrifice that our soul may fulfill when the day of earthly confidence, the day of redemption and resurrection, Easter Sunday, is joined to the beginning of spring. When spring begins, when the sun moves into such a position in relation to the earth that the plant germs can sprout from the womb of the earth mother through its power, then the human soul begins to rejoice inwardly as if in the brightness of paradise, because it knows that forces are at work through through the cosmos, which in a cyclic sequence with each new year conjure forth out of the bosom of the earth what is necessary for the outer life and also for the life of the soul, so that man in his development on earth can go his course from the beginning to the end of this development on earth. And when the impressions of winter, when the earth mother covers the ground with its icy blanket, when all this evokes the thought of all that will one day bring the earth to decay in the universe, what will one day will transform the earth into a state of world-wide solidification, which will make it incapable of being a further dwelling place for man, when winter evokes these thoughts, then every new spring evokes the other thought into the human soul: Yes, Earth, since the beginning of time you have been endowed with ever new youthful vigor, ever renewing life. You are given the task of calling forth the soul again to inward rejoicing, but also to inward devotion. And even when the cold blanket of ice has spread over the earthly realm, the hopeful images in the human soul combine with the intuitive feeling of how the earth will be able to sustain people through its spring and summer forces for a long time to come, so that they will find the opportunity to develop all the abilities, all the inner powers that lie within them. This is the soul's inner, reverent exultation at the spring equinox. It comes from the soul feeling full of hope that the earth can endure and that the earth can provide the opportunity for human forces to fully develop.

But the human soul may also wonder: Will all the forces of the sun be able to overcome all the forces of winter, or at least to counterbalance them? Will the winter forces not perhaps be able to exert such a strong influence on the earth that the earth must sooner go into a state of torpor before the human soul has fulfilled its full mission on earth? Will summer counterbalance winter? Will spring always have the strength it needs? This thought may not come easily to human souls that observe only the outer nature, but it must come more and more to those souls that can delve into the true spiritual content of the universe. These souls seek to decipher the great, powerful writing with which the secrets of the world are written into the cosmos. Then, in contrast to the writing just mentioned, the struggle of winter with summer, another writing of the soul becomes audible, the writing that is written into our universe when we follow the moon in its mysterious course, as it invisibly and visibly completes its cycle. Oh, this moonlight, like an enigmatic letter of the world's writing, it inscribes itself into the eternal word of creation of earth life. When the occultist seeks to fathom this moonlight, it reminds him first of the punishing voice of Yahweh in Paradise after the temptation of Lucifer, then it reminds him, of course, also of the wonderful, mysterious fact that the Buddha expired his spirit into the cosmic universe on a night of the silver moon. What does the moonlight tell us, which is there in the darkness of the night like a dream in a person's sleep? — The occultist learns that of the forces of the active sun, of the sun's forces that repeatedly and repeatedly renew the evolution of the earth, as much is taken away as the light of the sun is reflected by the full moon. The human soul may dream itself into the moonlit magic nights, the occultist knows that as much of the power of sunlight and solar heat is taken as the full moon reflects back to Earth from that sunlight.

Thus, the full moon is the constant symbol of what is taken from the sun. And when the Sun, with all its powers, once more penetrates into earthly life with each new spring, the occultist knows that, even if this is hardly perceptible to external observation, with each new spring the Sun has weaker powers than it had in the old, previous spring, and that just as much of its powers has been taken from it as full moonlight has shone over the earth. Thus the full moon that appears after the beginning of spring, however mysterious and soul-stirring it may appear to people, is at the same time a serious, stern admonisher of the earthly-cosmic fact that the sun's powers have diminished with each new spring, and that man could never achieve in his earthly mission what he would achieve if these powers were not taken from the sun. To sense this fact puts a huge question mark in the cosmos. Sensing this question mark, the old occultists behaved in their hearts.

So the old occultists said to themselves: We look up to the sun, whose secrets Zarathustra once proclaimed to men. We look up to the moon, whose secret has found its most significant expression in the religion of Yahweh. When we behold these two heavenly signs, we know that the interaction of Sun and Moon signifies the decline of the Earth. Then these ancient occultists looked at a point in the evolution of the Earth itself, at the point where the spirit of the Sun arose from the Earth itself in the fullness of time in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, when Christ died on the cross of Golgotha and the spirit of Christ united with the earth, a cosmic event occurred in earthly life that created a countervailing force against all that the moon takes away from the forces of the sun, while this sun works from the cosmos upon the earth. By the Christ-Spirit having taken up His abode in a human soul and from there spreading throughout all earthly existence in the course of future earthly evolution, compensation is made for what the lunar forces continually withdraw from the sun's penetrating solar forces. Thus the human soul understands its relationship to the cosmos when, morally and spiritually, it adds to the days dictated by the cosmos the third day, the day of death and resurrection of Golgotha. And when the progressive cosmic powers of the sun, which in their infinite kindness always want to give the earth new life, and the strict lunar spirit, which, because of the nature of Lucifer and his forces, must take away from the sun, insofar as it is only the natural sun, its powers, so can add to the two as a third day, morally and spiritually, as the answer to the great cosmic question, the human soul this Easter day. Wonderfully they stand side by side in such years as this one is.

Good Friday! This year in particular, it may remind us in cosmic-occult writing that the sun is constantly losing its strength with each new spring, and that the earth could die sooner than the human soul has developed all its powers. The full moon on Easter Saturday, a wonderful mystery! Above in the cosmos, the wonderful sign, the symbol of the stern Yahweh, who lets his thundering voice resound through Paradise, in which human sin radiates as the result of temptation; down on earth, the symbol of the newly resurrected power of the earth, Christ resting in the grave! It goes deep into the soul that can feel occultistically when the silver, solemn and strict full moon light spreads just above the Easter grave, the symbol of the penetration of the Christ impulse into the earthly body. Following this, the symbol of the resurrected sun, the sun that has risen again from the human soul, Easter Sunday! If we feel this trinity in our soul, we feel the cosmic sun, followed by the cosmic moon, followed by the moral-spiritual sun. If we feel in this trinity in our soul the symbol of how the spirit overcomes matter, how life overcomes death, if we feel something of what can fill us when we are occultists in the true sense of the word in our time, how the power which we call the Christ Impulse will dawn ever more clearly upon man, so that in the ever more and more revealing Christ Impulse, people will learn to feel what must be in them, so that they as human beings will find the way out of the dying earth to the higher stages of development of the immortal human soul, which lives on in eternities!

If we reflect on the fact that we are familiarizing ourselves with this physical world here in the physical world, we will always come to the conclusion that we live in this world primarily through our physical senses, through our minds. We certainly also live within this physical world through our soul life, through the thoughts that arise in us, that remain in our memory, that make up our store of memories; we live in this world through our feelings and will impulses. It is quite understandable that it is quite unlikely for a person who has not yet dealt with spiritual-scientific questions in depth that an experience can take place that is quite different from that in the physical world; because it is clear that man initially knows the world only through thinking, feeling and willing. But there is another form of experience in the world through what we call initiation, which goes beyond the physical world. Basically, it is the same kind of experience as when a person passes through the gate of death and enters the time that lies between death and a new birth.

Now, it must be said that in most cases, what befalls a person when he is supposed to form an idea of the life between death and a new birth here in the physical body, is a feeling of a certain fear of the void in the soul. Let us be clear that this occurrence of fear is quite natural. For try to put yourself in the situation, purely physically, of having walked quite fast and coming to a deep precipice. This would give nothing more than a presentiment, a feeling: you cannot know what might happen in the next moment if you continued your steps. — This feeling can only then afflict the soul when the person has walked so fast that he can no longer stop himself. He says to himself: You have to take the next step. — The uncertainty of fear lives in the soul and this feeling can only be compared to the feeling that is always present in the depths of the soul, but is only not perceived because attention is focused on the physical world. This feeling tells him: What will happen to you if you leave everything you have become accustomed to? Man need only reflect that something like this can live in him subconsciously, and it also lives there, which can be expressed with the words: You cannot see or hear, because the instruments for this sensory activity have been taken from you; you cannot think either. These feelings are not realized, but they are in the soul, and what the person feels is a kind of numbing of himself over this feeling. As soon as it occurs, something else is called into the soul so that the feeling cannot come to consciousness. But with that one can also not make the right preparation, one cannot lift the veil that lies behind death. Today we want to enlighten ourselves about how our life is connected to the one after death.

In the physical world, we rightly speak of perceiving it through our senses. When man speaks of the senses, he actually speaks only of the senses that can be used in the physical world. They can only be used in the physical world because they are connected to the tools that are taken from us at death. Only the five senses are ever mentioned: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. However, these cannot be used in the disembodied state. It is necessary, if one wants to find a transition, that one must completely enumerate the human senses. What the human being misses in this enumeration is that he forgets himself in the process. But he still belongs to the physical world and he could not perceive himself here if he had no senses for it. There are initially few senses through which he perceives himself: the sense of balance, the sense of movement and the sense of life, but they are just as important as the other senses, the external senses. What is the sense of life? You can get an idea of it by considering the difference between feeling hunger and feeling satiety. If man did not understand himself inwardly, he would know nothing of his own corporeality, of well-being or malaise. Just as one speaks of the sense of sight, so one must speak of the sense of life.

But one must also speak of another sense. How impossible it would be for a person to feel if they did not feel the activity of their muscles and tendons. This is a perception of inner mobility. It is only somewhat obscured for humans because we see ourselves in the physical world with our physical eyes. You get the right feeling from the inner perception when you move in the dark; for example, the perception of the breathing process becomes more clearly apparent.

What we call the sense of balance is very necessary. It can be observed in children when they learn to walk and stand; little by little they feel their way into it. We have to get used to feeling that we are walking upright. This sense even has an organ; these are the three semicircular canals in the ear, which are perpendicular to each other. If they are damaged, a person falls over, and the lack of balance in some people comes from the fact that the inner sense of direction is damaged.

If we go further, we find other senses through which we can have a kind of self-awareness within us, but this is more difficult. We have to start from a certain contemplation that points to a state of consciousness that is no longer quite normal. It occurs in certain dreams. The following can occur in consciousness as a dream: a person is in terrible trouble, the helmsman has arrived. He dreams this in great detail, and it can be a long dream. It changes and then the rattling of wagons occurs; the fire brigade passes by. A fire has broken out. Outwardly nothing more has happened than the call “fire”. This word softly echoes the word “tax”, and it calls in the soul through the sound of the transition from the directly heard call “fire”, and that in turn gives birth to the sum of the annoying images of the dream. The dream runs terribly fast. You imagine the individual events in a timeline, which is why the dream seems so long. From this dream, we see the great importance of sounding in the soul body, especially when it is mixed with images, when the word plays a role. If we go deeper into the soul, we see that something completely different is actually going on. Only when a person is fast asleep does he not perceive things. Something would have happened even if the call for “fire” had not been heard at all, but now the call covers something and gives rise to the word “tax”. A fine veil is spun from the resonance of the word. In daytime life, the veil is terribly thick, but alongside the daytime perceptions, the subtle soul perceptions also occur. Only these are not perceived. In such a dream-vision we grasp the world-process as it presents itself to our soul, at one corner.

We have chosen this example deliberately because hearing, as it is now established in present-day humanity, is the sense that is closest to the supersensible senses. We are standing right on the border of the supersensible world and if we could cast off the two words, we would be able to experience true soul experiences.

This example shows how man stands before the spiritual world. But the two words hold him back. It is really the case that by far the greatest part of our dreams are spun from the echoes of the sense of hearing, because between hearing and thinking there lives an inner sense that has been completely atrophied for today's life. When one has immersed oneself in the spiritual world, this sense comes into activity. Between hearing and thinking lives this sense, which becomes conscious when one can hear the inaudible, when one has awakened the sense for rhythmic, melodic, harmonious sounds... (gap in the text.)

If one does not advance to a sense that has meaning only for the physical world, one stands before a sense of the supersensible world. In the physical world, this sense has split into the sense of hearing and the sense of perception. It comes to the fore when one comes to a kind of self-awareness. It comes to the fore best when one tries to develop an appreciation of music and poetry. However, it is better to approach it from the other side. In the outer physical life, the sense has atrophied.

From there, it goes further and further to what we call today: the human being comes to the idea of the self. We must be honest about this idea of the self. People express the self and have a certain inner support in the expression. They rightly believe that they are grasping the self by expressing it. This is the case. It is a kind of preparation for grasping the real higher self. This realization is extremely difficult, otherwise all philosophical endeavor would not be directed towards it. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I have endeavored to make clear how one can arrive at this. All this belongs to self-perception. One must inwardly grasp it, whereby one addresses oneself as I. We therefore have senses by which we grasp the outer world, and others by which we grasp ourselves when we hear the soundless sounding.

Here in the physical, the well-known five senses are particularly developed. These have no significance for the initiate in the spiritual world. The other senses, through which man comes to self-awareness, are atrophied. They have great significance for man when he passes through the gate of death.

The first sense needed in the beyond is the sense that passes from the external musical to the internal musical. For this sense, the presence of the external auditory tool is not a hindrance. Today only the sense through the ear is being killed. In the physical world, one can perceive the power of the sense when musicians compose. The sense stands behind the musical creation. After death, it becomes a sense through which the person is made aware of his entire surroundings. We then experience music inwardly. After death, the sense becomes an external sense and one perceives for a time after death what goes through the world, because the world is permeated by rhythmic-musical harmony. A person who would not perceive this rhythmic-musical harmony would be like a person in the physical world who could not perceive the inorganic.

In my book 'Theosophy', in the description of Devachan, you will find how mutual life consists in the unfolding of the musical-rhythmic harmony. Indeed, the upper and lower are joined by the forward and backward, while we only know that we are walking upright through the sense of balance. We perceive the beings that are above and below, right and left. So the inner senses, which are now atrophied, expand and convey the spiritual world to us. Then the sense of balance develops into a sense of harmony and rhythm, and the sense of movement is added. When we are liberated from the whole apparatus of muscles and tendons, the sense that is otherwise concentrated through the physical body will spread and we will come to the possibility of being everywhere in the universe as we are in our own body through the sense of movement. In the spiritual world, the outer world is as in the physical world a muscle movement takes place in us. When a hand is held out to a child, the child understands and imitates the movement. The sense of movement awakens in the inner experience of the imitated movement.

Over time, one is thoroughly cured of some teachings that always suffer from the fact that they say: We live in ourselves. But there is no blood circulation in the supersensible world.

The sense of inner movement will be a very important sense when we have died, the sense of life will be important to us – if it cannot be claimed in an unpleasant way – because then we will no longer have headaches and no feeling of hunger.

The senses that have been atrophied here are particularly stimulated when we pass through the gate of death. We cannot perceive our own corporeality through our own corporeality, the eye cannot see itself and the brain cannot examine itself; so the organ that perceives something cannot be the same as that which perceives itself. Thus, what we have called the meaning of life must be separated out from the physical, and so it approaches the soul. It is not the case with the sense of balance that it mediates perception; rather, it expresses itself only symbolically in it.

These senses are actually the ones that are selfish by their very nature, because it is through them that man perceives his self. And we must not hide from ourselves the fact that what we take with us out of life is the more selfish part. So first of all we keep the more selfish part, and from this it becomes understandable that immediately after death, man passes into a rather selfish state. Just as a child brings its senses with it into physical existence and must first get used to the physical sensual world, so too, in the disembodied state, the human being must get used to the supersensible world. This takes quite a long time after death, and while he is learning to get used to his senses, all that remains to him at first is merely what has brought him together with the outside world here in the physical world, as a memory, and specifically as the more unpleasant part of the memory. The first memory lasts only a few days; it appears as a memory tableau that we are familiar with. Then it begins to change so that what is at its innermost here is connected in an inward way, so that the person becomes accustomed to asserting himself inwardly over everything he has experienced, because the possibility of perceiving ceases.

A concrete example: In some relationship of life we have lived together with a person. We pass away, he remains behind on the physical plane. We become more and more accustomed to retaining something from the inner being other than the memory. When we look at a dead person, we see that he knows what we experienced with him during his life on earth. With death, the thread now breaks and now the harrowing realization can be made that one meets dead people who say with the means of communication: “I lived there with this or that person. I know that he lives on, but I only know something about him until I die. That is a great pain. Now the dead person misses him. That is why the dead mainly mourn those they loved and cannot reach out to. It must be admitted that we can provide important services to the dead in this regard if we reach out to them. The external senses are taken from the dead, only what they have experienced in common with us lives in them. Yes, ordinary life actually offers nothing that could change this. It can only be changed if bonds are formed between the dead and the living. It is usually the case for the dead that we look up to the dead. (Gap in the text.) Now there is a common link between the dead and the living: it is what we think of supersensory thoughts. Spiritual thinking is this connecting link. I may emphasize that one can read to the dead about what concerns the supersensible worlds. When we have time, we sit down and go through in thought what the content of spiritual science is and in doing so, we vividly imagine that the deceased are with us. We thus spare them the torment of thinking that we are not there. We have achieved very good results within the anthroposophical movement by reading to the dead in our thoughts. This brings them together with us, and that is what they need and long for. There are two aspects to living together with the dead. The first is what has just been characterized, the lack of the people with whom one lived on earth. We can remedy this by reading to them. We should be together with the dead and bridge the circumstances of our existence. What does it matter to the dead if we read anthroposophy to them, even though they did not want to know about it during their lifetime? — is often said. But that is a materialistic objection, because the circumstances do not remain the same. For example, we can observe that two brothers are there. One of them is drawn to spiritual science, while the other becomes more and more angry about it. He talks himself more and more into a rage. But he does this only because he wants to numb himself to his inner longing for spiritual science. It is not easy to reach him in life, and it is not good to agitate for anthroposophy. In death, what the person has longed for most becomes apparent, and it is precisely such souls that can be given the very best by reading to them. Those who were interested in anthroposophy here will become more and more interested in it there. This is one thing.

The other thing to consider, especially in our time, is that when we enter the supersensible world in our sleep every day, we are in the same realm as the dead. Only we no longer know anything about it after waking up. How do most people go to sleep now? It can be said that when they have crossed the threshold of sleep, they have taken little spirituality with them. Those who have attained the necessary heaviness through the consumption of alcoholic beverages do not bring much of a spiritual nature into the spiritual world. But there are many nuances. We often hear: Yes, what is the use of studying spiritual science if you still can't see into the spiritual worlds? — Yes, if you only study it enough, you will take something with you into your sleep. Imagine a sleeping city, sleeping people, so the souls are disembodied. That which the sleeping souls represent for the spiritual world is still something different than that which they represent for the physical world. It is something similar for the dead. What we give the dead and what they absorb into consciousness is what they need for their life. And when we bring them spiritual thoughts, then they have nourishment; when not, then they are hungry, so that the sentence may be expressed: We can, through our cultivation of spiritual thoughts here on Earth, provide nourishment for the dead. We can leave them hungry when we bring them no spiritual thoughts. When the fields become barren, then they bring forth no fruits for the nourishment of men, and men can starve. The dead, of course, cannot starve, they can only suffer when the spiritual life on earth becomes desolate.

The fact of the matter is that here on earth, science follows different laws about the interrelationships, and one ideal is that through science, life as such can be scientifically grasped. But here on the physical plane one does not get to know life. All laws do relate to the living, but one cannot explore life with all this knowledge. For the supersensible world, one cannot get to know death with all research. For him who sees through things, it is nonsensical to believe that there is a death in the supersensible world. There are sleep-like states of consciousness and also a longing for death, just as we would like to understand life, but there is no death there. One should not believe that one could perish in the spiritual world, one cannot die there either. One cannot destroy one's consciousness either, which corresponds to dying here. But one can become lonely in the spiritual world.

It is about not being able to perceive the physical-sensory world. One only knows about oneself and nothing about other beings. That is what is called the suffering and pains of Kamaloka. What broadens human consciousness is the social life after death, and we also come into contact with the various beings of the supernatural world in social life.

One objection that may still be raised is to be resolved this evening in Erfurt. It is this: What is it like, since the dead are in the supersensible world after all? Can they learn anything from our reading to them about the supersensible worlds? — They cannot learn in the supersensible world what we do not give them from the earth. The thoughts must flow up from the earth. Anthroposophy is not taught in heaven, but on earth. People are not on earth to get to know only a vale of tears, but also Anthroposophy. It is often believed that one can also get to know anthroposophy after death, but this is a great mistake. What a person has experienced on earth, he must put down in the spiritual world after he has crossed the gate of death.

For the inauguration of the Johannes Raffael School.

It is a great joy for us from the various places of our anthroposophical work to have been able to meet in this city, where some of our friends have been working together for a long time to try to develop anthroposophical life for spiritual development, sometimes under difficult circumstances. And the fruit of this work is this Johannes Raffael branch. When we come together with our friends from Erfurt and are able to dedicate this branch, we may direct our souls to the significance of anthroposophical work in the present for the development of humanity in general with a few introductory thoughts.

My dear friends, how do our anthroposophical branches come about? If you think about it, they actually arise in a wonderful way, as it were. For they flourish here and there, as it were, like spiritual natural products, and those who feel called by their enthusiasm for the cause to found such a branch stand there, for their feeling and through what stands as secret forces behind these feelings, like a spiritual power. They feel that they must do something. A branch is not founded by the external culture of our time, but from the hearts of those who feel called to do so. In our culture today, there is nothing that could approach people and suggest, so to speak, from the outside that they work with anthroposophy. For those who decide to work with anthroposophy have much more to expect from the promotion of our endeavors than comfort and recognition. There is no current or endeavor of the present time that seeks to win souls for anthroposophy, and anyone who looks at what our anthroposophical movement is will attest that it does not operate in an agitative way in the usual sense. Apart from the fact that external circumstances do not allow lecturers to go anywhere other than where they are called, we understand the essence of the movement to be that we try everything to offer people the opportunity to hear something; but they should approach anthroposophical work. When they see that propaganda is being done, they will see that it has nothing to do with the current we represent, and that is how any movement based on occultism should act. It should be left to the souls themselves to come. And then this movement sees that anthroposophical branches flourish here and there because what flows into the movement continues to work in the right karmic sequence. And as a rule it turns out that the existing movement is brought to the branches. It is important to emphasize that the branches arise despite all the prevailing prejudices. There must be enthusiastic souls who, of their own accord, take the initiative to establish such branches.

From the outset, we cannot count on a great deal of support, and those who are enthusiastic about our work should not fear ridicule and mockery. They have to be prepared for that and also for the fact that the work will initially be difficult and full of sacrifices. We have never had a different experience; disappointment upon disappointment is often experienced. Public lectures are held again and again, but we have actually only had failures where we allowed ourselves to be discouraged by initial failures. Where we calmly observed that the first lecture was attended by five people, the second remained completely empty, and yet continued the work, we have also ultimately had success to report. We should make ourselves independent of immediately visible successes, because it is easy to feel encouraged by successes, but it is difficult not to slacken. The latter presupposes that we have no external support. So it turns out that our branches have to work, often from an early age. Misunderstanding upon misunderstanding occurs, but one should educate oneself to find what is right.

Sometimes we found a different echo. I was invited to a city – I will not mention the name – two or three times to give lectures. When there was no success, the person in question said: Now it is enough, people should now come and ask us for lectures. – I told him that we would probably have to wait a long time for that – and we are still waiting for it today. I am well aware that it is appropriate here to speak of our friends with gratitude, after they have worked hard for years. Those who came here with them will feel the gratitude. The thoughts that are directed here by our friends will have a strengthening effect, and we will come further if we stay together faithfully. Supporting souls is the main thing for spiritual work; the more support they receive, the better the work will succeed. I would like to say that this Erfurt branch has expressed how deeply it feels connected to our way of working and our attitude through an external sign, and this feeling of connection will be an inner spiritual impulse for the success of the work.

In a way, it is somewhat daring to go into specific details of anthroposophical research, and in a way I may describe it as an achievement of our work that our friends' immersion in anthroposophy has led us to the realization that one cannot just develop theories, but that working leads to insights. It is precisely in these areas that the strangest discoveries are made. It is curious that people on the outside, who know nothing about anthroposophical work, are beginning to criticize the concrete research in such circles, without having any idea what spiritual work is needed to establish, for example, what is said in my book 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and Humanity'. They set about criticizing how research is conducted in this field. For example, the two Jesus children are criticized. If one adheres to general truths, it may be that people can have a say. But when it comes to the particular, there is nothing to be done but remain silent. Every person should say to themselves: It is indeed strange to me when such assertions are made, but they do not concern me.

But it is all the more valuable when our Erfurt friends feel connected to these special things. For no other things are communicated than those which can be verified by the means at our disposal. It is one of these truths that John the Baptist is the same soul as Raphael. It is therefore a beautiful spiritual deed for me to call this branch the Johannes-Raffael-Branch, in order to express the intimate perception of a spiritually researched truth. That is why this consecration is also an intimate consecration. By leaning on such an occult truth with a name, we proclaim that we stand together in loyalty with regard to things that are most intimate to us. And then the words become something profound, spoken by the bearer of the name as Novalis, which sounded at the beginning of our celebration today.

We must seek the most important thing in the feelings and emotions that unite us. They cannot arise otherwise than on the basis of our knowledge. But we must not be comfortable. Our knowledge must be kindled into a feeling of togetherness, and if it corresponds to the intentions of our friends, if I commit the consecration with a few words, then I may say calmly: to utter these words is extremely satisfying, it is a consecration that corresponds to the heart. Therefore, I may say: let what I say to you be an impulse for what we have begun. You will work under the protection of the powers and authorities, of which we know that they invisibly rule among us: the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, when we carry out our work in love and loyalty. What ruled you when you tried to give your branch a name out of an intimate impulse, I may express at this moment: The protective powers that watch over us and give us impulses for our work, which we know are called the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, I call upon the protectors of the work so that the branch may flourish and be a center in this city for what we long for as spiritual progress. —- And with that, the opportunity is given for you to tie in with something I said for the friends gathered in Weimar, to tie in in a certain way, without it being necessary for each of us to have heard it.

It concerns the life between death and a new birth. It has been said that after leaving the physical plane, a person can, in a sense, have difficulty in connecting with those who have remained behind on earth. It may be possible that the one who has passed through the gate of death knows of someone he has left behind, knows that I had such experiences with him until I passed through the gate of death. What is experienced together on earth lives on in the consciousness of the dead. But often such a connection cannot be made if the person left behind develops thoughts that are not spiritual in nature.

If someone is left behind on earth and only very rarely fills his soul with spiritual thoughts, then the soul is one to which the deceased soul has no access. This refers to the way in which the living can make contact with the dead.

A certain line of research gave me strange insights into communication with the dead. At first it might seem surprising that John the Baptist brought into the world the prophetic activity, which was imbued with the impulses of the will, and then appeared again in such a wonderfully unified way in the soul of Raphael, completely surrendered to a deep devotion to the world. Much in spiritual research seems surprising to us. Much of it seems dangerous to us because it is so obvious. And when we then go deeper into the matter, it has a shattering effect on the soul when we see that many things are different from what we had thought. For the one who has recognized as true such a fact as the identity of John and Raphael, as elucidated here, it is important that he maintains a sense of wonder. I can assure those who are not able to research such facts that something does not come to light when it is sought; such things come unsought. Thinking about such things a lot helps very little. What helps most is being able to wait calmly until inspiration comes. And then it is good if you can be somewhat amazed at what arises.

The straight path of the intellect is not suitable for occult research. Being amazed leads to gradually recognizing that what was amazing becomes understandable. So it showed me one day that with Raphael, who painted in an amazing way, something else was having an effect in his soul, and I was able to discover that what was having an effect there was nothing other than what came from his father. He died when Raphael was only ten years old. This father might have lived a little longer, I mean, of course, hypothetically. He could have had the strength to live longer, but he carried these powers over into the spiritual world, and from there these powers can have a powerful effect. The father was not a great painter, but he was inwardly a painter; he lived in pictorial ideas that he could not realize while he was still in the physical body. From the spiritual world he sent the forces to his son, and this young Raphael was therefore able to become such a great painter. He acquired the pictorial ability through what the father sent him from the spiritual world. This does not belittle Raphael, of course, but it should only be shown how forces from the spiritual world work down into the physical world. Lessing made a remarkable statement. He said that Raphael would have become a great painter even if he had been born without hands. The forces that were in the Baptist John were transformed into the painter Raphael.

If we can gain knowledge of the influence of the spiritual world on the physical world, then life will be greatly advanced.

For a long time I had to carry out an educational activity. It was my task to teach children who had lost their father. If you educate in a conscientious way, you have to take all circumstances into account. You have to ask what the abilities are, how the environment affects the children, and so on. I had tried to take into account everything that could be taken into account externally, but there was still a difficulty. Then I said to myself, the father has died and he had certain intentions with his children. When I then took into account the father's will, it worked. The father's willpower was present. So you can see how the dead continue to have an effect on the living.

Nevertheless, it should be maintained that the dead cannot know what their survivors are doing on earth, as stated this morning. When someone has passed through the gate of death and knows that his impulses have an effect on the physical world, it can be a pain for him that he cannot perceive anything of his survivors. The dead person can feel an inner uneasiness when he cannot know what is happening down there. But this feeling can be removed if we send him nourishment. We, the living, must ourselves bring about the opportunity for the dead to perceive us. Now consider that we can easily, so to speak, ignite spiritual life in our soul through a thought. It is an important positive thought when we know that the dead person is there, within reach for us, when he has passed through the gate of death, because that is a thought that can never be brought about by dealing with the sensual-physical world. In our soul life, we should clearly carry the conviction that the dead person lives.

You see, in the times when there was nothing to confuse the mind, it was not exactly necessary for anthroposophy to exist, but times change during the development of humanity. Not so long ago, every soul, even if it occupied itself with the sciences that were common at the time, could be convinced of the life of the deceased. Not only are those who doubt that the dead exist confused, but the other souls are also confused, and that is also the reason why anthroposophy had to come into the world. We know that the dead live. What we hold in the depths of our souls is what matters and we often have no idea about it. We are all in the midst of the mechanical age, which has given us railways, ships, telegraphs and other inventions. What does it mean, for example, to travel in an electric train, in contrast to the fact that not so long ago it was not possible to travel in an electric train? It means that one is surrounded by a purely mechanical structure. This produces an image, which may remain unconscious, but it is there and has an effect on the soul and is likely to rob us of our belief in the life of the soul after death. This life is uprooted. Belief arose in the face of the old stagecoaches, but not in the face of today's means of transport; greater and stronger forces are needed for that.

I would now like to start from something I have said before. Some people want to stop the anthroposophical movement. When the first railroad was to be built, the Medical College was asked what it thought about the project in terms of the health of travelers. The doctors expressed serious concerns about the operation of the railroad and strongly advised against it. But if the railroad was to be built anyway, then it was absolutely necessary that high wooden walls be erected along the line, otherwise the passengers would undoubtedly suffer concussions from the rapidly changing images. But this expert opinion could not stop progress, and just as little will the anthroposophical movement be stopped by the opposing efforts. I did not mean to make fun of the Medical Council, I just wanted to say that progress cannot be stopped by such an expert opinion; it takes its course despite its opponents. Indeed, the railways have made people more nervous, and humanity has changed because of them. The whole structure of the soul life has changed; people would have remained more inwardly focused without the railways. The report had indeed made a recommendation, but it had been right.

The course of evolution on Earth is such that it had to happen as it did. Anthroposophy will not want to scale back anything, but it will be clear that faith could arise against the old stagecoaches, but not against the railways.

Anthroposophy works in the subconscious and belief in the spiritual world will be an important factor in the further development of people. In the broadest circles, belief is no longer sincere. Therefore, the reasons must be presented that flow from anthroposophy. If we pay attention to this, we find that in older times people had a spiritual inclination towards the dead, they could give them sufficient strength. Today spiritual knowledge is necessary and there we see that the spiritual thought of the survival of the soul must be encouraged by knowledge. We can say: because our time has taken on a certain form, it was necessary to let Anthroposophy flow into this time and this current will make it possible again for the living to feel connected to the dead. Man need not be disconsolate because he remains behind here, for he can become a helper to the deceased.

I said earlier that the dead can show us this and that. How does that come about? I will give an example here. I have said before how it is with Raphael's painting 'The School of Athens'. Usually, the two central figures are interpreted as Plato and Aristotle. This is a false representation, and anyone who, like the Baedeckers, deals with the picture and says that the individual figures represent these or those personalities will not be able to read much into this important picture. One of the figures is Paul, who appears among the philosophers in Athens. I could understand many things if I traced back through the Akasha Chronicle to see what had led Raphael to paint this picture. Through other research I had gained the conviction that the way the Gospels came about had nothing to do with the “School of Athens”. The writers of the Gospels had occasionally established their data according to the stars, and so had practised astrology. That is a fact in itself and initially has no connection at all with the painting by Raphael. Now I had the luck or the mercy: a soul who had died relatively young drew my attention to the connection between the right and left sides of the painting and I was told that the words from the Gospel of Luke that had been in the painting had been painted over later and words from the Pythagorean school were written on them. Now one also understands the gesture that over there is pointed to astronomy with the compass, and I could determine that on the right side of Raphael should be shown stellar research. And what was recognized there was written on the other side. So from astronomy gospels were written. Now, you see, it was important to me to draw your attention to the connection between the living and the dead. The one who undertakes something like this, when he has passed through the gate of death, can face spiritual events in the same way that a child faces nature. It looks at nature but does not understand it. But nevertheless, out of intuition, it can communicate wonderful things.

What is developed with intellectual thoughts does not come to the dead. The living must be available to the dead. The dead must be able to turn to the thoughts of the living, and what he experiences must be able to be seen in the mirror of the thoughts of the living within him.

I hope we understand each other on this point. It is indeed the case that when someone comes to you from the beyond, they experience something like a longing. However, they do not know what this longing is leading to. You can work with the dead in all kinds of ways, depending on how you are led to relate to them. If you have spiritual wisdom, it is illuminated, and the dead perceive the light. But if the soul does not absorb spiritual wisdom, it remains dark and the dead cannot perceive the soul. The fact that the dead can live with us depends on what we can offer them.

This is the other side of what we discussed this morning. We bring about what gives the dead inner satisfaction, and that will indeed be the most beautiful fruit of anthroposophical life and work: not just having faith in the life of the dead, but increasingly becoming a work, a soulful work that attracts the dead. And that will become more and more necessary for the development of culture. The less a person is imbued with spiritual wisdom, the less they will remain connected to what remains of the life between death and a new birth. In the physical world, souls will become increasingly impoverished and cold if they do not turn to the spiritual life. They can only be inwardly strengthened through contact with the spiritual world.

One thought will strengthen our soul: that our work need not be concluded when we pass through the gate of death, not for the progress of civilization, but that we can work down if our work is accepted below. If the spiritual world were accessible to us without man having to do anything, he would become careless. Man must do something himself. This is precisely a proof for us of the fundamental truth that flows from anthroposophy.

Today I would like to talk about an important concept in esoteric science, the connection between microcosm and macrocosm. Within esoteric science, there are various fundamental concepts that run like leitmotifs through the entire esoteric movement. One of these is the concept of rhythmic number, another is that of microcosm and macrocosm. The mystery of number is expressed in the fact that certain phenomena succeed each other in such a way that the seventh repetition can be designated as the conclusion of an event, the eighth as the beginning of a new event. This fact is reflected in the physical world in the relationship between the octave and the fundamental. For those who seek to penetrate into occult worlds, this principle becomes the basis for a comprehensive world view. Not only are the tones arranged according to the law of number, but so are the events in time. The events of the spiritual world are arranged in such a way that a relationship is found as in the rhythm of the tone.

Even more important is the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. We find the sensory image of this at every turn. If we look at the relationship between the whole plant and the germ, we see a macrocosm in the whole plant and a microcosm in the germ. In a sense, the forces that are distributed throughout the whole plant are concentrated in the germ as if at a single point. In a similar way, we can understand the development of the individual human being from childhood to old age as a microcosm, and the development of a nation as a macrocosm. Every nation has a childhood in which it absorbs important cultural elements. The ancient Romans, for example, absorbed Greek culture. A nation grows and draws the forces for its further development from within itself. It is therefore important that the members of a nation go through what the whole nation goes through. They are to their nation as the germ is to the plant. The relationship between microcosm and macrocosm is found to the highest degree in man, as he appears to us in the sense world, and the cosmos. Just as he stands before us in the sense world, he has drawn together the forces of the universe within himself, just as the forces of the whole plant are drawn together in the germ.

We can now ask ourselves: Are these forces in man also distributed in some way throughout the macrocosm, just as the forces of the plant germ are distributed throughout the whole plant? Only esoteric science can give us an answer to this, because within earthly life, man only gets to know himself as a microcosm. But he does not only live in the microcosm, he also has a life in the universe.

At first this seems to be no more than an assertion, that in the experience of waking and sleeping, man alternates between a life in the microcosm and a life in the macrocosm. When he sinks into sleep, consciousness ceases to function, affects cease to be there for him. An external science will seek in vain to find within the sleeping person what constitutes his soul life in the waking state. But it is logically impossible to think that when a person falls asleep, his soul life is destroyed and that it comes out of nowhere when he wakes up. In the not too distant future, external science will admit that one can no more recognize the soul life from external material facts than one can know the lungs by knowing the laws of oxygen. To do this, we study the lungs in their organic functions. Thus we also recognize that in the external laws there is nothing of the physical life that we inhale when we awaken and exhale when we fall asleep. For the occultist, falling asleep and waking up is nothing other than breathing. With every morning, man takes in spiritual-soul substance through breathing and exhales it again when he falls asleep. Where is this spiritual-soul substance when man is in a state of sleep, corresponding to the air in the room that he has exhaled? Occult science shows us that it is enveloped by the atmosphere of the spiritual world, just as we are enveloped by the atmosphere of air, only that the latter extends only a few miles, while the former fills the universe.

If we consider the amount of air that a person has inhaled into their body, we can compare it to the entire atmosphere: the same amount that is in the human body after inhalation is part of the atmosphere after exhalation. In the sense of occultism, we can say that after inhalation it is in the microcosm and after exhalation it is in the macrocosm. Likewise, the soul-spiritual life that is active within our body, from waking to sleeping in the microcosm, from sleeping to waking in the macrocosm. Just as external physical science teaches us the existence of the physical atmosphere, so occult science speaks of the spiritual macrocosm that receives our soul during sleep.

Spiritual science is acquired through spiritual methods: initiation. The life of our soul within the microcosm is shown to us by daily experience; we get to know the life within the spiritual-soul macrocosm through initiation. This science must be spoken of first if the transition from microcosm to macrocosm is to be understood. This science takes on a special significance because in it we enter the spiritual world after death. Crossing the threshold of death only means that the soul leaves the body for good. The method of initiation teaches the soul intimate exercises. Just as we act on our physical environment in our daily lives, we must enable our soul to act spiritually and soulfully on the macrocosm and to receive impressions from it. We must seek to free our spiritual and soul forces that are bound to our physical life. In our ordinary lives, three soul forces are connected to the body, and these are released through initiation. The first soul force is the power of thought. In our ordinary lives, we use this to form thoughts and to imagine the things around us. Let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of this power of thought. What happens when we think and imagine? Even physical science will admit that every time we think of something sensual, a process of destruction takes place in our brain. We have to destroy fine structures of the brain, and fatigue shows this sufficiently. What is destroyed by everyday thinking is restored during sleep.

Through the method of initiation, we attain a state in which we free the power of thought from the physical brain: then nothing is destroyed. We achieve this in meditation, concentration, contemplation. These are certain processes in our soul that differ from ordinary soul life. The images and soul processes that fill us in our ordinary life are not very suitable for creating meditation in our soul; we have to choose others for this. To speak in concrete terms, an example will be given. Imagine two glasses, one empty, the other half full. Then imagine that we are pouring water from the half-filled glass into the empty one, and now imagine that the half-filled glass is becoming fuller and fuller. The materialist finds such a thing foolish. But in a meditation suitable for meditation, it is not about something in the physical sense of the word, but about something that forms soul perceptions. Precisely because such a perception does not refer to anything real, it distracts our minds from the real. But it can be a symbol, namely for the soul process that is linked to the secret of love. In the process of love, it is like a half-filled glass from which one pours into an empty one, and which thereby becomes fuller. The soul does not become emptier, it becomes fuller to the extent that it gives. This symbol can have such a meaning.

When we treat such an idea by turning all the powers of our soul towards it, then this is meditation. We must forget everything else, including ourselves, when we are dealing with such an idea. Our entire soul life must be directed towards it for a long time, about a quarter of an hour. It is not enough to do such an exercise once or a few times; it must always be repeated. Depending on the disposition of the individual, it will become apparent that the soul life changes in the process. We notice that we develop a kind of thinking power that does not destroy the brain. Anyone who undergoes such a development will recognize that meditation does not cause fatigue and does not destroy the brain. It may seem contradictory that beginners fall asleep during meditation. But this is because in the beginning we are still attached to the external world and have not yet freed our thoughts from the brain. Once we have freed our thoughts from the brain through repeated efforts, we have achieved meditation without fatigue, and then a transformation occurs in our entire human life. Just as we were unconsciously outside the body during sleep, so now we are consciously outside the body. And just as we think of our ego in our skin during our daily lives, so after meditation we experience ourselves outside our body. The body becomes an object that we look at. But now we get to know it differently than in sleep. We get to know it like magnetic forces that chain us to our body. It is something we want to plunge into. And we recognize that these are the same forces that draw us to our physical body every morning, that we have drawn out of the spiritual world before birth, and that have caused us to seek out the currents of inheritance to find a new body. We thereby experience why we feel drawn to our parents and ancestors.

We can exclude one idea, one soul experience, which is different from those we have when we pass from the microcosm to the macrocosm. When we look at the body from the macrocosm, we say of all experiences: This is outside of us. But if we have awakened the Paul experience in us, then we have developed a soul element that is already outside of us. When we are out of the body, we feel the Christ-experience as an inner one. This can be called the first encounter with the Christ impulse in the macrocosm. Now we have to discuss a second kind of initiation forces. Just as we can detach the power of thinking, we can also detach the power we use for linguistic expression. Materialistic science says that the motor speech organs have their center in the so-called Broca's area. But it was not Broca's organ that formed language, but language that formed Broca's organ.

The power of thought has a destructive effect, while language, which comes from our social environment, has a constructive effect. Now we can detach this power that Broca's organ builds up. We achieve this by permeating our meditation with emotional values. If I meditate: In the light shines wisdom - this too does not reflect an external truth, but it does have a deep meaning, a deep significance. If we imbue it with our feeling: We want to live with all the light that wisdom radiates - then we feel how we grasp the power that is otherwise expressed in the word and that now lives in our soul. When one speaks of golden silence, it refers to this: we have a power in our soul that creates the word. We can grasp it like the power of thought. Then we overcome time, just as we overcome space by grasping the power of thought. What is a remembering for everyday life up to childhood then extends to prenatal life. This is the way to gain experience about life from the last death until our present birth, and at the same time the way to understand the evolution of humanity. We understand the forces that guide the evolution of human history.

And we recognize life from birth to death. When we develop the power of the silent word, we recognize the spiritual foundation of life on earth. Here again we come across a historical event, the Mystery of Golgotha. For this is the way in which we find the ascending and descending evolution of humanity and the point where Christ incarnates. He is recognized as he is in his very own power. Just as we connect with the Christ through the liberation of thought, as he was on earth, so we connect with the Mystery of Golgotha through the liberation of the word. A special light thus falls on the first line of the Gospel of John.

Then a third power becomes independent through meditation. It takes hold not only of the brain and larynx, but also of the blood circulation and the heart. When it is working in a weak form, we feel it when we blush or turn pale. Then something soul-like takes hold of the pulsation of the blood and goes up to the heart. This soul power can be drawn out of the pulsation of the blood and become an independent soul power. This happens through meditation, where the will connects with meditation. We meditate: In the light shines wisdom. But we make the decision to connect our will with it in such a way that we want to go with this radiant wisdom in the evolution of humanity. When we arrive at this kind of will-meditation, we achieve an inflow of willpower into the soul. These forces can be grasped and drawn from the blood – although they cannot be drawn out completely – and then they form a clairvoyant power through which we can transcend our Earth. We learn to recognize our Earth as a re-embodied planet that will re-embody itself and we human beings with it. Thus we grow through the spiritual and soul world into the macrocosm. In a sense, we experience how life between death and birth must be opposite to life in an incarnation. For what man experiences after 'death', freed from the body, that is what the initiate experiences. Let us take the main characteristic of what was presented to us in the body-free state. It is the same experience as in the life after death. Living in the microcosm, we perceive through the physical organ of the senses. After death, we look at the body like the initiate. One cannot perceive what the sense organs perceive. The initiate can recognize the life between death and new birth because he has already found the transition from microcosm to macrocosm here.

In the ordinary language of man, one cannot talk to the dead. But when we have liberated the power of speech, we can see how we are with the dead. By liberating the power of thought, we can talk to those who are between death and rebirth.

Let me give you an example: a seer was able to talk to a deceased person. He had been an excellent man, but he had only taken care of his family in a material sense. He had no religious or anthroposophical ideas. The seer was able to learn the following from the man: “I know that I lived with my family, with my loved ones, and they were my sunshine. They still live now, I know that, but I only see them up to the point when I left the earth. No connection can be established with them. The circumstances are complicated after death. The seer was able to see the following: The woman still showed something of the effects of her husband's influence in her nature. The man could see these effects, but not as one sees a person, but as in a mirror: there is indeed seeing, but it is as if one were only seeing an image in a mirror. This seems gruesome because one cannot really see the person as he is. Just as we see the physical in the life of the senses, so must we be able to see the soul afterwards. But just as we cannot see a candle in a dark room if it is not lit, so here too is the recognition subdued, darkened. Yet a connection is still possible between the dead person and the person on earth if the latter imbues himself with spiritual life. This is the basis for the benefit we can do for the dead. Someone has passed through the gate of death, with whom we have common interests: we can read to him. We imagine that he is in front of us, we read to him quietly, and we can also send him thoughts. But he will only receive an impression if we send him ideas and concepts with spiritual life. The task of anthroposophy will be understood when we understand that we have to remove the abyss that separates us from the dead.

Even a soul that was opposed to anthroposophy can feel a benefit from such reading aloud. In our soul life, two sides can be distinguished: what we consciously experience and the soul's undercurrents, which, like the depths of the sea, only express themselves in the waves on the surface. Thus we can experience that, for example, one of two brothers becomes an anthroposophist and the other an opponent of anthroposophy. This can only be a fact of the external world. The inner process is as follows: there is a deep longing for something religious, and the only way to numb oneself to this is to reject anthroposophy. The conscious idea is only an opiate to forget what is going on in the depths. Death removes all this and we then hunger precisely for what we unconsciously long for. That is why reading anthroposophical writings aloud is such a blessing for us. Gradually, we become aware of our connection with the dead. But even before we have this feeling, we risk nothing more than the dead person not listening to us when we read to him. Thus we see that through the living comprehension of the anthroposophical teaching, the dead and the living, microcosm and macrocosm, come into connection.

This also happens in another area. When the seer observes the sleeping, he sees: souls pass through the gate of sleep that never have spiritual interests, and others that absorb spiritual thoughts during the day. — There is a difference: the sleeping souls are like germs in the field. Famine would occur in the spiritual world if no spiritual thoughts were taken across. The dead feed on the spiritual and anthroposophical ideas that the dying bring with them. If we do not carry spiritual concepts with us when we fall asleep, we deprive the dead of nourishment. By reading to them, we give them spiritual stimulation; with the spiritual ideas that we carry with us when we fall asleep, we give the dead nourishment.

Through what a person creates in his soul, he becomes a bridge from the microcosm to the macrocosm. What we acquire is like a seed. I would like to describe the living, not just the theoretical mission of anthroposophy as follows: Theory is transformed into elixir of life, immortality becomes an experience. Just as the seed guarantees the germination of another seed, we develop spiritual and soul forces that guarantee our return in a subsequent earthly life. We not only comprehend, we experience immortality within us. From the moment our hair turns grey, we experience that which passes through the gate of death. In this sense, anthroposophy will become the elixir of life, just as blood courses through our physical body. Only then will anthroposophy be what it is meant to be. When we learn to recognize this and want to summarize it in a basic feeling, in the basic feeling that the human soul is connected to the spiritual world as our physical body is to the physical world, then the human being experiences:

The following speaks to the human mind:
The beings in the expanse of space,
They change over the course of time.
The human soul, experiencing,
From the expanse of space, unlimited
And unperturbed by the passage of time,
Into the realm of eternity.

The first of the topics chosen for this short lecture cycle is “Nature and Spirit in the Light of Spiritual Science”. Nature and Spirit! — It seems to express a contradiction, and the human soul immediately has many opposing views and opinions that have confronted each other in the world. We know, of course, that in recent centuries a kind of science has emerged that only wants to accept nature and that, from its point of view, can hardly do anything other than also consider the spirit to be nature. On the other hand, we see how defenders of the spirit and of intellectual life assert themselves in all fields, even in our time. And we need only look on one side to the extreme, where it was said in the 19th century: the brain secretes thoughts, like the liver secretes bile. That is, what we perceive as spiritual in the human being is a purely natural process, and we do not believe in another spirit. We need only place this alongside the many current efforts to establish a spiritual science, and we have extremes.

But one can also think differently about the words “nature and spirit”, namely, point to Goethe's words: “Nature is sin, spirit is devil, they harbor doubt between them, their deformed hybrid child.” And so we can point out many things that set nature and spirit in opposition to each other, and we can find many things in them that have brought disharmony into human hearts, that have caused storms of struggle and conflict in the world.

On the other hand, we are still confronted with a word from more recent times, also from Goethe, which says that the spirit could never be and be effective without matter and that matter could never be and be effective without spirit. This word can be refuted very easily. One need only point out that when I cut a piece of granite out of a rock, I then have matter without spirit! It is very easy to find refutations of profound words in the world, and it must be clearly understood, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that nothing is easier for the foolish in the world than to refute the words of the wise with a great semblance of right. An anthroposophical view must go deeper into these things.

What is spirit, what is nature? — There is no doubt in our ordinary perception that we encounter nature when we see plants sprouting from the earth in spring and watching them unfold. There we see the weaving and living of nature. Nor is there any doubt that we speak of nature with a certain right when the snowflakes cover the earth in winter. These are both effects of nature. But does this mean that we are fully entitled to participate in what is unfolding around us? Imagine that: Entities could think that are much smaller than we are, so small that for them our nails or our hair would be as big as for us the trees, so these entities would describe the hair of our head in the same way that we describe the plants that come out of the earth. We humans, however, do not describe the individual hairs or the head of the human being as a ground on which the individual hairs rise, because we know that we cannot find a hair as an individual being in nature; they are only possible on another being. Only someone who, due to their smallness, cannot see the hairs in their entirety could describe a hair on its own. Such an entity could perhaps very well distinguish between the different hairs. Depending on the place on the head where they grow, they could be organized into classes and orders: one class of left temporal hair, one class of right temporal hair; one class of left frontal hair, one class of right frontal hair; later, names could be given to further distinguish them. Thus, there could be a hair science for such small entities. For other beings there is, with some justification, such a science: it is botany. While in fact the earth as a whole produces individual plants just as our head produces hair, while the individual plants belong to the earth and do not exist as a special genus, in botany the plants are classified and described without taking into account that this plant world forms a unity belonging to the earth, just as our hair forms a unity with our organism. To nature or the world, it is of no consequence that man has created a botany for himself, just as a hair science would be of no consequence to a thinking little being for man.

Spiritual science, however, leads us even further. It shows us that just as little as one can think of a being like man, with hair on his head, without a soul, just as little can the earth be considered other than as a whole, which has all material, purely natural things as organs of the earth spirit or the earth soul. When we study this earth spirit or this earth soul further, it differs from the human soul at first. What is peculiar about the human soul is that it presents itself to us as a kind of unity. With the earth spirit, this is not the case at first. In the end, however, as you know, there is a directing earth spirit, but the next thing we find in the spiritual observation of the earth is a large number, an abundance of elemental beings, which form the next stage of the earth spirit as a multitude, a diversity.

We can deal with this earth spirit for the time being. Then it turns out that, for example, on the half of the earth where it is summer at a certain time, these entities of the earth spirit go through a kind of sleep, and where it is winter, they wake. For spiritual realization, in fact, to the same extent that the plants sprout out of the earth, the elemental beings and spirits begin to fall asleep. In winter, they begin to stir. Then these elemental beings and spirits form their ideas, sensations and feelings in their own way. What night is for humans is summer for the half of the earth that is currently in summer, and what day is for humans is winter for the earth. The Earth as a whole sleeps and wakes like man, but in such a way that one half is always more awake and the other more asleep, whereas man is organized in such a way that when he sleeps, he sleeps all at the same time. That is actually not correct either, but it is quite the same with man as with the Earth. When man sleeps, only his head is asleep, while the other organs are all the more alert. But man is just not equipped to perceive that. It is actually the same with the earth, although not quite. One hemisphere of the earth has more water than the other, so the earth's sleeping and waking is not unlike man's sleeping and waking.

Just as we regard human beings as animate and ensouled beings, so must we also regard the Earth. Just because we walk the Earth as such small creatures, we do not see that it has both body and soul at the same time. But that also stems from the materialistic age. Kepler, for example, who also knew how to think, still says that he regards the Earth as a great organism. He just had no occult conception of the earth, so he did not know that winter means waking and summer sleeping for the earth, and he imagined the earth to be a great whale instead of thinking of it as a souled being higher than man. He somewhat belittled the conditions, saw the He saw the earth as a whale and in the movement of the air he saw the inhaling and exhaling of the animal. This was also the view of Giordano Bruno. For him, the earth was a great, ensouled organism that breathes with the tides. Goethe was of the same opinion: “The Earth is a great, living individual that manifests its process of inhaling and exhaling in the tides, in the currents of air and in the seas.” Yes, the spirits of the older, more spiritual times still knew that one cannot look at the earth in such abstract, theoretical terms as one does today, as if one could describe a hair or a nail in itself, whereas one should know that these cannot exist without the whole organism, that they are grounded in the whole organism. The naturalistic view does not know what is important. When observing the world, it is important that one can ask oneself about everything in the world: Is it a part of a whole or is it a whole in itself? — If someone finds a human tooth, they should not look at it as an individual thing, but the tooth is only understood when it is seen as a part of the human being. It is also absurd to describe a single plant, because it is only conceivable as a part of the whole earth being. So it is only conceivable that the outer body of the earth has a soul and a spirit. And if one knows nothing of the spirit of the earth, if one does not know that this earth is the body of a spirit, as our own body is, then one regards the earth as mineralogy, geology, botany regard it. These have no consciousness of the fact that behind everything they describe is the directing earth spirit. If I cut a piece out of a rock, it is easy to say: There is no spirit in it! — There is no spirit in a piece of tooth either, but the piece of tooth is inconceivable without the whole human being and the soul-spiritual to which it belongs.

We must keep this in mind when we speak of nature and spirit. When we speak of the earth as a natural planet, without speaking of its soul and spirit, this description stems only from the fact that we disregard the spirit, we do not want to know anything about it. Where does the earth exist as a mere natural planet? Botany, geology, astronomy would say: It moves in space! —- If that were true, it would soon stop moving, then it would collapse, like the human body after death, when the spirit has left it.

This way of looking at the world has rubbed off. Even the limbs of the human being and the human being as a whole are described today as if they were only nature, that is, one looks at the corpse. For if man were as the physiologist, anatomist and so on describe him, he would have to die immediately. Physiology describes only its own fantasy, as do astronomy and geology with their description of the earth. This is a pure fantasy product. There is no such thing as the mere natural earth. The fact that the earth is as it is is based, down to the smallest piece of rock, on the earth being permeated by the spirit of the earth.

There we see what is important. When observing human beings, it is important to find the starting point from which the part can be seen as part of the whole, and not to crumble the part away from the whole. Man as such is a whole. But when it comes to the earth, the whole earth is to be regarded as a whole. If we separate nature and its effects from the earth, what then is this nature? Then it is our product of the imagination, which does not really exist, which only appears to us because we cut a part out of a whole. Therefore, it can be seen that it is not at all important that someone describes something accurately, but that he knows how a part is integrated into the whole, or rather grows out of the whole. The earth must be seen as a whole, not as a physical whole, but as a living being that belongs to its spirit.

But we could also talk about nature and spirit in another way. We only need to look at the human being itself. In the human being, something comes to us that seems to justify the concepts of “nature and spirit” as opposites. A child is born, and all the expressions of life in the child in the early days appear to be something that has emerged from the physical, from the whole of physical nature. That is why it is often said that a child still acts entirely according to its nature. Only later is the spiritual, the soul, born out of the body. In the beginning of his life, man is more nature, later he develops more of the spirit. But that, in turn, is nothing more than a careless way of looking at things. For in the early days of our life there is much spirit in us, it is just more hidden in us than later. Everything that gives our body its forms is active spirit, it is just that we do not work inwardly in spirit and illuminate it with the faculty of memory. We truly have no less spirit in us in the early years of childhood than in later years. One could even be more radical in one's speech. Someone recently asked: What does it mean when a child only lives for a few days and then dies? Occult science shows us that such a short life still has a purpose. Often, the being in the womb has been able to develop many things, but sometimes it has not been able to develop one thing, for example, healthy vision. Let us assume that someone was an excellent person in one incarnation, but had poor eyesight. Then it will happen that such a person later lives only a few days in an incarnation, just to make up for what was lacking in the previous life because of his poor eyesight. In this case, this incarnation must be counted as part of the previous one. In general, the importance of the child's ability to learn in the first few days is greatly underestimated. When the child learns to see into the light, more capacity is needed than for anything learned in the first academic semester.

One can object to such things, but just think about the content of such a thing, and you will see that it is correct. We only consider childhood in the right way when we know that the spirit is not less in the body when we build our brain, work out our physiognomy and so on, than later, when we can do something more astute. At a later age, the spirit has withdrawn itself a little more from the body and works as the more abstract spirit, but it can no longer organize the brain. This has already become fixed again. The spirit, which one so readily calls “spirit” later in life, was already present in the first part of life, but had something else to do then, was more linked to the natural processes. We just don't see that, that's why we call what happens there just nature, and what happens later consciously, just mind. Therefore, man assumes an opposition between the “natural” processes of early childhood and the spirituality of thinking, feeling and willing in later life. But the contrast is quite different.

In early childhood, there is an intimate connection between nature and spirit; they permeate each other and are still on friendly terms. Later, they separate, and the spirit and natural processes take place more separately. In return, the natural processes become more spiritless, in that the spirit has differentiated itself from them and become the special soul of which the human being is so proud. Man pays for this with his body becoming more spiritless. Man has first drawn spirit out of his body so that he can use it more separately for himself. There is something similar in the whole evolution of the earth. In very early times of the earth, spirit was intimately connected with the nature of the earth everywhere, and so there was then an intimate interaction between earth spirit and earth nature. Today, in a certain way, the nature of the earth is as separate from its spirit as the nature of the human being is from the soul. And just as it is the spirit in the human being that directs thinking, feeling and willing, so too, in the evolution of the earth, the earth spirit runs alongside the natural process as the course of history. In the Lemurian period these were still more interwoven with each other, just as the spiritual and natural processes are more closely related in the child than in later man. What is the point here? Does it matter whether we say: the spirit develops in the later age of life or the earth age? — No, it was already there, but in those days it directed its activity to that which was then separated. And that hardens, lignifies, dies.

For this reason, we must also consider the whole, which is to be considered as a whole, not in time, only according to its parts. Man as a child is not a physical whole on earth. A human being in youth, middle age, old age and so on is only a whole, and we cannot say: 'The human being undergoes a development from the natural to the spiritual', but we must say: 'In his first childhood, nature and spirit were intimately connected. Later they separate more and more. Thus, the natural becomes somewhat dead, somewhat less inwardly alive, and the spirit becomes more independent. So a differentiation has occurred in the whole human being. That is the right impression. But the spiritual does not develop out of the natural without further ado. There is differentiation. If we speak of nature without spirit, then we speak of a mere fantasy product. Under the present physical conditions of the earth, a human being could never later become a thinking, feeling and willing creature that is so proud of its spirituality if it had not first detached its spirit from its natural existence. One must learn to completely rethink about nature and spirit.

This goes even further. Let us consider the external nature of man and woman. If you look at it very superficially, you will come to the conclusion that woman is closer to nature, judges more directly from the standpoint of nature. Man has distanced himself more from nature; independent thinking, the independent spirit, lives more in him. — The materialistic age, which thinks of the spirit in materialistic terms, has taught other reasons for this difference, such as the weight of the brain. But when the brain was weighed by the man who thought up this theory, it turned out that he had a particularly small man's brain! So if we look at nature and spirit in this way, even a superficial glance shows how little this is true. Anyone who goes into the depths here will in turn come to a completely different way of looking at things. In a certain respect, however, the woman's outer being is more natural, but in turn more spiritual than the man's outer being. Womanhood on today's earth is more natural because the spiritual activity in her has not yet separated from her physicality as it has in man. Therefore, man cannot be conceived of as having a greater spirituality than woman, but in man only that which is distilled spirit, leaving matter beside it, is more prominent. On the other hand, for certain parts, the male body is more abandoned to spirit. The feminine body is more permeated by spirit, as for example is the case with the child; the masculine body is more abandoned to matter at a later age than it is in youth. But we must not speak of more naturalness or spirituality in being a man or a woman.

The approach must therefore be completely different. It is true that, in a sense, what has to do with the essence of man and woman affects us throughout our lives. It is not always pleasant to point this out. Why, for example, are there more women than men in the Anthroposophical Society? Does this not actually speak against the presence of intellect in anthroposophy? — one might ask. The answer to that question is entirely objective, but it is easy to be misunderstood when one gives it. The fact that women are more attracted to the Anthroposophical Society, that is, more readily embrace spiritual truths, is because they preserve the spirituality of the nervous system and the brain longer in later life. In the case of man, these separate from the physical earlier, so he does not have the opportunity to so easily take in what speaks to what is neither man nor woman, but what stands above: the being itself.

In an incarnation, a person is either man or woman. In the case of man, the lignified parts are more developed, and somewhat more distilled out of his overall nature is the spirit, the temporal, transient spirit. In women, nature and spirit remain more connected throughout life, which is why their nature remains more flexible. But spiritual truths speak to something in people that has nothing to do with the difference between men and women. Because the being that goes from incarnation to incarnation can alternately be man and woman, even if that is a truth that often makes men angry.

Thus, our deepest nature has nothing to do with man or woman. Just as it has nothing to do with man and woman, so the deepest nature of world phenomena and facts has nothing to do with nature and spirit, but one time it is more spiritual, the other time more natural. These are both phases of an existence, as life continues. Just as in human life, there is a daily alternation between more spiritual activity during the day and more natural activity for the physical human being at night, so in the universe there is an alternation between times when beings become more spiritualized and times when they become more “naturalized”. That is a rhythm in the universe. For example, if you look at the nature of man, when he is a man in an incarnation, when he is thus karmically condemned to distill the spirit out of the natural, then he can say to himself: 'Now I am indeed karmically destined to distill the spirit out of nature, but that must alternate rhythmically, cyclically with a woman's existence, where I am allowed to be more in the natural with my spirit, so that I may have a pendulum swing in the direction of natural existence.

This is the case with all planets, with all wholes, totalities, with all worlds. Where we find a natural, there is a spiritual belonging to it, and where we find a spirit, it tends to separate something out of itself, which is a natural. Nature and spirit are not opposites, but alternating states of the higher being that stands behind them.

Thus we must see that through our spiritual world view, many old concepts with which much mischief has been done must be corrected. When we stop describing only parts of a being that is actually a whole, we will also come to clarity about the concepts of spirit and nature and will no longer limit ourselves to one-sidedness. Then one will realize that the spirit would be very weak if nature were hostile to it, then one will realize that nature is something that the spirit occasionally releases from itself, like the snail releases its shell. But the spirit can also absorb nature again and dissolve it within itself. Then it makes it invisible, but then it has it within itself, then it has become one with it. If a complete unity of spirit and nature were to exist somewhere, it would mean that for the realm of facts, the spirit has dissolved all nature that belongs to it.

Let us assume that a person is forty years old. He has his nature and he has his soul, his spirit, of which he is so proud. If we go back to his childhood, it is more of a unity, but it appears more in its natural basis. If we go back even further, before his birth, then he is entirely spiritual, he still had all spirituality without a natural basis, without matter in him.

It is a pendulum swing in the world: the being creates its image in the natural aspect and reveals itself through it. The spirit bears nature in its bosom in order to make an image of itself with what it itself gives birth to in its bosom as nature. But the spiritual essence also has the power to absorb everything that is out there in nature into the spirit. And so the spirit can triumph over all images of itself in order to appear ever anew in new transformations and new forms. This testifies to the fact that an infinite number of formations rest in the bosom of the being, and that the meaning of the world is actually fulfilled in ever new and ever new becoming. If one can see the belonging together, the inseparability of spirit and nature, one comes to the being in the world.

By devoting oneself to spiritual life, it is necessary to become aware of why we, as human beings in today's world, by grasping our task as human beings in today's world, have the longing and the urge to cultivate spiritual life. This is because, since the last period of the last century, people can relate to the higher worlds in a completely different way than was the case in earlier centuries. This is something that is basically far too little taken into account: that the development of humanity from epoch to epoch always produces new impulses.

Whereas it was relatively difficult in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries to gain an understanding of the spiritual world and spiritual life from within the human soul, it will become more and more a natural need of the human soul in the coming times to seek spiritual understanding. For since the last third of the 19th century, the gates to the spiritual world have, in a sense, opened so that spiritual knowledge flows from the spiritual world for everyone who wants to receive it. In this sense, we are in a completely new epoch of human development. Those who today are drawn to anthroposophy and the anthroposophical movement as if by instinct feel what is written in the signs of the times. Fifty years ago, it would have been completely impossible to gather together to discuss the spiritual secrets of existence, because the waves of spiritual understanding had not yet begun to flow down to humanity. And we must understand that what we strive for and want must become more and more general. To do that, we must also look at the symptoms that characterize the overall development of humanity today. Today, only a few people are interested in spiritual life and have the urge to gain knowledge of the spiritual world. The masses still vigorously reject any spiritual knowledge. Now we must know how to delve into all that has led to such a state of affairs in our human development. Among the ideas that best show what has emerged as a symptom of the present era, perhaps the idea of freedom is the most important, for it is the idea that can best illustrate the evolution of the last few centuries.

It is only natural that a person out in the world today who is not seeking spiritual knowledge but who wants to be informed about the laws of the world and the human soul life, takes refuge in official science, which in turn is dominated by natural science. How do people come to know about the world? They turn to people who have learned to gain a scientific understanding of the world and who may have then also laid down in popular scientific writings how one should think about the human soul, about nature and freedom and so on. How would someone like that come to a different idea than by asking such people?

Now, in the nineteenth century, official science, in its desire to become a world view, underwent a very strange but symptomatic development. But people do not notice such very strange symptoms at all. If you ask a great scientist whether there is such a thing as an idea of freedom, he will answer: It does not exist in the sense in which the old worldviews understood this idea, because today we know that when a person, for example, consumes a certain substance, that substance immediately affects his brain, and then he can no longer properly control his brain. You see that man is dependent on his brain, so how can he be free? Or they say: In rational psychology, we show that a person who is afflicted with a mental illness and cannot speak or remember speech sounds shows abnormalities in his brain. How can you talk about freedom when man is dependent on his brain? This is what ordinary psychiatry says. For ordinary, trivial thinking, all these reasons carry a great deal of weight. Such things sound very plausible and gradually take hold in people's thinking. Unless a spiritual worldview sets minds straight again, people will fall prey to a worldview that completely denies the idea of freedom.

In this respect, science has come a long way. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, people were always looking for purpose in nature. They wondered: why does the bull have horns, why do apples grow on apple trees? — A wise world guidance, they said, has done that. It gave the bull horns to be able to push with, and it has apples grow so that man can eat them and so on. Enlightened minds of the 18th and 19th centuries have scoffed at these utilitarian reasons. They have said, ironically: Why did the world's existence cause this or that tree to grow? — Because man wants to drink wine and needs cork stoppers for his wine bottles!

Such objections to the careless way in which nature was thought of as man are entirely justified. With a person, you can always ask: what purpose does he pursue with what he does? — Now, nature had been humanized or anthropomorphized, an anthropomorphic worldview had been created that asked about goals in nature just as one can ask about a person's goal. It was perfectly legitimate for the nineteenth century to oppose this anthropomorphism, which saw nothing in nature itself, but only introduced human beings into nature. The spirits of the nineteenth century wanted to look at nature directly, to ask it themselves. They did not want to fantasize human purposes into nature. This striving was entirely justified, because the old way of looking at things transferred human soul life into nature. And it is justified to say that one wants to look at nature as it is, apart from man. It was said: We want to throw out of nature everything that belongs to man. This then led in the 19th century to an image of nature in which there was no longer anything of man in it. This gave rise to a materialistic natural science. Human concepts were pushed out of nature. In a sense, it was a correct reaction against the old doctrine of utility or teleology.

Thus a materialistic natural science arose on the premise that nothing of man can be found in this natural science. At the time, this was a perfectly justified demand. But in the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that we must also consider the human being as a natural product, we must also consider the human being as nature. This second demand, to consider the human being according to the material conditions of nature, changed everything, because the human being had been thrown out of nature. It was quite clear that man could no longer be found in this science of nature, which had been so arranged. This developed in the course of the 19th century. It was then that everything belonging to the human soul was distilled out of natural science, which can be compared to saying: I have a bottle, there is water in it. But I want an empty bottle, so I pour the water out of the bottle. And then one is surprised that there is no more water in the bottle. With the bottle, everyone immediately notices that the bottle is then empty. With science, people did not realize the folly of wanting to understand man from nature emptied of man. I am convinced that a materialistic assembly would only laugh at these simple considerations, because they are not aware of this capital mistake. Among these misconceptions, the idea of freedom, immortality and the like suffered the most. For anyone who looks at the matter as it has just been described finds it quite natural that no information about these concepts can be obtained from science.

Now it is a matter of the fact that it is indeed necessary, especially for a spiritual world view, to come to the realization that although man in his corporeality belongs to external nature and its laws, he carries something within him as a soul that can only be found by spiritual means. In other words: If we want to recognize the human being in his very own essence, then we must not look at that in man which is his outer shell between birth and death, but we must look at that which, going from incarnation to incarnation, is his actual, true essence. And it will be the task of anthroposophy to direct people's attention to those processes of the inner life that prove that there is such an eternal core of being within the human being, independent of the outer physical body.

If we first consider the human being in such a way that we admit that the actual human essence not only lives between birth and death, but is also that which places the human being in the physical world and which remains after death, then one will recognize the necessity of guiding human knowledge and cognition up to the regions where the human being, through its knowledge, participates in that higher world to which it belongs through its soul-spiritual nature. But in the moment when man enters with his knowledge into the higher worlds, he comes together with spiritual beings of the higher worlds just as he does here in the physical world with the beings of the three natural kingdoms.

Now, the most unjustified view is that which Pascal, the famous Christian researcher, once expressed and in which Maeterlinck, for example, today quite rightly agrees with him, saying that Pascal wanted that once and for all. - Pascal says: We actually have nothing from earthly existence but that it hides eternity, infinity, from us. It must be said that this belief is very widespread. Wherever one goes, one finds a justified longing for the spiritual, the eternal, which is expressed in such a way that one says: after all, earthly existence is quite unsatisfying. Only in the contemplation of the eternal can man really find satisfaction. But when one really penetrates into the eternal worlds, then something else is added to Pascal's saying. When one penetrates into eternity, one experiences that it by no means conceals earthly existence, but rather shows that everything there is designed to lead back to earthly existence.

The most peculiar objections are sometimes raised against the doctrine of re-embodiment. A lady, to whom I explained the necessity of re-embodiment with all its reasons, said to me: I do not want to come back to earth, I do not like life enough. — I tried to make her understand that her feelings had nothing to do with the matter. She listened to me and then left. From the nearest railway station she sent me a postcard on which was written: I don't want to be born again! One can laugh at such an attitude. One finds it often. One does not consider that the attitude is not important, not important what one says here on earth within this life. One just does not know that it can be quite insignificant whether one wants to return or not. They do not realize that in the time between death and the new birth they carry all the forces in their soul that long for re-embodiment, that want to return. These forces are indeed present. There everything is geared to the fact that the forces one develops there can only be satisfied when one enters earthly life again. One senses that the soul has remained imperfect, that it has not developed certain qualities in its last life on earth. Here on earth it may be unimportant whether one is perfect or imperfect, but not in the life between death and a new birth. There are irresistible forces to transform imperfection into perfection. One realizes that in many cases this can only be achieved through suffering and pain, and one knows that in order to achieve perfection, one must undergo the sufferings and joys of an earthly life. And so one enters a new incarnation with all one's might.

I have mentioned this because from such a matter one can see very clearly that our world view must become all-encompassing, that one must not draw conclusions from life between birth and death, as it presents itself to our desires and interests, about the desires and interests that one has between death and a new birth. Man only learns to think in a thorough, energetic way when he trains himself in this way to be all-round through the spiritual world view, when he learns to recognize that every thing must be considered from different sides. Even the practice of life forces man to do so in ordinary life. If one says: fire is beneficial – he is right. But if one says: Fire is very harmful, because it burns towns and villages, then that is also true. The absolute statement: Fire is good, or: Fire is evil, does not apply. With regard to fire, practical life already teaches us to recognize these two sides. But if the same is demanded for beings of the higher worlds, for example, Lucifer and Ahriman, then one does not readily accept it, but one asks: Is Lucifer a good or an evil being? Is Ahriman a good or an evil being? People want to have definitions that give them an answer to such questions, and they consider an answer to be highly unsatisfactory that says: Lucifer and Ahriman can be both good and evil. This is not demanded of fire. Here, practical life helps us to transform an incorrect judgment into a correct one.

Among the many things that are now circulating in Germany, for example, to attack us, is the fact that it was recently said: He — that is, Dr. Steiner — presents things in his public lectures as they present themselves to his view, but he avoids giving specific concepts or judgments. My dear friends, in a Greek school of philosophy, they once wanted to have a very definite concept of what a human being is. After much discussion, they agreed to say that to define the concept of a human being, a human being is a being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day someone brought a plucked cockerel and said: So this is a human being, because it has two legs and no feathers. According to the definition, this must therefore be a human being! — It just so happens that when you look more closely, 'certain concepts' can be very unrealistic. Therefore, the spiritual world view will accustom people to characterizing things in a comprehensive way. Natural science has also produced a good deal of one-sided thinking, and even those who, with their spirit, would like to rise above natural scientific thinking often show - with all good will - a certain admirable naivety. In this field, one must really develop the will bit by bit to achieve full clarity.

Just as I tried to show yesterday how people who may be regarded as thorough natural scientists and whose names should not be vilified are unable to judge in the field of spiritual scientific research, so one should not, without being unjust, be immediately amazed by an idea that may be put forward with good intentions but is not sound. There is, for example, the natural scientist William Crookes. He has achieved many significant things for scientific research, but at the same time he was someone who wholeheartedly committed himself to research into immortality. He wanted to gain certainty about immortality using the usual scientific methods, and he achieved wonderful results in his mediumistic research. Now he once expressed an idea in such a way that one can also appropriate this idea, go along with it to a certain point. When someone claims that we see colors depends on the nature of our eyes, that we hear sounds, we owe to our ears, and if we had other sensory organs, the world around us would be quite different – that is quite right. When William Crookes says, “Why do you then deny the existence of a supersensible world, which is not there for you only because you have such organs that are not suited to perceive it?” — so that is also correct. He expresses this fully justified idea more precisely by assuming that he says: We perceive colors, we hear sounds, but we only see effects of electricity and magnetism. They are forces of nature, the essence of which man does not know, even if he applies them in practical life. This is found everywhere, that it is said to be natural forces, the essence of which man has not fathomed. — Admitted! In reality, it means nothing more than: Man has his eyes for colors, his ears for sounds, and so on; in the case of magnetism, man sees that the magnet attracts the iron, but he does not see magnetism itself, that which magnetism actually is. With electricity, he perceives light and heat effects, but not electricity itself. Now William Crookes says: What would the world be like for beings that could perceive electricity and magnetism directly with special sensory organs, but not light, colors, sounds, and so on? If we could not perceive light, a crystal would be opaque to us, as would glass, and there would be no point in putting windows in. They would only prevent us from having contact with the outside world. If, on the other hand, we had organs for electric current, we would see a telegraph wire as a line of light running through the dark space; we would perceive flowing, luminous electricity there. If we had an organ for magnetism, we would perceive magnets in such a way that magnetic forces would radiate in all directions, and so on. William Crookes now says: It is not unlikely that there are such beings whose organs are attuned to vibrations that our organs leave untouched. Such beings live in a completely different world from us. And he then considers what this world would look like. In this world, glass and crystal are dark bodies; metals, because they conduct electricity, are somewhat lighter, interspersed with dark parts. A telegraph wire would be a long, narrow hole in a body of impenetrable solidity. A working dynamo would resemble a conflagration, and a magnet would even fulfill the dream of medieval mystics of an eternal lamp that never goes out.

William Crookes has dealt with this beautifully, and in this way one can already give an idea of how nonsensical it is to claim that this sensual-physical world is the only one, that there is no other world than just ours, and that there cannot be beings other than human beings. All true! But there is something else that can be said about this idea – and this is where the other side of the matter begins, which concerns the true spiritual researcher. Let us suppose that we ask the question: What would it be like if, instead of eyes, man really had these organs to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, if this idea, which a person naively puts forward, were realized in us humans, what would it be like? Then we human beings would find our way around in the realm of electricity and magnetism just as directly as we now find our way around in the realm of light and sound. But that would have a consequence. If man had an organ for the direct perception of electricity and magnetism, then, at the same time as this organ, which would then be an organ of knowledge for him, he would have the power and the authority to kill or make sick every other human being. This ability would be conferred directly by such an organ.

This is what spiritual science has to say about William Crookes' idea, because spiritual science knows that the human being is permeated by such forces, which have a kinship here on earth with magnetic and electrical forces. Now the question takes on a completely different meaning; now the touch of naivety in the simple posing of such an idea becomes really apparent. While a person who has no higher vision posits the idea of looking into the electrical and magnetic forces, for the spiritual researcher what has just been said follows immediately from it. When we realize this, we first come to realize that we must not remain on the surface if we really want to delve into and understand the wisdom that underlies the order of the world. For this insight of the spiritual researcher shows us that it is very good for man that he does not have the electrical and magnetic organs, that he cannot harm his fellow human beings with them. In this way, his lower instincts and desires cannot be satisfied in such a way as to be fatal for him and the world. Man has a world around him that allows him, through a slow and gradual education, to conquer these lower forces and then ascend to the higher forces.

That is the whole purpose of evolution on earth: that man, passing through many earth-lives, in manifold undulating movements, gradually heads towards perfection, but in such a way that he learns to put his lower powers, instincts and longings at the service of higher ideas and motives. He would not be able to do this if, at the time when he was only developing morality in the course of his evolution on earth, he had been given organs that allowed him to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, because then the temptation would have been too strong to kill people he did not like for whatever reason, and to leave only those people on earth who were right for him.

Thus we see that only the spiritual world view actually gives us the opportunity to look at existence from all sides and to penetrate deeper into it. When a person really becomes a spiritual researcher, as could only be briefly characterized in yesterday's public lecture, he really enters the spiritual world and then becomes aware that the higher hierarchies are around him there, as the three kingdoms of nature are around him here. There we learn to recognize certain entities, which we call the luciferic and ahrimanic beings. What then are the luciferic beings? They are those that belong to beings who, during their previous incarnation on earth, in the old lunar age, remained behind in their development, thus did not enter into the full hardening of earthly existence, into which the human being has entered, but remained at a stage that lies before the materialization of the human being. As a result, they and their powers have remained more spiritual than the human being is. In their development they could only reach a stage that is more spiritual than the stage in which man undergoes his earthly embodiments. By permeating human nature with their powers, they have caused human nature to contain more spirituality than it should actually have. If these Luciferic forces had not been present, man would have had in his astral body, in the lower unconscious forces as compared with the conscious ego forces, a personal spiritualization in the form of the Luciferic forces, but not such forces as he now has. Through the Luciferic influence man's lower nature has become more spiritual than it would otherwise have been. Man would have received everything he should have received on earth from the progressive powers, but he would not be as spiritual as he is today. He would have escaped the Luciferic impact.

But man would also lack something else. Without this influence, man could not have had freedom, because if this influence of Lucifer had not come, he would have carried out all his actions in such a way that, when he had to do this or that, he could only have looked to the motives that would have come to him from the spiritual world in the form of ideas. Whatever man would accomplish on earth, he would accomplish in such a way that he would see the idea underlying it like a picture showing him what had to happen, without him having to form this idea. It would be like an inspiration from the higher worlds, and this would affect him in such a way that he could not possibly resist it. He would naturally follow the will of the gods.

But now the Luciferic influence was there. Through it, man has come into the position of not simply allowing the motives for an act to flow to him, but he must first prepare these motives himself through his own work from the depths of his soul. He must educate himself to moral ideas, and man would not be able to educate himself to moral ideas if the Luciferic influence had not come. For through this a more spiritual element has entered into our astral nature. Thus it is not only the idea of morality that works in our consciousness of self — for the idea of morality would work in such a way that it would not occur to any human being to do evil, since the idea of good for an action would be directly presented to his spiritual eye by divine spiritual beings — but the instincts and passions also work with it. This idea would not be able to arise in the consciousness of the ego at all if its astral nature, individually shaped by the influence of Lucifer, did not confront it. This influence of Lucifer has brought about that in our nature, out of the unconscious and towards consciousness, purification must take place, that we must work our way up to conscious moral ideas and motives in the struggle with ourselves, and then follow these ideas of our own accord. Thus it is Lucifer who enables us to follow moral ideas after we have first worked them out for ourselves.

Now we can say: So there is a power that arises from within us when we work towards moral ideas. Where is this power in man, if man is not moral by nature but must educate himself to be so; where is the power that works in the soul from out of the unconscious to present moral ideas to man? Where is it in us that we can bring it out of ourselves? If man becomes a spiritual researcher, if he is able to look into the spiritual world, then he also discovers where the power that generates moral ideas is to be found. It is constantly at work in the unconscious forces; it is in man, but in the ordinary world it is used for something quite different. When we act in the ordinary world before we have set ourselves moral goals, we act under the influence of our urges, desires and instincts. But we can only act when we put our body into action. Here we are constantly working with unconscious forces, for unless one has studied spiritual science, who knows what forces are at work when one bends an arm, puts one foot in front of the other, and so on? Without spiritual science, one does not know what forces are at work in man. No one knows how his movements, how everything that works so that he can be an active person in the physical world, how that comes about and what force is at work. This is only noticed by the spiritual researcher when he comes to so-called imaginative knowledge. First, one makes images that work by drawing stronger forces from the soul than are otherwise used in ordinary life. Where does this power come from that unleashes the images of imaginative experience in the soul? It comes from the place where the forces that make us active human beings in the world are at work, that make us move our hands and feet. Because this is the case, you can only access your imagination if you are able to remain still, if you can bring the movements of your body to a standstill, if you can control it. Then you notice how this power, which otherwise moves the muscles, flows up into the soul and mind and forms the imaginative images. So you are actually rearranging the forces. So down there in the depths of the body is something of our very own nature, of which we feel nothing in ordinary life. By switching off the physical, the spirit, which otherwise comes to expression in our actions, penetrates up into the soul and fills it with what it would otherwise have to use for the physical. The spiritual researcher knows that he must withdraw from the body what the body would otherwise consume. For imaginative knowledge, therefore, the bodily must be eliminated. In ordinary life, we do think, we do form ego-conscious images, but the just-discussed power flows down into our organs in our organism in waking consciousness, becomes effective there and is not used at all, as a rule, to become spiritually visible in the soul.

If we are not spiritual researchers, we have no control over this power; we have to leave it down there in the subconscious, but it does something, this power. It works on our moral ideas. When it flows up consciously, one educates oneself by means of this power to imaginative knowledge; if it is not consciously used for that, it serves man in his actions in the world. But man is not always in action, in activity; then this power, which sits below, is unconsciously released, and it then also works on the realization of moral ideas. So the same power that moves the limbs, that spiritually permeates the body so that man can grasp, walk, and so on, that power sometimes releases itself in the human 'body and produces moral ideals. If you can admire a moral thinker somewhere, who alone develops lofty ideals, you see in these ideals the release of the same forces that play in his hand movements and so on. So, to develop moral ideals, man must, so to speak, first come to rest.

But one can also develop moral ideals and then not follow them, because the forces we use to develop moral ideas, we also use to move and they can be used for one and for the other. Developing moral ideals does not yet mean being moral. Only following them means acting morally. The moral ideals then emerge like memories. As long as you still have to educate yourself to them, you have to use the same strength to generate them that you will need later to follow them. We carry them as memories within us as our moral norms. Therefore, man must be educated in morality so that these memories arise within him as his moral norms and he can follow them.

Who is it then that works in us to conjure up these moral ideals from our nature? That is Lucifer. He urges us to produce our moral ideas, our free morality, out of ourselves. Man owes it to Lucifer that he must produce his moral freedom out of himself. There is no freedom in nature. Freedom is only found by carrying out and realizing that which permeates the human being spiritually and soulfully. By penetrating the lower desires of the human being, Lucifer not only became the seducer of the human being, but at the same time the creator of human freedom. Through Lucifer's impulse, man was made free.

So when we study the innermost nature of our physical body in the way that science studies nature, and follow the laws of logic, we come to this origin of human freedom. If someone were to say today: I don't believe in magnetism, I only see an iron and that cannot possibly attract another iron, that's fantasy —, then this refutes life practice. But in the realm of soul and spirit, people do behave in such a way as to deny the forces that are present. Luciferic forces are inherent in freedom. Without these luciferic forces, we could not be free beings; we could never develop ethical impulses from the depths of our souls and act upon them. We will only understand freedom when we understand that the physical-sensual nature of man is permeated by a spiritual-soul nature, which is already expressed in the hand movement, but which can be released consciously in the imaginations of the spiritual researcher, unconsciously in the presentation of moral motives. When we look within, we also get to know the good side of Lucifer, and one can no longer say: Lucifer is an evil being – for he is also the bringer of human freedom.

Now, however, man also transforms other forces in his soul into bodily functions, for example, when speaking, when the speech organ is set in motion by the brain. In this case, we are not in action with the whole body, but by setting the organization of the physical body in motion from the spiritual-soul, we perform an inner activity. When we speak, spiritual-soul forces intervene in the so-called Broca's organ, which is located in the third cerebral convolution, and then in the larynx. If we withdraw this power, which acts on the Broca's organ, from speaking, as it were, if we become aware of it without using it to speak, then we have grasped it in its spiritual-soul aspect. Let us suppose, for example, that you meditate in such a way that you place yourself in the forces of your soul, which would otherwise be expressed in speech, without speaking, you remain silent. When one thus arrests the soul-life in its inner being, before it intervenes in the bodily, one has grasped a power in oneself that leads to so-called inspiration, to spiritual hearing. The occult saying about so-called “silent knowledge” is based on this. What is meant is a kind of silence in which one inwardly applies the forces that would otherwise flow into the larynx. These forces penetrate into the soul and make it inwardly active. In this way one enters into the world of inspiration.

This world of inspiration is basically a world that is separate from the world of mere imagination when the spiritual researcher enters it. It is a world through which other beings of the spiritual worlds express themselves to us. In our present cycle of time, it is the case that, as if by a law of nature, such forces are unconsciously coming more and more to expression in man as well, which otherwise only live out in the organs of the physical body and their inner activities.

When the power that a person would otherwise use to speak is released in him as if by natural necessity, this power enables him to perceive a spiritual reality, which corresponds to inspiration. This is different from perceiving images in imaginative knowledge with the eye of a true seer. This power, which is active in our moral ideas, enables us to recognize the good side of the Luciferic beings. When we can perceive with this power, which is otherwise used to speak, then we enter into the sphere for which, without all religious prejudice, the Gospel of John gives us the right understanding by saying: “In the beginning was the Word.” This “Word” is heard when one can so subdue one's own word, one's own corporeality, that the power which otherwise speaks through the larynx can be held back before the larynx, and thus be set free.

So what was the obstacle that prevented people from perceiving the word of the world from the very beginning? It was that they had to learn to speak! But in the process of further development, language will indeed become something very strange. Language has changed a great deal in the course of human development. If we go back to the original stages of language, people were still directly connected with language. Even today, in the country, we find that man lives and moves much more in it, is more closely knit to it. He still feels, when uttering a word, that there lies in it something like an image of what he sees around him. The further human evolution advances, the more abstract the word becomes; it becomes only a sign of what it is meant to express. Language becomes more and more inorganic,

increasingly arabesque-like, ever more alien to the human being. Why is this so? In this alienation of language from the inner meaning of words, those forces that were formerly used to develop language are laid bare. This in turn is connected with the fact that spiritual perception of the Christ-being will soon come, precisely because man's power to form speech is being released. In ancient times speech was closely connected with the human organism, now it is beginning to emancipate itself from it. Thus the power to form speech is being released and will be used for the perception of the World Word, the spiritual Christ.

Thus we have considered two sides of human nature; how man, on the one hand, uses the luciferic power in the free creation of moral ideals, and how, on the other hand, through the release of the speech-forming power – through something, therefore, that he shares with all mankind, since these powers are released within all mankind – he attains the power to perceive the Christ spiritually. We can penetrate to the Christ impulse because we are members of the whole human race. To the same extent that language becomes more and more abstract and the power of speech emancipates itself from the organism in human nature, man prepares himself to truly perceive the spiritual Christ. This is the other side of human evolution. While man has inwardly become freer through the influence of Lucifer, in that the latter gave him the possibility of forming his moral ideas, he will, as through an external force, acquire for himself the ability to connect with the Christ. The Christ will approach man in such a way that He will pour out His nature as the epitome of moral ideas over the whole evolution of mankind. When the Christ-being thus becomes known to all mankind, the Christ-entity will have in itself something of the nature of moral motives. And here we touch on something that shows how anthroposophy can rise to a level where the highest sense of truth can unite with the noblest moral motives. In my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', which was completed twenty years ago, I tried to show that real freedom is present in the human soul when a person follows the moral motives that he has raised to consciousness. What is the nature of these moral motives? They do not force; we follow them without compulsion. No motive is moral that forces. Motives that we follow out of compulsion are brought to us from the outside world. Moral motives can be recognized by the fact that we cannot follow them either. We must let their value penetrate us in a free way. Man only professes the ethical-moral motives in a truly moral way when he goes to them, when they do not impose themselves on him. That is the characteristic of moral motives. The Christ, when humanity recognizes Him in spirit, will have this in common with ethical motives: that one can also deny Him, that He forces no one to acknowledge Him. The old gods still worked on other powers of the human soul. They still touched man where he had not yet raised himself to consciousness. But the Christ will consciously appear to man in his spirituality to the extent that man has freed himself in consciousness and will have risen to him. He will be there for all who want to recognize him, without forcing anyone to acknowledge him. He will appear before humanity in such a way that people can follow Him freely. Just as a moral motive does not force a person, but leaves him free to follow this motive or not, so it will also be with the Christ-Being: a person must be fully aware of the value of this Christ-Being if he wants to follow it. In the future, the recognition of the Christ-being will be at the same time a free deed of the soul for every single human being. This will be the infinitely significant fact that we may struggle to a truth that does not force us to recognize it, but that we only recognize when we see its full value.

Thus, the idea that anthroposophy gives us of Christianity — which will only come into its true form — will indeed bring a truth to people that is, in the most eminent sense, a free truth at the same time. The following, given in pictorial form, can be added to this, which can then be further understood through meditation. The same word has been used twice in the development of humanity: Once at the temptation in Paradise, when Lucifer said to man: “You will be like the gods; your eyes shall be opened.” This is the pictorial expression for the Luciferic impulse. With it, Lucifer poured spirituality into the lower nature of man and in return gave man the possibility of attaining inner freedom through moral motives. And a second time it was said, now by the Christ: Are you not gods? The same Word! From this it is evident that it is not only the content of a word that is important, but the essence that a word expresses, the way in which a word is spoken. There we see the necessary connection between the act of Lucifer and the act of the Christ, also expressed in a figurative way, as the religious documents tend to do.

Lucifer is the bringer of personal freedom for the individual human being; Christ is the bearer of freedom for the whole human race, for all humanity on earth. That is the significance of anthroposophy: it teaches us that the recognition of the Christ-being will take place in such a way that it is up to the individual to recognize the Christ or not, just as it is up to the individual not to be moral.

The Christ should be a free truth for the human soul. All other truths, which belong to all mankind, constrain us. But there are still truths in the bosom of the world that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, the recognition of which must be free acts of the human being and which ennoble and refine this human being by being recognized by the human being of his or her own free will. Thus does free truth, free concrete truth, reach so deeply into the developing nature of man on earth. It shows us how truth, won in freedom, belongs to the fundamental laws of human evolution.

It has been shown to us how freedom could only come into human development through the influence of Lucifer, and that man first had to rise to the truth with the help of this Luciferic impulse. In this way, humanity was still compelled to the truth; one could only recognize the truth through compulsion. But man can see this as an ideal for the future, that he can develop in such a way towards freedom and recognize truths in a free way, as set out here. Much could be said about anthroposophy, but it would be difficult to find anything more intimately connected with our need for freedom than the above statement about free truth. It must speak in the most profound and noble way to what lies at the core of our human destiny.

We can only truly grasp what it means to be human on earth when we realize what stands before us as a conscious ideal: the ideal of freedom and truth, of truth that will create an outer body for itself in freedom.

It was necessary to speak to you about such ideas of freedom at the very moment when we have won our own liberation as an Anthroposophical Society from fetters that had become impossible for us, in order to use these ideas to give a feeling-based indication of the way one should think in a society that makes such ideals the goal of its togetherness.

Now I would like to say to you in the warmest way – as all friends who have come together with our Swedish friends here from out of town will feel with me – how deeply satisfying it is, and even more deeply satisfying at the end of our event, that here in this country, what has been presented here has met with such a deep, fundamental understanding, that such a fundamental understanding has developed here for what we want with the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. And truly, not to fight against anything, but to serve in the right way our freely conceived anthroposophical ideal, may this be chosen as a farewell word. May the society that you have founded among yourselves contribute much more work and achievement to what we were able to discuss today in our lecture on the freedom of the soul in the light of spiritual scientific knowledge. May that which is already there, waiting and hoping, flow down from the spiritual worlds through this work, and may it surely come true for us humans when our work is done, which will be so tremendously significant for the development of humanity's spiritual striving. May this be the work of this branch in particular! With these words, I would like to have said my farewell to you.

for the inauguration of the Vidar branch.

A number of friends from out of town have come to visit our friends in Bochum to see the branch of our spiritual endeavor that has been established here under the Christmas tree. And there is no doubt that all those who have come from out of town to celebrate the opening of this branch with our Bochum friends feel the beauty and spiritual significance of our Bochum friends' decision to found this place of spiritual endeavor and feeling here in this city, in the middle of a field of material activity, in the middle of a field that, so to speak, mainly belongs to the outer life. And in many ways, each of our dear branches, here in this area more than anywhere else, can be a symbol for us of the significance of our kind of anthroposophical spiritual life in the present day and for the future development of human souls.

We are truly not in a situation where we can look critically or disparagingly at what is going on around us when we are in the midst of a field of the most modern material activity, because we are rather in a field that shows us how it must become more and more in later outer life on earth. We would only show ourselves to be foolish if we wanted to say: ancient times, when one was more surrounded by forests and meadows and the original life of nature than by the chimneys of the present, should come back again. One would only show oneself to be unintelligent, for one would prove that one has no insight into what the sages of all times have called “the eternal necessities in which man must find himself.” In the face of the material life that covers the earth, as the 19th century in particular has brought about and which later times will bring to mankind in an even more comprehensive way, in the face of this life there is no justified criticism based on sympathy with the old, but there is only and alone the insight that this is the fate of our earth planet. From a certain point of view, one may call the old times beautiful, one may look upon them as a spring or summer time for the earth, but to rage against the fact that other times are coming would be just as foolish as it would be foolish to be dissatisfied with the fact that autumn and winter follow spring and summer. Therefore, we must appreciate and love it when, out of an inwardly courageous decision, our friends create a place for our spiritual life in the midst of the most modern life and activity. And it will be right if all those who have only come to visit our branch for the sake of today leave with a grateful heart for the beautiful activity of our Bochum friends, which is carried out in a truly spiritual scientific way.

What is so endearing about what we have been calling our “branch initiations” for years is that on such occasions, friends from outside the circle that has come together in a particular place often come from far and wide. As a result, these friends from afar can ignite the inner fire of gratitude that we must have for all those who found such branches, and that, on the other hand, these friends from afar can take with them a vivid impression of what they have experienced, which keeps the thoughts alive, which we then turn to the work of such a branch from everywhere, so that this work can be fruitful from all sides through the creative thoughts. We know that the spiritual life is a reality, we know that thoughts are not just what materialism believes, but that thoughts are living forces that, when we unite them in love, for example over any place of our work, there they unfold, there they are help.

And I would like to be convinced that those who have brought their visit here will also take with them the impulse from today's get-together to think often and often of the place of our work, so that our friends here can feel when they sit together in silence, into that which, by the grace of the hierarchies, becomes spiritual knowledge for us, so that our friends, when they sit together in silence again, may cherish the feeling that creative thoughts are coming from all sides into their working space, their spiritual working space.

Looking at what is, and not practicing an unjustified criticism of existence, is something we are gradually learning through our anthroposophical worldview. There is no doubt that the earth is undergoing a development. And when we, equipped with our anthroposophical knowledge, yes, when we look back with understanding, with what we can know outside of anthroposophical knowledge, to earlier times in the development of the earth, then earlier times appear to us in relation to the earth, which is is riddled with telegraph wires and swept by those electric currents, these times of the earth appear to us like spring and summer time, and the times we are entering appear to us like the autumn and winter time of the earth. But it is not for us to complain about this, but for us to call this a necessity. Nor is it for us to complain, just as it is not for a person to complain when summer comes to an end and autumn and winter arrive.

But when autumn and winter come, the human soul has been preparing for centuries to erect the sign for the living word to enter into the evolution of the earth in the depths of the winter night. And in this way the human heart, the human soul, showed that what is created from the outside by summer without human intervention must be created by human intervention from within.

When we rejoice in the sprouting, sprouting forces of spring, which are replaced by gentle summer forces from the outside, without our intervention, winter, with its blanket of snow, covers what would otherwise, without our intervention, please us during the summer and always brings new proof that divine-spiritual forces prevail throughout the world, so we receive during the cold, dark winter time, we receive what is placed in winter as the summer hope for the future, which tells us that just as spring and summer come after every winter, so too, once the earth has reached its goal in the cosmos, a new spiritual spring and summer will come, which our creative powers help shape. Thus the human heart erects the sign of eternal life.

In this very sign of eternal spiritual life, we feel united today with our friends in Bochum, who some time ago founded their branch here. It is wonderful that we can inaugurate it just before Christmas.

Perhaps to some who at first glance look at it superficially, all that has been discovered about Christ Jesus through our spiritual science, and all that has been revealed to it about Christ Jesus, will look at it superficially, it may seem as if we are replacing the former simplicity and childlikeness of the Christmas festival, with its memories of the beautiful scenes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, with something tremendously complicated. We must draw people's attention to the fact that at the beginning of our era two Jesus-children entered into earthly evolution; we must speak of how the ego of one Jesus-child moved into the bodies of the other Jesus-child; we must speak of how, in the thirtieth year of Jesus' life, the Christ-being descended and lived for three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. It might easily appear as though all the love and devotion which men through the centuries have been able to summon up for their own salvation, when they were shown the Christ Child in the manger, surrounded by the shepherds, when the wonderfully moving Christmas carol sounded to their ears, when the Christmas plays were celebrated here and there, when the lights appeared on the Christmas tree, delighting the most childlike hearts, it might appear that in the face of all what so immediately kindles the human heart to intimacy, to devotion, to love, when the warm feeling, the warm sensation, should fade away when one has yet to take in the complicated ideas of the two Jesus children, of the passing over of the one ego into the body of the other, of the descent of a divine spiritual being into the bodily shell of Jesus of Nazareth. But we must not indulge in such thoughts, for it would be a bad thing if we did not want to submit to the law of necessity in this area.

Yes, my dear friends, in the places that lay outside the forest or in the middle of the fields and meadows, the snow-capped mountains and distances or the wide plains and lakes spoke down and into them. In those places that were not traversed by railroad tracks and telegraph wires, hearts could dwell there that were immediately ignited when the manger was built and when one was reminded of what the Gospels of Matthew and Luke told of the birth of the wonderful child. What is contained in these narratives, what has happened on earth in such a way that these narratives bear witness to it, lives and will continue to live. It just takes time, which occurs, we may say, in the “earthly winter”, a time of railways and telegraph wires and meals, stronger forces in the soul, to ignite warmth and intimacy in the heart in the face of the external mechanism, in the face of the external materiality. The soul must grow strong in order to be so inwardly convinced of the truth of what has happened in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha that it lives firmly in the heart, however outwardly the mechanical natural order may intervene in earthly existence. The knowledge of the child in Bethlehem must penetrate differently into the souls of those who are allowed to live on the edge of the forest, on mountain slopes, by the lakes and in the midst of fields and meadows; the knowledge of the same being must penetrate differently to those who must have grown to the newer conditions of existence.

For this reason, for our own time, those whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings tell us of those higher contexts that we must consider when speaking of the Child of Bethlehem. With our newer insights, we stand no less soul-filled before the Christmas tree because we must know something different from what earlier times knew. On the contrary, we come to a better understanding of those earlier times, we come to understand why the hope and joy of the future spoke from the eyes of young and old at the Christmas tree and at the manger. We learn to understand how they lived in a way that went beyond what could be seen immediately, when we explain to ourselves, in our own terms, the reasons why we feel such deep, heartfelt love for the Child of Bethlehem. We may call the Jesus child, the one from the Nathanic line of the House of David, in the most beautiful sense, in the most beautiful sense, “the child of humanity, the child of man”. For what do we feel when we look at this child, whose essential nature shines through even in the descriptions of Luke's Gospel?

Humanity took its origin with the origin of the earth. But much has passed humanity in the course of the Lemurian, Atlantean and post-Atlantean times. And we know that this was a descent, that in primeval times there was an original knowledge and original looking, an original connection with the divine-spiritual powers, an old inheritance of a knowledge of the connection with the gods. What lived in the souls of human beings from divine beings has increasingly become less and less. Over time, people have come to feel their connection with the divine spiritual source less and less through their direct knowledge. They were increasingly thrown out into the field of mere material observation, of sensuality. Only in the early years of life, in childhood, did people know how to revere and love innocence, the innocence of the human being who has not yet taken up the descending forces of the earth.

But how, now that we know that with the Jesus child an entity came to earth that had not previously been on earth as such, that was a soul that had not gone through the rest of the evolution of mankind on earth — which I have indeed presented in my “Occult Science Outline», was held back, as it were, in the innocent state before the Luciferic temptation, that such a soul, a childlike human soul in a much, much higher sense than is usually meant, came to earth, how can one not recognize this human soul as the «child of humanity»? What we human beings, even in the most tender childhood, may no longer have in us, because we carry within us the results of our previous incarnations, which we cannot recognize in any of us, even in the moment when we first open our eyes on the field of the earth, is presented in the child who entered the earth as the St. Luke's Boy Jesus. For in this child there was a soul that had not previously been born on earth out of a human body, that had remained behind when the evolution of humanity began anew on earth, and that appeared on earth at the very beginning of our era, in the infancy of humanity. Hence the marvelous event that the Akasha Chronicle reveals to us: that this child, the Nathanic Jesus-child, immediately after his birth, uttered intelligible sounds to his mother only, sounds that were not similar to any of the spoken languages of that time or of any time, but from which sounded for the mother something like a message from worlds that are not the earthly worlds, a message from higher worlds. That this child Jesus could speak, could speak immediately at his birth, that is the miracle!

Then it grew up as if it were to contain, concentrated in its own being, all the love and loving ability that all human souls together could muster. And the great genius of love, that was what lived in the child. He could not learn much of what human culture has achieved in earthly life. The Nathanian Jesus Child was able to experience little of what had been achieved by people over the course of thousands of years until he was twelve years old. Because he could not, the other ego passed into him in his twelfth year. But everything he touched from the earliest, most tender childhood was touched by perfected love. All the qualities of the mind, all the qualities of feeling, they worked as if heaven had sent love to earth, so that a light could be brought into the winter time of the earth, a light that shines into the darkness of the human soul when the sun does not unfold its full external power during this winter time. When later the Christ moved into this human shell, we must bear in mind that this Christ-being could only make itself understood on earth by working through these shells.

The Christ-Being is not a human being. The Christ-Being is an Entity of the higher Hierarchies. On earth It had to live for three years as a human being among human beings. For this purpose, a human being had to be born to It in the way I have often described for the Nathanian Jesus child. And because this human child could not have received — since it had not previously set foot on earth, had no previous education from earlier incarnations — because it could not have received what external culture had worked for on earth, so a soul entered this child that had, in the highest sense, worked for what external culture can bring: the Zarathustra soul.

And so we see the most wonderful connection when Jesus Christ stands before us. We see the interaction of this human child, who had saved the best human aspiration, love, from the times when man had not yet fallen into Luciferic temptation, until the beginning of our era, when it appeared on earth for the first time, embodied, with the most developed human prophet Zarathustra, and with that spiritual essence which, until the Mystery of Golgotha, had its actual home within the realms of the higher hierarchies, and which then had to take its scene on earth by entering through the gate of the body of Jesus of Nazareth into its earthly existence. That which is the highest on earth, and which we can only glimpse in its purity in the still innocent gaze of the human being, in the eye of the child, that is what the human child brought with him to the highest degree. That which can be achieved on earth as the highest, that is what Zarathustra contributed to this human child. And that which the heavens could give to the earth, so that the earth might receive spiritually, which it receives anew each summer through the intensified power of the sun, that the earth received through the Christ-being.

We will just have to learn to understand what has happened to the earth. And in the times to come, the soul will be able to swell with intimacy, the soul will be able to strengthen itself through a power that will be stronger than all the powers that have so far been connected to the Mystery of Golgotha, in a time that can offer little outward support to the strengthening of those forces that tend towards man's true source of power, towards man's innermost being, towards an understanding of how this being flows from the spiritual-cosmic. But in order to fully understand such, we must first understand ourselves as one once understood the Christ Child on Christmas Day; we must first rise to the knowledge of the spirit. Times will come when, as it were, one will look at earthly events with the eye of the soul. Then one will be able to say many a thing to oneself that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today, for which only spiritual science enables us today, so that we can already say many a thing to ourselves that one cannot yet say to oneself in the broadest circles today.

We see spring approaching. During the approaching spring, we see the plants sprouting and sprouting from the earth. We feel our joy igniting in what comes out of the earth. We feel the power of the sun growing stronger and stronger to the point where it makes our bodies rejoice, to the point of the Midsummer sun, which was celebrated in the Nordic mysteries. The initiates of these mysteries knew that the Midsummer Sun pours itself over the earth with its warmth and light to reveal the workings of the cosmos in the earth's orbit. We see and feel all this.

We also see and feel other things during this time. Sometimes lightning and thunder crash into the rays of the spring sun when clouds cover these rays. Irregular downpours pour over the surface of the earth. And then we feel the infinite, uninfluenced, harmonious regularity of the sun's course, and the — well, we need the word — changeable effectiveness of the entities that work on earth as rain and sunshine, as thunderstorms, and other phenomena that depend on all kinds of irregular activity, in contrast to the regular, harmonious activity of the sun's path through space and its consequences for the development of plants and everything that lives on earth, which cannot be influenced by anything. We feel the infinite regular harmony of the sun's activity and the changeable and fickle nature of what is going on in our atmosphere like a duality.

But then, when autumn approaches, we feel the dying of the living, the withering of that which delights us. And if we have compassion for nature, our souls may become sad at the dying of nature. The awakening, loving power of the sun, that which regularly and harmoniously permeates the universe, becomes invisible, as it were, and that which we have described as the changeable weather then prevails. It is true what earlier times knew, but what has faded from our consciousness due to our materiality: that in winter, the egoism of the earth triumphs over the forces that permeate our atmosphere, flowing down from the vast cosmic being to our earth and awakening life on our earth.

And so the whole of nature appears to us as a duality. The activity of spring and summer is quite different from that of autumn and winter. It is as if the earth becomes selfless and gives itself up to the embrace of the universe, from which the sun sends light and warmth and awakens life. The earth in spring and summer appears to us as showing its selflessness. The earth in autumn and winter appears to us as showing its selfishness, conjuring forth from itself all that it can contain and produce in its own atmosphere. Defeating the working of the sun, the working of the universe through the selfishness of earthly activity, the winter earth appears to us.

And when we look away from the earth and at ourselves with the eye that spiritual research can open for us, when we look beyond the material and see the spiritual, then we see something else. We know that, yes, in the elemental forces of the earth's atmosphere, which appear to be at work only in the unfolding of the sun's forces, in the spring and summer struggles that take place around us, the elemental spirits live, innumerable spiritual entities live in the elemental realm that swirl around the earth, lower spirits, higher spirits. Lower spirits, which are earthbound in the elemental realm, have to endure during the spring and summer season that the higher spirits, which stream down from the cosmos, exercise greater dominion, making them servants of the spirit that streams down from the sun, making them servants of the demonic forces that rule the earth in selfishness. During the spring and summer season of the earth, we see how the spirits of earth, air, water and fire become servants of the cosmic spirits that send their forces down to earth. And when we understand the whole spiritual context of the earth and the cosmos, then during spring and summer these relationships open up to our souls and we say to ourselves: You, earth, show yourself to us by making the spirits, which are servants of egoism, servants of the cosmos, of the cosmic spirits, who conjure up life out of your womb, which you yourself could not conjure up!

Then we move towards autumn and winter time. And then we feel the egoism of the earth, feel how powerful those spirits of the earth become, which are bound to this earth itself, which have detached themselves from the universe since Saturn, Sun and Moon time, feel how they close themselves off from the working that flows in from the cosmos. We feel ourselves in the egoistically experiencing earth. And then we may look within ourselves. We examine our soul with its thinking, feeling and willing, examine it seriously and ask ourselves: How do thoughts emerge from the depths of our soul? How do our feelings, affects and sensations emerge first? Do they have the same regularity with which the sun moves through the universe and lends the earth the life forces that emerge from its womb? They do not. The forces that reveal themselves in our thinking, feeling and willing in everyday life are similar to the changeable activity in our atmosphere. Just as lightning and thunder break in, so human passions break into the soul. Just as no law governs rain and sunshine, so human thoughts break out of the depths of the soul. We must compare our soul life with the changing wind and weather, not with the regularity with which the sun rules our earth. Out there it is the spirits of air and water, fire and earth, that work in the elemental realm and that actually represent the egoism of the earth. Within ourselves, these are the elemental forces. But these changing forces within us, which regulate our everyday life, are embryos, germinal beings, which, only as germs, but as germs, resemble the elemental beings that are found outside in all the vicissitudes of the weather. We carry the forces of the same world within us as we think, feel and will, which live as demonic beings in the elemental realm in the wind and weather outside.

When the times approached in which people, who were at the turning point of the old and the new times, felt: there will come a time reminiscent of the wintertime on Earth. Indeed, there were teachers and sages among these people who understood how to interpret the signs of the times and who pointed out: Even if our inner life resembles the changeable activity of the outer world, and just as man knows that behind the activity of the outer world, especially in autumn and winter, the sun still shines, the sun lives and moves in the universe, it will come again - so man may also hold fast to the thought that, in the face of his own fickleness, which lives in his soul, there is a sun, deep, deep in those depths where the source of our soul gushes forth from the source of the world itself. At the turn of the ages, the sages pointed out that just as the sun must reappear and regain its strength in the face of the earth's selfishness, so too must understanding develop from those depths of our soul for that which can reach this soul from the sources, where this soul is connected in its life itself with the spiritual sun of the world, just as earthly life is connected with the physical sun of the world.

At first this was expressed as a hope, pointing to the great symbol that nature itself offered. It was expressed in such a way that the winter solstice was set as the celebration for the days when the sun regains its strength, the time when it was said: however the selfishness of the earth may unfold, the sun is victorious over the selfishness of the earth. As if through the darkness of a Christmas in the world of elemental spirits, which represent the egoism of the earth, the spirits that come from the sun and show us how they make the egoistic spirits of the earth their servants.

At first it felt like a glimmer of hope. And when the great turning point had come, when nothing but desolation and despair should have been felt in human souls, the Mystery of Golgotha was preparing itself. It showed in the spiritual realm that, yes, there are forces at work within the human being that can only be compared to the changeable forces of the earth's atmosphere, to earthly egoism. They manifested themselves in ancient times, when people still carried within them the legacy of the ancient powers of the gods, like the forces that show themselves in spring and summer: they were servants of the old hierarchies of the gods. But in the time when it was heading towards the Mystery of Golgotha, the inner forces of human souls became more and more like the outer demonic elemental spirits in autumn and winter. These forces within us were to break away from the old currents and workings of the gods, just as the changeable forces of our earth withdraw from the activity of the sun in winter. And then, for man in his evolution on earth, what had always been symbolically depicted in the hope that it would come about in the victory of the sun over the winter forces, the winter solstice of the world began, in which the spiritual sun underwent for the whole evolution of the earth what the physical sun always undergoes at the winter solstice. These are the times in which the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

We must really distinguish between two periods on earth. A time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the earth is heading towards autumn through its summer, when the inner forces of human beings become more and more similar to the changeable forces of the earth, and the great Christmas festival of the earth, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, when breaks over the earth, which is indeed winter time for the earth, but where out of the darkness the victorious spirit of the sun, the Christ, approaches the earth, bringing the souls within what the sun brings to the earth externally in the way of growth forces.

So we feel our whole human earthly destiny, our innermost human being, when we stand at the Christmas tree. So we feel intimately connected with the human child, who brought message from that time, where humanity had not yet fallen into temptation and thus the disposition to decline, brought the message that an ascent will begin again, as in the winter solstice the rise begins. On this day in particular, we feel the intimate relationship of the spiritual within the soul with the spirit that permeates and flows through everything, that expresses itself externally in wind and weather, but also in the regular, harmonious course of the sun, and inwardly in the course of humanity across the earth, in the great festival of Golgotha.

Should humanity not develop a new piety out of these thoughts, a piety that is not meant to remain a mere thought but can become a feeling and an intuition, a piety that cannot become dulled even by the most extreme mechanism, as it must unfold more and more on earth? Should not Christmas prayers and Christmas songs be possible again, even in the abstract, telegraph-wired and smoke-filled earth's atmosphere, when humanity will learn to feel how it is connected with the divine spiritual powers in its depths, by intuiting in its depths the great Christmas festival of the earth with the birth of the boy Jesus?

It is true, on the one hand, what resounds through all human history on earth: that the great Christmas festival of the earth, which prepared the Easter festival of Golgotha, had to come one day. It is true that this unique event had to occur as the victory of the spirit of the sun over the fickle earth spirits. On the other hand, it is true what Angelus Silesius said: “A thousand times Christ may be born at Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art still lost forever.” It is true that we must find within us, in the depths of our soul, that through which we understand the Christ Jesus.

But it is also true that in the places at the edge of the forest, on the lakeshore, surrounded by mountains, people, after a summer spent in the fields and pastures, were able to look forward to the symbol of the Christ Child , that they felt something else in their souls than we do, who must also feel the power to sense the Christmas message in the face of our smoky, dry, abstract and mechanical times. If these strong thoughts, which spiritual science can give us, can take root in our hearts, then a solar power will emerge from our hearts that will be able to shine into the bleakest external surroundings, to shine with the power that will be like when in 'our inner being itself light kindled light on the tree of our soul life, which we, because its roots are the roots of our soul itself, are to transform more and more into a Christmas tree in this winter time. We can do it if we absorb, not just as theory, but as direct life, what the message of the spirit, what true anthroposophy can be for us. So I wanted to bring the thoughts of Christmas from our spiritual science into the space that we want to consecrate today for the work that our dear friends here have been doing for a long time.

In the name of that deity who is regarded in the north as the deity who is supposed to bring back rejuvenating powers, spiritual childhood powers of aging humanity, to which Nordic souls in particular tend when they want to speak of what, flowing from the Christ Jesus being, can bring our humanity a new message of rejuvenation, to this name our friends here want to consecrate their work and their branch. They want to call it the “Vidar Branch”. May this name be as auspicious as it is auspicious for us, who want to understand the work that is being done here, what has already been achieved and is intended by loving, spirit-loving souls here. Let us truly appreciate what our Bochum friends are attempting here, and let us give their branch and their work the consecration that is also intended to be a consecration for Christ today, by unfolding our most beautiful and loving thoughts here for the blessing, for the strength and for the genuine, true, spiritual love for this work. If we can feel this way, then we will celebrate today's festival of the naming of the “Vidar” branch in the right spirit with our friends in Bochum.

And let us let our feelings reach up to those whom we are naming as the leaders and guides of our spiritual life, to the Masters of the Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, and let us implore their blessing for the work that is to unfold here in this city through our friends:

You who guide the spiritual life, give people
what they need according to the times,
you work with us when our friends devotedly serve the spiritual life
here in this city.

We would like to send this up as a prayer to the spiritual leaders, the higher hierarchies, at this moment, which is solemn in two respects. And we may hope that what has been promised will prevail over this branch, despite all the resistance that is piling up more and more, despite all the obstacles and opposition, what has been promised for our work: that through it the mystery of Christ will be incorporated anew into humanity in the way it must happen.

That this may prevail, that may be our Christmas gift today: that this branch too may become a living witness to what flows as strength into the evolution of humanity from higher worlds and can ever more and more give human souls the consciousness of the truth of the words:

The senses speak
The things in the vastness of space,
They change in the stream of time;
Recognizing, the human soul,
From the vastness of space,
And unreachable by the stream of time,
Into the realm of eternity.

Our dear friends in Bochum will return to their work here imbued with this feeling. Those who, through their meeting with them, are now aware of their work will think of it often and with great intensity. These thoughts can unfold their special power all the more because we were able to consecrate the work immediately before Christmas this year, before the festival that can always be a symbol for us of all that the spirit has achieved in victory over the material, over all the obstacles that it can and must face in the world.