The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends,

What I am going to speak about this evening I should like to link on to the scenes we have just witnessed. And what can be said in this regard will fit in well with the whole course of our present considerations.

Now I have often spoken here before about the importance of the ‘Mothers scene’ in the second part of Goethe's “Faust”; this scene, however, is of such a nature that one can repeatedly return to it because through its significant content, apart from the aesthetic value of the way in which it is introduced into the poem, it really contains a kind of culminating point of all that is spiritual in present day life. And if this ‘Mothers scene’ is allowed to work upon us, we shall well be able to say that it contains a very great deal of all that Goethe is wishing to indicate. It comes indeed out of Goethe's immediate soul experiences just as on the other it throws light on the significant, deep knowledge that we are obliged to recognise in him if we are to have any notion at all of what is meant by this scene where Faust is offered by Mephistopeles the possibility of descending to the Mothers. If we notice how, on Faust's reappearing and coming forth from the Mothers, the Astrologer refers to him as ‘priest’, and that Faust henceforward refers to himself as ‘priest’, we have to realise that there is something of deep import in this conversion of what Faust has been before into the priest. He has descended to the Mothers: he has gone through some kind of transformation. Leaving aside what one otherwise knows of the matter and what has been said by us in the course of years, we need reflect only upon how the Greek poets, in speaking of the Mysteries, refer to those who were initiated as having learnt to know the three world-Mothers—Rhea, Demeter and Proserpina. These three Mothers, their being, what they essentially are—all this was said to be learnt through direct perception by those initiated into the Mysteries in Greece.

When we dwell upon the significant manner in which Goethe speaks in this scene, and also upon what takes place in the next, we shall no longer be in any doubt that in reality Faust has been led into regions, into kingdoms, that Goethe thought to be like that kingdom of the Mothers into which the initiate into the Greek Mysteries was led. By this we are shown how full of import Goethe's meaning is.

And now remind yourselves of how the moment Mephistopheles mentions the word ‘Mothers’ Faust shudders, saying what is so full of meaning: “Mothers, Mothers! How strange that sounds!” And this is all introduced by Mephistopheles' words “It is with reluctance that I disclose the higher mystery.” Thus it is really a matter here of something hidden, a mystery, that Goethe, in this half secret way, found necessary to impart to the world in connection with the development of his Faust.

We must now ask, and are able to do so on the basis of what we have been considering during these past years, what is supposed to happen to Faust in the moment that this higher mystery is unveiled before him? Into what world is he led? The world, into which he is led, the world he now enters, is the spiritual world immediately bordering on our physical one.

Please remember clearly how I have already said that the crossing of the threshold into this world beyond the border must be approached in thought with great caution. As I said, this is because between the world that we observe with our senses and understand with our intellect, and that world from which the -physical one arises, there is a borderland as it were, a sphere where one may easily fall into deception and illusion when not sufficiently developed and prepared. It might be said that only in the world comprehended by the senses are there definite forms, definite outlines and boundaries. These do not exist in the world that is on other side of the border. This is something that it is very difficult to get the modern materialistic intellect to grasp—that in the moment that the threshold is passed everything is in constant movement, and the world of the senses rises out of all this continual movement like petrified forms.

It is into this world so penetrated by movement—the imaginative world—that Faust is now transplanted; transplanted, however, by an external cause end not by gradual painstaking meditation. The cause comes from without. It is Mephistopheles, the force of evil working into the physical, who takes him over to the other world.

And now there is something to which we must be very much alive to if we are not to develop errornous opinions in this sphere. We, in anthroposophical circles, are seeking knowledge of the spiritual world. And everything said in the book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” and other books of that nature, about the exercises for gaining admittance into those worlds, goes no farther than the means by which this knowledge may be obtained. And here, as far as the present time and necessity are concerned in the giving out of these things to the world, it goes without saying that a halt must be made. Anyone wishing to advance beyond this, will come to the sphere that can be called the sphere of action in the supersensible world. This must be left to each individual. When he has once found the security of knowledge, he himself must undertake the action. But in what is meant to proceed between Faust and Mephistopheles this is not the case. Faust has actually to produce the departed Paris and Helen; therefore he does not only have to look into the spiritual world, he does not have to be an initiate only, but a magician, and must accomplish magical actions. It very clearly shown here in the way this scene is handled by Goethe how deeply familiar he was with certain hidden things in the human soul. The state of Faust's consciousness has to be changed. But at the same time he has to be given power to act out of supersensible impulses.

In his connection with Faust, Mephistopheles, in his capacity as an ahrimanic force, belongs to our world of the senses, but as a supersensible being. He has been transplanted. He has no power over the worlds into which Faust is now to be transplanted. They really do not exist for him. Faust has to pass over into a different state of consciousness that perceives, beneath the foundation of our world of the senses, the never-ceasing weaving and living, surging and becoming, from which our sense-world is drawn. And Faust is to become acquainted with the forces that are there below.

The ‘Mothers’ is a name not without significance for entering this world. Think of the connection of the word ‘Mothers’ with everything that is growing, becoming. In the attributes of the mother is the union of what is physical and material with what is not. Picture to yourselves the coming into physical existence of the human creature, his incarnation. You must picture a certain process that takes place through the interworking of the cosmos with the mother-principle, before the union of the male and female is consummated. The man who is about to become physical prepares himself beforehand in the female element. And we must now make a picture of this preparation that is confined to what goes on up to the moment when impregnation takes place—all therefore that takes place before impregnation. One has a quite wrong and materialistically biased notion if one imagines that there lie already formed in the woman all the forces that lead to the physical human embryo. That is not so. A working of the cosmic forces of the spheres takes place; into the woman work cosmic forces. The human embryo is always a result of cosmic activity. What is described in materialistic natural science as the germ-cell is in a certain measure produced out of the mother alone, but it is a counterpart of the great cosmic germ-cell.

Let us hold this picture in mind—this becoming of the human germ-cell before impregnation, and let us ask ourselves what the Greeks looked for in their three mothers, Rhea, Demeter and Proserpina. In these three Mothers they saw a picture of those forces that, working down out of the cosmos, prepare the human cell. These forces however do not come from the part of the cosmos that belongs to the physical but to the supersensible. The Mothers Demeter, Rhea and Proserpina belong to the supersensible world. No wonder then that Faust has the feeling that an unknown kingdom is making its presence felt when the word ‘Mothers’ is spoken.

Now think, my dear friends, what Faust really has to experience. If it were purely a matter of imaginative knowledge he would only need to be led into the normal state of meditation but, as has been said, he has to accomplish magical actions. For that it is necessary that the ordinary understanding, the ordinary intellect, with which men perceives the world of the senses, should cease to function. This intellect begins with incarnation into a physical body and ends with physical death. And it is this intellect in Faust that must be damped-down, clouded. He has to recognise that his intellect should cease to work. He must be taken up with his soul into a different region. This naturally should be understood as a significant factor in Faust is development.

Now how does the matter appear from Mephistopheles' point of view? We must understand that there is danger in the fact that it is Mephistopheles who has to transform Faust's state of consciousness. And it gives the former himself a sense of uneasiness; in a certain way it becomes dangerous for him also. What then are the possibilities? They are twofold. Faust may acquire the new state of consciousness, learn to know the other world from which he can draw upon miraculous forces, and go to and fro from one world to the other, thus emancipating himself from Mephistopheles for he would then learn to know a world where the latter had no place. With that he would, become free from Mephistopheles. The other possibility would be that all might go very badly and Faust's intellect become clouded. Mephistopheles really puts himself in a very awkward situation. However, he has to do something. He has to give Faust the possibility of fulfilling his promise. He hopes that in some way or another the matter may arrange itself, for he wants neither of the alternatives. He does not want Faust to grow away from him nor does he wish him to be completely paralysed.

I ask you to think over this and then to remember that it is all this that Goethe wants to indicate. In this scene of Faust he wishes to point out to the world that there is a spiritual kingdom, and that here he is showing the way in which man can relate himself to it. This is how things are connected.

Since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the knowledge of these things has to a great extent been lost. I have told you that Goethe applied the knowledge he had personally received through great spiritual vision. The whole connection with the Mothers had entered into Goethe's soul when he read Plutarch. For Plutarch, the Roman story-teller whom Goethe read, speaks of the Mothers; and the following particular scene in Plutarch seems to have made a deep impression on Goethe. The Romans were at war with Carthage. Nicias is in favour of the Romans and wishes to seize the town of Engyon from the Carthaginians; he is therefore to be given over to the Carthaginians. So he feigns madness and runs through the streets crying “The Mothers—the Mothers are pursuing me!” From this you may see that in the time of which Plutarch writes this relation of the Mothers is brought into connection not with the normal understanding of the senses, but with a condition of man when this normal understanding is not present. It is beyond all doubt that what Goethe read in Plutarch stirred him to bring to expression in his “Faust” this idea of the Mothers.

We also find mention in Plutarch of how the world has a triangular form. Now naturally these words ‘the world has a triangular form’ must not be taken in a heavy literal sense, for the spatial is but a symbol of what has neither time nor space. Since we live in space, spatial images must be used for what is nevertheless beyond image, time or space.

Thus Plutarch gives the picture of a triangular world. This the whole world (see diagram). According to Plutarch in the centre of this triangle that is the world, the field of truth is found. Now out of this whole world Plutarch differentiates 183 worlds. 183 worlds, so he says, are in the whole circumference; they move around, and in the middle is this resting field of truth. This resting field of truth Plutarch describes as being separated by time from the surrounding 183 worlds—sixty on each of the three sides of the triangle and one at each angle makes 183. When, therefore, you take this imagination of Plutarch's, you have a world considered as consisting of three parts and in the cloud formation around it the 183 worlds welling and surging. That is at the same time the imagination for the “Mothers.” The number 183 is given by Plutarch.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Thus Plutarch, who in a certain sense held sway over the mystery wisdom, quoted the remarkable number 183. Let us now reckon how many worlds we get if we make a correct calculation up to the time of Plutarch's world. We must do so in the following way:

You see how when we apply our own way of reckoning and correctly calculate the separate divisions and the whole world, as they have made their evolutions up to the time of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch when Plutarch lived, we can truthfully say that we get 183 worlds.

Moreover, when we take our Earth upon which we are still evolving, and about which we cannot speak as of something completed, and when we look from this Earth to Saturn, Sun and Moon, there we find the “Mothers” that figure in another form in the Greek Mysteries under names Proserpina, Demeter and Rhea. For all the forces that are in Saturn, Sun and Moon are still working—working on into our own time. And those forces that are physical are but the shadow, the image, of what is spiritual. Everything physical is a mere picture of the spiritual.

Consider this. If you do not take simply its outward, gross physical body, but its forces, its impulses, the Moon with its forces is at the same time in the Earth. The being of the Moon belongs to the being of the Earth. If you only want a realistic picture, you need to imagine it thus. Here is the Earth (see diagram); here you have a shaft connected with the Moon, and the Moon is turned round on it The shaft, however, has no physical existence. And all that is Moon-impulse is not only here in the Moon but this sphere penetrates the Earth.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

We now ask whether these forces thus related to the Moon have a real existence anywhere. The Greeks looked upon them as mysterious, as very full of mystery. And our modern destiny is connected with the fact that these forces no longer retain their character as mysteries but have been made available for all. If we only concentrate on this one thing, on these forces that are connected with the Moon—then we have one of the Mothers. What is this one Mother? We shall best approach the answer to this question in the following way.

In order to have a picture let us take any river—say the Rhine. What is the actual Rhine? On reflection—I have already spoken of this here—no one is really able to say what the Rhine is. It is called the Rhine. But what actually is it when we look into the matter? Is it the water? But in the next moment that has flowed away water has water has taken its place. It flows into the North Sea and other water and follows it, and that goes on continuously. Then what is the Rhine? Is the Rhine the trough, the bed? But no one believes that, for were the water not there no one would think of the bed as the Rhine. When you use the word ‘Rhine’ you are not referring to anything really there but to something in a constant state of metamorphosis—which, however, in certain sense does not change. If we picture this diagrammatically (see diagram) and assume that this is the Rhine and this the water that flows into it—well, now, this water is always evaporating and descending again.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

If you consider that all rivers belong to one another, you will have to take into your calculations that the water evaporates and then falls again. To a certain extent the water that flows from its source down to its mouth always comes over again from the same reservoir in its rising and flowing down. The water completes its circulation here. But this water is divided up an extended over the surroundings; naturally you cannot follow the course of each drop. All the water that belongs to the earth, however, must be considered as a whole. The question of rejuvenating water does not come into consideration here, This is what happens where the water is concerned.

Something the same happens with the air, and in yet another case. If you have a telegraph station here and here another, you know that it is only a wire that connects them. The other connection is set up by means of the whole earth, the current goes down into the earth. Here is the place where it is earthed. The whole goes through the earth.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Now if you make a picture of these two things you have the water, the running water that spreads itself out and sets itself in circulation; and if on the other hand you imagine the electricity spreading itself out down in the earth, then you have two things at different poles—two opposed realities. I am only indicating here, for you can piece it together yourselves out of any elementary book on physics. But we are led to the conclusion that in electricity you have under the earth the opposite of what goes on above the earth in the circulation of the water.

What is there under the earth ruling as the being of electricity is Moon-impulse that has been left behind. It definitely does not belong to the earth. It is impulse remaining over from the Moon and was spoken of as such by the Greeks. And the Greeks still had knowledge of the relation between this force, distributed throughout the whole earth, and the reproductive forces. And there is this relation with the forces of growth and of increase. This was one of the ‘Mothers.’

Now you can imagine that all these premonitions of mighty connections did not arise before Faust merely as theories, but he felt himself obliged to seek out—to enter right into these impulses. Knowledge of this force was first of all given to those being initiated into the Greek Mysteries, this force together with the two other Mothers. The Greeks held all that was connected with electricity in secret in the Mysteries. And herein is where lies the decadence of the future of the earth—of which I have already spoken from another point of view—that these forces will be made public. One of these forces has already become so during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—electricity. The others will be known about in the decadence of the sixth and seventh epochs.

All this, even in the decadent new secret societies, is still among the things about which their conservative members will not speak. Goethe quite rightly judged it fit to give out knowledge of these things in the only way possible for him in that age. At the same time, however, you have one of the passages from which you can see how the great poet Goethe did not simply write as other poets write, but that each word of his bore its special impress and had its appointed place.

Take for example the relation of the Mothers to electricity. Goethe belongs to those who treat of such things out of a thoroughly expert knowledge.

“Do you now see what one possesses in it?
The key will ferret out the proper place.
Follow it up, it leads you to the Mothers.”

And Faust:

“To the ‘Mothers’. That strikes me always like a shock!”

as if he had received an electric shock. This is written with intention—not haphazardly. In this scene nothing in connection with the matter in question is haphazard.

Mephistopheles gives Faust a picture of what he is to find as the impulses of the 183 worlds. This picture works in Faust's soul as it should work, for Faust has gone through many things that bring him near the spiritual worlds. On that account these things already affect him.

This is what I wanted chiefly to dwell upon, my dear friends, hew Goethe is wishing to set forth the most significant matters in this 'Mothers' scene. And by all this you can see from what worlds—what worlds of different consciousness—Faust has to bring Paris and Helen. Because Goethe is dealing with something of such supreme significance, what is spoken in this scene is actually different from what it appears at first sight. What Faust brings with him from these worlds—what I have already referred to—is recognised by the others who have assembled for a kind of drama. What makes them see it? It is half suggested: but by whom? By the Astrologer; and for that he has been chosen as astrologer. His words possess suggestive power. This is clearly expressed. These astrologers had an inherent art of influencing through suggestion, not the best kind of suggestion but an ahrimanic one. What then is our Astrologer actually doing as he stands among these courtiers, who really are not pictured as being particularly bright,—what is he doing? He is putting into them by suggestion what is necessary for all that has arisen as a special world through Faust's changed consciousness to become present in their minds. Remember what I showed you, what I once said to you, that nowadays it can be actually proved that spoken words produce a trembling in certain substances. You will surely find it in one or another of the lectures I have previously given here. I have wanted to remark upon this to show you how today the real nature of the conjuration scene can be demonstrated by experiment. Out of the smoke of the incense and the appropriate accompanying word is really developed what Faust brings for his consciousness out of quite another world. But this must be brought to the minds of the courtiers and made fully clear to them through the suggestive power of the Astrologer. What then does he do? He insinuates. He has the task of insinuating all this into the courtiers' ears. But insinuation is devil's rhetoric. So that through the words ‘insinuation is devil's rhetoric’ the devilish nature of the astrologer's art is brought home to us. That is the one meaning of the sentence. The other is connected with what actually happens on the stage. The devil sits in the prompter's box making his insinuations from there.

Here you have a very prototype of a sentence signifying two different things. You have the purely scenic significance of the devil himself sitting, insinuation from the prompter's box, and the reality of this—the Astrologer insinuating to the Court. In the way he does this it is a devilish art. Thus, if you go to work in the right way, you will find many sentences here with double meaning. Goethe employs this ambiguity because he wishes to represent something that actually happened but did not do so purely in a course-grained, material fashion. It can be performed thus, but its reality has nothing to do with the physical. Goethe, however, wanted to portray something that actually happened and was moreover an impulse in modern history and played a part there. He did not intend that something of this kind was simply to be performed, he meant to show that these impulses had already flowed into modern history, were already there, were working. He wanted to represent a reality, and to say that, in what has been developing since the sixteenth century, the devil has definitely played a part. If you take this scene seriously you will got the two sides of the matter, and you will realise how Goethe knew that spiritual beings were playing into historic processes. And at the end you come to what I have so often indicated, namely, that Faust is not yet sufficiently developed to bring the matter to a conclusion, that he has not derived the possibility of entering other worlds from the right source but from the power of Mephistopheles. All this is what forms the last part of the scene.

I shall add more to this tomorrow and bring our considerations further. But you have seen enough to know that in what Goethe wishes to say much of what we have been studying lately receives new light.

In the evolution of mankind, as I have recently been showing, inner spiritual connections prevail, which send their influences through the soul of man. I showed this in relation to Goethe's endeavours in his Faust, where he relates Faust to the impulse of the fifth post-Atlantean age by associating him with Mephistopheles, an Ahrimanic power. I then tried to show how Faust had to dive down into the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean age, which I tried to describe in their real essence. All this is necessary, so that there takes place in the soul of Faust a conscious interpenetration of that which prevails unconsciously in human souls by virtue of the laws of evolution.

I said that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—our epoch—will have to do with the great and significant life-question of Evil,—the mastery of Evil in all directions. Human beings will have to learn to know all that the soul must rouse and bring forth within itself in order partly to overcome the powers of Evil, partly to transmute them into impulses of Good. All this has arisen on the foundation of the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which had to do especially with the problem of Birth and Death,—a problem which it had received as heritage from Atlantean time. We need only turn our gaze to the Christ-Impulse itself, entering in as it did in the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean period. This period began with the founding of Rome in the year 747 before the Birth of Christ. Thus, of the 2160 years of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, 747 years had to run their course before the main impulse—the Christ-Impulse could enter in, as indeed it did precisely in this fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Has not the Christ-Impulse to do with the great and important question that summons into the evolution of mankind problems of Birth and Death in their supersensible significance? How much discussion, how much thought and feeling has there not been on Christian soil about the Birth of Christ! How infinitely significant a part is played by the Death of Christ! In the Birth and Death of Christ we see most pregnantly this wrestling of the soul of man with the problem of Birth and Death. It was a wrestling in the soul, because the same struggle had already been there in a more elemental, in a more physical form in the great Atlantean epoch. Notably in the fourth civilisation-epoch of Atiantis-in the middle of Atlantean time, and as an after-effect in the fifth period also,—forces connected with Birth and Death were subject to the power of individual human beings. I have already described some aspects of this fact. Forces there were in the Atlanteans—forces that could be developed and that had influence on Birth and Death in a far more than merely natural degree. The good and evil forces in the human being had a far-reaching influence upon the health and sickness of their fellowmen, and thereby also upon Birth and Death. In Atlantean time one saw an actual connection between the things one did as human being and what took place in the so-called “course of Nature,” as Birth and Death.

In post-Atlantean time—in the fourth civilisation-epoch of post-Atlantean time—this problem of Birth and Death was transplanted more into the region of the soul. But in our epoch, in the fifth, human beings will have to grapple with the forces of Evil in an elemental way, just as they did with Birth and Death in Atlantean time. Notably through the quite different mastery over the forces of Nature, the impulses of Evil will work into the world on a grand scale, in a gigantic way. In the resistance which human beings will have to summon forth from spiritual depths, the opposite forces—the forces of Good—will have to grow. And in particular, already during the fifth epoch it will be possible for men to bring Evil over the Earth, by exploiting the force of Electricity, which will assume far greater dimensions than hitherto. Even directly out of the force of Electricity itself, Evil comes over the Earth.

We need to place these things before our consciousness. He who desires to receive the spiritual impulses will then find points of resistance; he will find the starting-points for those impulses which must evolve by the very resistance of Evil. It is difficult as yet to speak in any detail in this connection; for in the widest spheres as yet, these details touch on interests of human beings which they do not wish to have molested. In this respect, human beings are divided. On the one hand are those who suffer greatly, because they cannot clearly realise how they are interwoven with World-Karma; how they simply must take part in this thing or that, and cannot become abstractly pious all at once. On the other hand are those who in many ways are caught up in this World-Karma of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They would rather not hear of what is really contained in the impusles that are going through the world, for it is often to their interest to represent as constructive the very impulses that are destructive. We have described, how since the last third of the nineteenth century there have been working among human beings those Beings whom I characterised as fallen Spirits of Darkness—Beings of the hierarchy of Angeloi. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, these Beings were still ministering members of the good, progressive Powers. They served in the creation of those orders which, as I told you, are derived out of the blood-relationship of men. Now they are in the realm of men, and as Angel-beings who have remained behind, they work into the inner impulses of human beings, to make effective in a retrogressive way—and thereby in an Ahrimanic way—all that which is connected with relationships of blood and clan, nation and race. Thereby they work to mar and to hinder those other social structures of mankind which should now arise out of quite other foundations than for example the bonds of blood, of family and race, clan and nation. To-day a very serious beginning of the work of these Spirits consists precisely in the abstract emphasis that is laid on the principle of Nationality. This abstract emphasis on Nationality, this setting up of programmes on the foundations of a national principle, is among those endeavours which we must attribute to the Spirits of Darkness who will stand far nearer to man—who will approach man in a far more intimate way—than did the backward Spirits of the fourth post-Atlantean period. The latter belong to the hierarchy of Archangeloi. Precisely this will be the significant aspect of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. These Beings who stand immediately above the hierarchy of Man—these Angel-beings—are able to approach the individual human being very nearly and intimately. They do not merely approach the groups. The individual will believe that he is representing things out of his own personal impulse, where in reality—for we can truly put it so—he is possessed by the kind of Angel-being of whom we have been speaking.

Let us once more make clear to ourselves, what was the nature of the efforts of the backward retrogressive Spirits of Darkness of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. For we shall then be more able to understand what is the nature of their efforts in our present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, as I have told you, it was the normal thing to build all the social structure of humanity upon the bonds of blood—blood-relationship. During that time—that is, during the Graeco-Latin civilisation-epoch—the Ahrimanic-Luciferic backward Beings rebelled precisely against the bonds of blood. They were the inspirers of that rebellion which wanted to loosen human beings from blood-kinship. You can derive it even from the general teachings of Spiritual Science. And above all, it was in a sense the descendants of individualities who in the Atlantean time had still been working in a magical way,—it was the descendants of these, who as rebelling individualities, became the “Heroes” in the recapitulation of Atlantean time, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. I beg you now to observe how the Graeco-Latin epoch met these rebel-beings. For in that time, after all, there was still the wise guidance of mankind out of the Mysteries. They did not say to human beings: “Avoid these rebel natures! Avoid the Ahrimanic, Luciferic spiritual Beings!” They did not say this to them; they knew that it lay in the wise plan of cosmic evolution to place these Beings where they were and to use them. It is a weakness of many people to-day, when they hear of Lucifer and Ahriman, to explain: “For Heaven's sake, let us avoid them!” As though they could avoid them! I have often spoken of this. Knowledge was brought to the human beings of the fourth post-Atlantean time in the form in which it had to be at that time. The influence of the good Gods was there in the bonds of blood. Human beings gave themselves up to it, in the mutual love which was founded in the blood-relationships (for so it was at that time; to-day it must be more purely spiritual.) Yet, for the sake of progress, rebellions always had to take place. This way of cosmic evolution had to be explained to the people in myths and legends. To the Initiates they were communicated in another form—in a way more similar to the way in which these truths are being taught to us to-day. But in the widest circles, human beings of that time would not have been ready to receive the explanations of the myths. Therefore the exoteric myths were told to them. In these, however, deep significant truths of evolution lay concealed.

Let us consider an outstanding myth, connected with the very thing I have just been placing before you. It tells how an oracle prophesied to Laius of Thebes at his betrothal with Jocaste. It prophesied that from this union a son would be born who would become his father's murderer and live in incest with his mother. Laius did not let this deter him from the contemplated union; but when the son was born, he pierced his heels and had him exposed on Mount Cithaeron. To a shepherd the boy became entrusted. The shepherd's wife called him Oedipus on account of his pierced heels. You know how the story goes on. The boy Oedipus grew up; his talents developed. At an early age his soul was beset by doubts concerning his descent, for his companions drew his attention to many things. Then the Delphic Oracle pronounced an important saying, painful to study nowadays, if you can study it in its whole context. The saying is: “Avoid thy home-country; otherwise thou wilt become thy father's murderer, thy mother's husband.” This was said to Oedipus.

Now he was under a complete illusion. He did not know who his father and his mother really were. He could not but think Corinth, where he had grown up, his home. At last he wandered from Corinth in order not to bring about disaster there by killing his father and marrying his mother. But the very fact that he set out and took the way to Thebes became his doom. On the way he met a chariot in which his father Laius was travelling with a companion. A conflict arose; he killed his father and continued on his way to Thebes, and his first deed was, as you know, to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. So we hay e Oedipus placed in the very fullest way into the evolutionary nexus of the fourth post-Atlantean age. For in a certain sense the Riddle of the Sphinx—the Riddle of Man—belonged to the fourth epoch. Oedipus was one of those who knew. Far from replying to the Sphinx: “I am reluctant to unveil a higher secret”; he solved the secret. Something was thereby implanted in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It was an impulse that worked on and on, and in which Oedipus played an essential part. For we Wright speak for many hours about the solving of the Riddle of the Sphinx by Oedipus; but we need not do so to-day. To-day we will only make clear that this deed reveals him as a characteristic Hero of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

Now he went on to Thebes, married his mother, whom of course he did not hold to be his mother, and was comparatively happy—till a plague arose. At length it was the seer Tiresias who revealed the truth. Jocaste, suddenly knowing herself tobe the wife of her son, killed herself by suffocation. Oedipus blinded himself and was driven away by his own sons. Another one, Theseus, then protected him in the Grove of Attica until his death, and he was buried in Attic soil. We need only call to mind the Oedipus-drama up to this point.

What does it represent? It represents an individuality—the Oedipus individuality—taken out of the blood connection, growing up outside the bonds of blood and then transplanted back again into the blood-connection, to his own detriment. We have before us no mere subjective rebel against the bonds of blood, but one who by the very laws of Nature becomes a rebel against the bonds of blood and thereby kindles and enflames them even against himself.

Look through the Greek mythology, and you will often find such human beings—Heroes who are placed into the blood-relationship in such and such a way, but who are then exposed so that they undergo their evolution outside the blood-relationship. Through the very fact that they are removed from the old order, from the normal order, they then bring in quite other impulses of evolution. Such an Hero is Oedipus; such too is Theseus who protects him in the wood of Attica.

No wonder if in ancient Greece they could not tell the people who was really behind these Heroes! They could not tell them that they were the great rebels, who were none the less necessary in the wise course of World-evolution. Think, for example, of Theseus himself. Here, too, it was an oracular saying that reached the ears of his father, so that he had his son educated far away. The mother, who had given birth to Theseus far from his father's home, was told: When the youth grows up so that he can wield a certain sword, then and then only let him return. Here again, Theseus is removed, transplanted away from the blood-connection. He too has to solve important riddles of the fourth post-Atlantean time. You know the legend of how he liberated Athens from the tribute of the youths who had to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, and of how he saved himself by means of Ariadne's thread. Theseus became the protector of Oedipus; yet Theseus is the very one who carries Helena away when she is ten years old, and keeps her in hiding. Theseus is brought into close connection with Helena.

Deep evolutionary riddles of the fourth post-Atlantean age are concealed beneath these things. The Court lady of the sixteenth century naturally had no more inkling of them than to exclaim: “From her tenth year onward she was nothing worth.” Yet in this line again, Goethe is hinting at sometning deeply significant. Goethe was well aware that that which stands behind Helena is in reality worthy of reverence, even as Faust revered her. But with regard to Helena of all people, the worst forces of calumny have been at work. Mankind might learn from such things; it can very easily happen that that which is worthy of true recognition—that which perhaps is highest—can be the most calumniated!

I only wished to point this out, to show how Helena herself stands in mysterious connection with those individualities who were the rebels of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and who at that time had the task—for the wise guidance of the Universe—to break through the blood-relationship.

How does it stand with Paris, who is presented to us by Goethe in the Invocation Scene—forgive the trite expression, I do not mean it trivially—as Faust's competitor or rival? How does it stand with Paris? Here too we are told; he was the son of Priam and of Hecuba, and his mother had a dream when she was pregnant with him. In this case it began not with an oracle but with a dream—albeit a dream containing deeper wisdom. It prophesied to Paris' mother that she would give birth to a burning torch that would set fire to the city of Troy. Therefore the parallel legend tells also of an oracle which announced to the father that this his son would serve in Troy's destruction. Whether for the one reason or the other, the father had Paris exposed. Paris, therefore, was also among those who were put outside the blood community. He was brought up in Parion, far from the bonds of blood; and it was there that there took place what the legend tells: how Eris assigned the apple to the most beautiful, and how Paris was called upon by the Goddesses, Hera, Pallas and Aphrodite, to determine which of them was the fairest. It was even said that Hera promised Paris Asia, that is the ruler- ship over the Earth, for ‘Asia’ at that time signified the rulership of the entire Earth. Pallas Athene promised him fame in battle; Aphrodite the fairest of women. Paris gave Aphrodite the prize of beauty.

Nov the great Song of Homer describes how significantly Paris thereby entered into the whole course of the affairs of Greece. In Paris himself we have an individuality rebelling against the bonds of blood. He takes Helena out of the Grecian bonds,of blood and tries to transplant her to Troy. He wants to break the bonds of blood. These things are always connected in this way; in the Greek Hero-legends we always see how there is placed into the midst of evolution that which is meant to break the bonds of blood. For the bonds of blood—in themselves strong, mighty and powerful—they are the thing that really brings about the social structure in that time.

There is one question which can come before us very clearly in this field, and it shall occupy us now for a few minutes. Someone might easily raise the following question: How does it stand with human freedom if such important deeds as the rape of Helena by Paris are accomplished by something taking place in the Spiritual World above, as in this case the rivalry of the three Goddesses? The human being then appears as the mere tool to execute what is not only prepared, but actually worked-out, in spiritual realms above. Now in a certain sense we must truly say: That which takes place through human beings here below is the reflected image of what happens in the Spiritual World. This is a point where the great riddle of freedom mightily knocks upon the doors of human knowledge. Are we really automata, who by their actions reveal the mere reflected image of what happens in the Spiritual World above? And again, how would the Spiritual World, which is the guide and leader in all that happens,—how would the Spiritual World stand there if, so to speak, it had nothing to do, if it were actionless? Two things must be understood: First, the universal course is really led and guided by spiritual forces, spiritual Powers; and nothing happens that does not happen down from the Spiritual World. And the second is, that the human being has Free Will. The two things seem diametrically opposite. We are here touching a great riddle, a problem that gives men very much to do, and they can never get beyond it lightly. For it is truly so: If we look up into the Spiritual World, what the Gods do there represents the deeds of Gods; and the human beings here below carry out the impulses of Gods. So indeed it is. How then can human beings be free?

Let me now place these problems before you with a few brief strokes. Of course one can only indicate a little of this problem at a time. Let us assume therefore: Up yonder are the three Goddesses with the conflict that is taking place among them. As a result of their conflict, there comes clown on to the Earth the impulse that proceeds from these their actions. We need not consider for our present purpose how these actions are in turn connected with still higher Hierarchies. That which takes place up yonder takes place with absolute Necessity; and as to that which Paris does, this also happens because the three Goddesses above have had this conflict with one another. How then is any freedom possible for Paris? It is practically out of the question, you will say. Yet it is not. For the ray falls down, as it were, on to the Earth; and here on Earth there is not one whom it can reach, but there are many. Assume, for example, that there are an hundred. Ninety and nine do not do the deed; the hundredth does it. Here in effect once more the Mystery of Number plays its part. These things are always confused. Paris does the deed, it is true, but the point is that Paris only becomes fully Paris inasmuch as he finds himself prepared to put himself in the very place where this impulse was able to he fulfilled. In short, the Gods would have found another one if Paris had not done it; and in that case the legend would be told of another.

It is through Number that you will come to the solution of this Riddle of Freedom. And if so be, at any given point of time, among the hundreds who stand here below no one is found, then the Gods wait till one arrives. He then accomplishes what the Gods place before him. Be that as it may, Paris it is who has accomplished the deed. It does not mar his freedom in the very least, for he could perfectly well have left the deed undone. Think of this aspect of the problem of Number, and you will find that the divinely necessary, wisdom-filled guidance of the Universe stands not in contradiction to human Freedom. Needless, to say, this does not exhaust the problem of freedom; this again is only a part.

You see, therefore, how in the total evolution of mankind the Heroes of ancient Greece, of whom we are told that they were exposed in childhood, are of great significance. And you may also call to mind (you will find it in one of my lectures; I do not know, I may even have said it several times) there is a similar legend of exposure in connection with Judas. Of Judas Iscariot we are also told that he was put out in his youth. This is a typical feature; it signifies in the language of myth and legend the entry of the rebel Powers, who rebel against the bonds of blood of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

Now the region out of which these impulses proceeded in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is the region wherein the Archangel-Beings rule. Therefore the narratives are always such that the human being stands rather remote from the influences that take place out of the Spiritual World. Either it is an oracle that brings the message from the Spiritual World, or else it is the direct intervention of the World of the Gods Themselves. Helena, you know, is a daughter of Leda and Zeus; here too the Spiritual World works in directly. In our time it is the dark and backward Angel-Beings, and they naturally work through a far more intimate intercourse with human beings. I have already told you, if one would discuss or even only hint at many things that are connected with this working of the Dark Powers since the last third of the nineteenth century, one treads on very thin ice indeed! But you can tell from the whole context; the seeking of social structure through the bonds of blood, which was the right and normal evolution for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, represents, where it remains behind in the fifth epoch, one of those impulses with which the human beings of this epoch will have to battle. We must however add another thing which I have also told you. Something entirely new is now occurring. The fourth post-Atlantean epoch—its wrestling with Birth and Death—was a repetition of Atlantean time. Now something new makes it appearance—something created directly out of Maya or Illusion. Yet this Illusion we must also understand; we must only understand it rightly. It goes without saying, Maya was always there. As I explained in the essay which you will shortly be able to read in the Reich, in relation to the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, all consciousness originates out of Illusion. Yet since the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, Illusion is present in a more than usual degree. Illusion will appear increasingly in this form:—Human beings will give themselves up to illusions. Illusions there always were, but they were always connected with other powers in the third post-Atlantean epoch, with the forces of “elective affinity”; in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch with the forces of Birth and Death; in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with the forces of Evil. Illusion, Maya itself, will be seized upon by Evil. Moreover, it will all be permeated by that element of which I have also told you—by cleverness, intelligence.

It sounds paradoxical when one asserts that it is good for men that they can learn to know all these things. But the fact is, the human being can only come to spiritual freedom by growing strong against resistance. This, one can readily see.

Moreover, precisely that which is connected with the number Five is always connected in this way with the unfolding of Evil. Human beings will have to accustom themselves to one thing: to regard the inrush of the forces of Evil as an inrush of very laws of Nature, forces of Nature. Then they will learn to know them, and they will know what lives and moves in the very depths of things. We must not regard Evil from the outset as one would, who in the fulness of his egoism merely wanted to get away, to flee from it. We cannot do so. But we must penetrate it with consciousness; we must learn to know it,—really learn to know it. Above all, in our time already a force is preparing in the realm of human beings,—a force which tends to create illusions that are harmful and destructive. I will give you a little example of one such illusion. In giving this example, once again I do not wish in any way or in the very least to take sides in one direction or the other; I simply wish to give you an example of this entry of Illusion.

Assume that a politician appears upon the scenes to-day, wishing to speak out of his inmost impulse of his own attitude to the wheel of the world—to the various things that are being said and done to-day, from one quarter or another. Suppose that this politician found occasion to express himself about the part that is being played in the events of our time by the British State system (I say the State system; for with the nations themselves we are not concerned in this connection) and by the hidden powers that are behind it,—powers of which we have often spoken. Assume that a politican feels called upon to speak of this. He wishes to make plain how he considers that a right relationship to the British impulses can be established.

Suppose now that such a politician were to say the following. Suppose he were to say: It would be an unfriendly action against the Power that rules the Sea, to paralyse or lessen its superiority. What would you say? This politician notes the fact that there is a Power that rules over the Sea. One must take some attitude towards it. Since, after all, this Power rules the Sea, it would be an unfriendly act, he says, to hinder its development. Therefore one should refrain from such unfriendly action.

What could one say of such a politician? I think the very least that one could say would be that he stands for a policy of Power—Machtpolitik. Is is not so? Wherever the Power is, in that direction let us turn. This, at the least, seems to emerge from his words. But to-day one does not say so. One does not take one's stand in such a case and frankly say: “I stand for a policy of Power; I will attach myself to the Power which happens to have power.” But on the contrary one says, one defines it thus: “I stand for Right and Freedom and for the Independece of Nations.”

One says these two things side by side. One says that one stands for Right and Freedom of the Nations, and directly side by side with this, one says: “Let us above all attach ourselves to the particular Power which has the power, and commit no unfriendly act in relation to it.”

You see from this how human beings involve themselves in illusions. For I have here put before you the case of the Swedish politician Branting. He, a neutral politician, is the man who spoke in this way. That is the way one carries on a neutral policy, of course. I do not say it as a reproach or to take sides with one or another party. I say it as a pure description of how such things must take their course to-day. One is enthusiastic, needless to say, for Right and Freedom of the Nations, and yet—one stands for a such a policy. One does not confess that one stands for it for the simple reason that one can do no other,—that would be the truth,—but on the contrary one says that one stands for it inspired by the impulses of Right and Freedom for all Nations.

With such things as these we must indeed concern ourselves. It is not enough for anyone to give himself up to the fairy-tales that are going through the world to-day; we must take these things into our consciousness. Only by this means is it possible to attach oneself to the real impulses of evolution which I have described. No age was ever so little enlightened about itself as is the present. No other age stands in such dire need of enlightenment about itself. Think only how proud it was of its great progress in every kind of human thought. Why, they had even succeeded in finding impulses for Social Science, out of Natural Science! I have often spoken to you of the science of social life.

Think for a moment, what is so often said in official quarters to this day on educational and social questions, questions of right and justice and so forth. Try to transplant yourself into the frame of mind in which these people bring forward their supposed infallible truths, while at the same time they would suppress absolutely everything that resounds from any other quarter. Part of what modern humanity believed thus fondly, has led to the event that through the impulses of this humanity,—impulses of Illusion upon the one hand, of Nationality upon the other—five million human beings have been consigned to death during two years and three to three-and-a-half million have been permanently wounded. It was so after two years, and now, considerably more than three years have elapsed. This is only the consequence of the false thoughts that were entertained,—thoughts in which illusion was allied with destructive power. From many another thing that is spoken nowadays about education or questions of right and justice, similar consequences will evolve if it goes on in this way, uninfluenced by spiritual life and being. For in the last resort everything depends on this. To kindle the spiritual forces in the consciousness of mankind is an absolute need for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Our criticism of the opposite, materialistic opinion is but a part of the zeal with which we call to life the spiritual impulses within us. This is the thing that matters. Whatever has to happen among men must also be undertaken by men. If we have made ourselves ready to take our stand where the ray falls, the ray will come in good time; of that you may be certain. This preparation, this making-ready, can, however, only take place through the community. It will be for the individual human beings, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, only so far as the ideas are concerned; but it will depend on the understanding with which communities will receive these ideas.

Hold to this thought, my dear friends.

My dear Friends,

I had intended to make a few remarks from the artistic point of view about the scenes from “Faust” which were to have been performed today. Since, however, on account of illness, the performance is not taking place and the lecture can therefore be independent of it, I shall arrange matters rather differently. My lecture will have to do with the scene to be given next Sunday, but I wish to stress the fact that I shall not be speaking from the standpoint of art, but from quite another point of view. It is more that to the presentation of the scene as Goethean achievement I shall add some Spiritual-Scientific observations that will also in some respect link up with what has already been said here during the autumn.

Anyone allowing this scene—“On the Upper Peneus as Before” to pass before his soul, has an opportunity to look deeply into Goethe's soul, in that this scene—as also the following one which leads to the phantasmagoria of Helen—specially shows how Goethe divined and felt the truths of Spiritual Science even though these truths did not yet come to him in clearly defined ideas. A poet whose understanding did not reach up to the truths of Spiritual Science would certainly never have created these scenes in the way Goethe has done. It would lead us too far even to speak briefly of the path by which Goethe arrived at his insight into Spiritual Science. I can do this some other time. I shall only say enough to make it clear to you that Goethe must have seen certain things in the spiritual world to be able to give this scene the form it has. It is true that what I was explaining to you a few days ago about the evolution of man as a physical-temporal being could not have been known to Goethe in definite ideas. Nor can it be said that there is anything in the course of Goethe's development pointing to definite knowledge that not until the middle of life man first gains, through his bodily organism, the capacity for self-knowledge. From our studies during the past weeks we know that it is only at about the end of his twenties that man, through the forces he develops out of his own bodily organisation, becomes capable of achieving self knowledge. If we wish to learn the truth about these matters, we have to bear in mind that man is really a complicated being. We only understand man by first becoming clear to what extent he is a creature—if I may use a term much assailed by modern science—and that this creature points us back to his creators, his spiritual creators.

Now, by a kind of spiritual chemistry, so to say, we can extract from man what he is solely by virtue of his dependence on his own particular spiritual creators, on those beings among the hierarchies of the cosmic order whose special mission in the universe reaches its culmination in the creation of man, on those beings with whom man, as man, must therefore feel himself quite specially connected. If we separate man out in this way—(we wish our understanding of these things to be exact) we can show him diagrammatically as follows:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Let us suppose that this circle represents man at a given point in his evolution; if we then trace the human being indicated by this circle backyards in the line of his emergence from his spiritual creators we have this stream which I will colour orange. Were we to go back and examine now man has evolved through Moon, Sun and Saturn ages and later through the Earth age, we should find the special characteristics of the several beings of the higher hierarchies, as they are made known to you in my book “Occult Science”. We should discover the working-together, the mutual relations, of these hierarchies; and were we to look deeply enough into this connection of man with the hierarchies, we should perceive how he is, in a sense, the goal of divine creation. I have shown how this is so in a conversation between Capesius and the Hierophant, in the first scene of the second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation.” I have also pointed out there the hazardous side of such knowledge for those who are insufficiently prepared.

But suppose we go on to ask what man would be like in the course of his physical development between birth and death if he were only subjected to the influence of these creators of his? He would then be the being who only becomes ripe for self-knowledge in the physical world at the end of his twenties. For these creative beings set themselves the task of so forming man that in the course of his earthly development he should attain what is to be attained on the basis of his bodily organisation, that organisation that is itself derived from the earthly and thus is akin to earthly substances and to the interplay of earthly forces. I mean that these divine beings intended to give man the opportunity through his bodily organisation to go through a period of sound, all-round preparation for self-knowledge and for the knowledge of the world derived from self-knowledge right up to the end of his twenties. Then, in the second half of his life, they intended to give him the opportunity to pursue this self-knowledge in a very different measure from that in which man, as he now is as earthly man, can pursue it. If man had only first awakened to self-knowledge at the time that the spirits of the hierarchies concerned with him intended, at the end of his twenties, it would admittedly have been late, but he would have attained self-knowledge and the world-knowledge bound up with it in enhanced splendour. He would have been able from his innermost being to give a solution to the question: What am I as man? This under ordinary conditions at the present time he cannot do. e would have had this self-knowledge as insight, as vision, he would not have had to acquire it through abstract concepts.

Neither of these things has come about. In the first half of life we do not find that state of subdued consciousness. If he had it, man, rayed through by higher intelligences and not by his own, in a life not of sleep but of twilight, would build up his bodily organisation in a very different way, in order then to awaken to self-knowledge. But such a twilight condition does not exist. On the contrary, a certain self-knowledge appears comparatively early in man, though not with the radiance originally intended by his creators. Again, the self-knowledge that arises after the middle of life is not the self-knowledge that man's creators intended. And when we ask where the blame lies for this, we come to the other currents influencing man. We come to a stream that does not actually belong to man's nature, but which is, so to say, for the time being associated with him; we come to the Luciferic stream (yellow in diagram), we come to that stream which makes it possible for man to have a certain self-knowledge in the first half of his life, although it is not the luminous self-knowledge just described.

As you know, there is another current which unites for a time with man somewhat later; it is the Ahrimanic stream (blue). This stream prevents man, as he is on earth at present, from attaining in the second half of his life that luminous self-knowledge to which his creators had destined him. According to their intentions, the consciousness of man should have been in a much more enlightened state than the one he actually enters upon during the second half of his life, which is dimmed by ahrimanic influences. Naturally we need not think that luciferic influences are present only in the first half, ahrimanic influences only in the second half of life; they both persist throughout the whole of life. But these two influences are respectively concerned at the times in human life I have mentioned, with what I have just been describing. At other periods they have to do with something else. It is very important that no wrong conclusions should be drawn from what has been said. For instance, no one ought to say he has been told here that in the first half of his life man is luciferic, in the second half, ahrimanic. That would be completely untrue. Such misunderstandings often arise and it is important that no one should be misled by them. That is why over and over again I emphasise that in Spiritual Science we shall strive to speak accurately. Much harm is done by the way in which accurately given information about Spiritual Science is then repeated in public in another form, changed through preference or carelessness.

Thus, man stands in a threefold stream, to only one of which he really belongs. The other two were not originally in human evolution but have united themselves with it for a time. We can even say exactly when these influences entered in; you will find it in my “Occult Science”—the luciferic influence in the Lemurian age, the ahrimanic in the Atlantean age.

Now we cannot say that Goethe definitely knew anything of that phase of development, peculiar to man, beginning in the middle of his life. But he felt, he divined—divined very clearly—that through impulses inherent in the world-order man is a different being in the second half of his life from what he is in the first. And if we look into Goethe's soul-life more deeply than modern superficiality generally desires to do, we see his intense longing to gain something quite exceptional for his own life from the culture of the south—the culture of Italy. And if we follow up what he himself records of the benefits he reaped from the Italian tour, for himself, for his knowledge, for his art, we begin to feel hoe Goethe wished to make the transition into the second half of his life fruitful for himself through a deeply penetrating influence which he believed it impossible to experience by always remaining in his old surroundings. Goethe was conscious that in the forties something takes responsibility for the human soul which throws a very different light upon the nature of man than a man can gain through the human forces of the first half of life. And this knowledge, so clearly divined, flowed into the creation of the second part of his “Faust”. It was always particularly difficult for Goethe to approach the question: How does one acquire self-knowledge? If we follow his development aright, we may see his struggle for self-knowledge in a most interesting, most significant light. And little by little—not in the beginning, when he was still writing the youthful part of Faust, but later, gradually—the creation of Goethe's Faust-figure, and the whole poem, acquired such a stamp that the struggle for human self-knowledge may be said to find in “Faust” its most outstanding expression.

It was in this connection that Goethe thought out the figure of Homunculus, As I said before, I am not speaking to-night from the artistic standpoint but am relating to “Faust” a few remarks out of the essence of Spiritual Science. Thus Goethe thought out the figure of Homunculus in connection with his endeavour to depict in Faust man struggling towards self-knowledge. And what did the Homunculus-figure become under the influence of this preoccupation? The answer is that it came to represent all that man knows about man. What can we know about man by collecting together that knowledge which we have about the substances and forces of the earth? How can anyone imagine that those ingredients of earth-existence surrounding us in the kingdoms of nature can combine to form man? How is it possible to think that? For Goethe this became a burning question.

Remember how, when Schiller made friends with Goethe, he wrote him a most significant letter. I have often quoted this letter because it is characteristic both of the friendship between Goethe and Schiller and of the whole character of Goethe's soul. Schiller writes

“Though from some distance, I have for a long time been watching, with ever increasing admiration, the nature and course of your spiritual life. And I have seen that you are striving, so to say, to gather together all that is offered by the rest of nature, in order at length in your mind to put together man out of the sum-total of nature's works. This is a heroic undertaking before which any other intellect would have quailed. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, an imaginative force enabling you to think of man as made up of the various ingredients of nature would have lived within you from your earliest youth. Since, however, you were born as a Northerner, you have been obliged to produce a spiritual Greece in your soul, and to supply by means of your imagination what did not exist in your surroundings.”

Thus Schiller attributes to Goethe this striving to obtain a knowledge of man by piecing together all the details to be gleaned from a knowledge of the kingdoms of nature. And that is actually the ideal which Goethe had before him. What can man know about man? But then there came to him at certain times the thought that the knowledge of man possible to acquire by earthly science is in truth small, that'll is no scan that comes into being through,this knowledge—only a manikin, a Homunculus. And Goethe was often assailed by the burning, tormenting thought: “We are in the world as men, feeling, thinking and willing as men, but we really only know something about Homunculus, not about Homo. The ideas we form concerning man bear as little relation to what man is in truth as does a little manikin in a glass test-tube”.

And for Goethe this burning question was associated with another: How can that element in knowledge which does not correspond to nature, to cosmic existence, be quickened so that it may, in knowledge at least, grow near to what in reality man is—of which he knows so little that actually it only amounts to knowledge of a Homunculus. That is why Goethe makes Wagner produce this manikin, Homunculus. Then, in the further development of his poem, he undertakes to show what sort of experience a man can have whereby his knowledge of man is widened, so that out of Homunculus there may grow something at least approaching Homo.

Now it was a belief of Goethe's that the only ideas which could be acquired in his day, the ideas which could be acquired from the culture of the North, were not sufficiently pliant and flexible to carry the Homunculus-knowledge further. Goethe believed that one could do better by endeavouring to clothe the knowledge of man that it,was still possible to acquire in one's soul life in such ideas as existed in an age that was nearer nature—such as the Greek age. It, was Goethe's firm belief that, by entering into the style and the form of Greek thought, one receives a deep, significant and vivifying impression, one's ideas acquire an added truth. This feeling lies at the root of his taking Faust to Greece, of his wanting to take him to Greece, to live there as a human being and to acquire Greek culture. Had Goethe been asked to state on his honour—I put it thus strongly on purpose—what he believed the men of his circle actually thought and felt, or had thought and felt, about the Greeks, he would probably have answered: “Oh, I should think more rubbish! They talk of Greek life, but have no ideas with which to grasp it. All that our pundits”—this is the sort of thing Goethe would have said—“all that our pundits think, write and print about Helen of Greece in modern times is just philistine trash, for in spite of it all they know nothing of Helen, nor of any other Greek, man or woman, as the Greeks really were”. But that was precisely what Goethe was striving after—to get nearer Greece in his soul. Hence his Faust had to get nearer Greece and had to live as a man among Greek men. Helen—as a Greek and the most beautiful of Greek women, as an outstanding Greek about whom so much strife and discord had arisen—Helen only supplied the point of contact for this. It the heightening, widening, strengthening of the knowledge of man, of the conception of man, that Goethe wants to accomplish in Faust.

Now in that Goethe kept all this clearly before him, (but as a kind of dim apprehension that became at the same time a torment for him) he was conscious that the abstract, philosophical path to knowledge, the path of science, regarded by many as the only right one, is all the same only one way of knowledge, and he dimly felt that there are many ways,. And whoever believes that Goethe was a rationalistic philistine—as really all upholders of modern science must be, otherwise they would not be genuine scientists, for science in the modern sense is itself pedantic, philistine, and rationalistic—whoever believes that Goethe was this kind of pedantic, rationalistic, philistine, understands nothing of him. He understands nothing at all of Goethe, my dear friends, who believes that he could for a single instant have supposed that, through ordinary scientific reflection any real knowledge could be acquired of the nature of man in his fulness. Goethe knew well that the human soul cannot discover truth merely on the path of thought or even on the path of that activity which takes place on the physical place; he knew that the soul of man has to find its way into reality and truth by several paths. Goethe was well acquainted with that approach to truth which takes a deeper course than the ordinary life of waking consciousness. This conscious, waking life in which our bright ideas run round, this life so highly valued by all the pedants, lies fundamentally very far from all that lives and weaves in the world as the basis of existence. In a certain respect man approaches nearer what lives and weaves below the surface of existence if—but this must not be misunderstood—out of his subconscious he sees and feels the arising, however chaotically, however sporadically, of significant dreams. In former years I have often told you that the content of dreams is of little importance; what is of importance is the inner drama, the connection between dream-life and deep human reality.

In a pamphlet, called “Dream-Fantasy”, a philosopher, Johannes Volkelt, in the seventies of last century, ventured timidly to suggest that man in his dreams comes near the riddle of the worlds. If only he had not later rectified this terrible professorial error by respectable pedantic works on the theory of knowledge! But then he never would have become Professor Johannes Volkelt, nor been allowed to teach philosophy in Basle, Würzburg, Jena, Leipzig. For it is a heinous sin against modern science to hint such a thing as that during his sleep-life man sinks into a real, cosmic stream, and that out of this experience things emerge which to be sure show themselves only in pictures, chaotically, and are therefore not to be accepted in their immediate form, but which nevertheless reveal how man, in the weaving of his sleep, is in a sphere that brings him nearer to the fulness of the living and weaving from which the physically visible springs than do his waking moments.

Now when a man plunges into this world—a world that the man of today only comes to know through his dreams, which do interpret it for him, even if badly—his situation within the entire world-order is different from what it is in ordinary waking consciousness. Of course the dream-life alone does not enable us to perceive the difference between the life in waking consciousness and the life we live down there in the sphere whence the dreams arise. But spiritual science can guide us into this sphere. Down there even language ceases to have its correct significance. That is why it is so difficult to come to an understanding. Down there in that sphere the words which we have formed for use in the sense-world cannot be properly applied to what takes place down there. Take for instance what used to be called the elements. Today we call them physical conditions describing them rather differently, But we can quite well understand if the old names earth, water, air, fire or warmth are used. We know these things from “Occult Science”; we can call what is solid, a solid physical condition, the earthly; what has a fluid physical condition, water; what has such a physical condition that, when it is not enclosed, it expands, we call air; whereas what permeates these three substances we call warmth or fire. Yes, my dear friends, we may call them so when, from the point of view of our waking consciousness, we speak here about our surroundings, because, if I may so express it, the things we denote by these words—earth, air, fire, water—are present with us. But if we plunge into the world out of which dreams are working, there are no such things as earth, air, fire, water, they do not exist; these words applied in the same way as for the world in which we are with our waking consciousness, no longer have meaning. As soon as we enter a different sphere of existence, a sphere that has to be grasped by a different consciousness, we see at once the relativity of these things. There—the things regarded by the ordinary materialistic consciousness as absolute—no longer exist. There earth is not earth. It has no meaning at all to talk of such things when we immerse ourselves in the world that, although also a reality, must be grasped by a quite different consciousness. To be sure, there is something there which may be said to stand midway between air and water; it is experienced in this different consciousness, through quite different forms of thought. Air is not air, water is not water, but there is something midway between air, and water; we might call it a sort of watery vapour, (German – Rauch) still called Ruach in the old Hebrew language. It does not mean the physical vapour or the mist we have now, but this intermediary something between water and air.

And another intermediary thing is there between earth and fire. This you must picture as though our metals were gradually to become so glowing and fiery that at last they become actually nothing but fire, fire through and through. And these things—intermediary between earth and fire and between air and water—are down there in the world out of which dreams come whirling. As you will easily understand we could not exist in that world in our physical body, we could not breathe in that world; we have to enter it with our souls, between falling asleep and waking. With our physical body we could not breathe in that world for there is no air. I have pictured in one of my Mystery Plays (“The Guardian of the Threshold”) a being who can breathe in this world, a being having no need of air, for he breathes light. Such beings may indeed be pictured by one who knows them. But no man may take his physical body into this world, for he could not breathe there and would be consumed by the fire. Nevertheless, man is united with this world, from falling asleep to waking, and out of it spring dreams.

Now this world that man encounters beneath the threshold of his consciousness is quite unlike the world we see today during our waking hours but it is not so unlike those worlds from which the present one has evolved. Former worlds, certainly the Sun-world—and this you can gather from the description in my “Occult Science”the Sun-world was even so formed as a physical world that in it fire-earth, earth-fire and water-air whirled and simmered together, not conveniently separated as they are today. Thus, if we are to grasp world-evolution cosmically and historically, we must picture earlier conditions of our evolution as similar to what we find today when we dive down into the world to which we belong between falling asleep and waking.

These worlds, however, that were formerly physically present, just as now our world is physically present, can only be experienced today in sleep, and no one can penetrate to them unless he imagines what is no longer visible in our present world to be visible and manifest. You cannot think of water-air in the same way as today you have to think of water and air as existing side-by-side. Today you think of water and air as separate. That has come about because the water-air, substantially one in former times, has now been differentiated. Water-air is now separated into the two polaric opposites—water and air. Formerly it was a unity, water-air, but was permeated instead by another pole. Today, man has so to say descended, and has completely lost the other pole of the water-air, instead the water-air has itself separated into the two poles—water and air. If we want to get an idea of what the other pole of the water-air was, we must imagine something having reality also experienced in the world where man is between falling asleep and waking, the world from which dreams arise. But too if we go back to the old Sun-existence, we have to think of the water-air as having had side by side with it something of a spiritual nature, something of the essence of the elemental spirits. You still find the elemental spirits belonging to the water-air in mythology, where echoes of ancient truths still remain. And among the beings associated with the water-air are those that in Greek mythology—or indeed in any ancient mythology—are called Sirens. So that when out of real knowledge we say of the world we are referring to that there are in it water-air and Sirens—that it is composed of water-air and Sirens—we are speaking with as much truth as when we say of our external world that it contains water and air. Thus the Sirens belong to those elemental beings who are the other pole of water-air.

The other thing in the old Sun existence was earth-fire or fire-earth, Whereas today we have earth that has been pushed down below the level of the water, with fire or heat above it, formerly these two were one. And among those beings who were related polarically to the earth-fire as are fire or warmth to earth today, is that being whom Goethe, following the Greeks, called Seismos. By bringing Sirens into the relevant scene, Goethe points at the same time very clearly to their connection with water; not however with water as it is today, for that has grown denser and is only one pole of the old water-air. The Sirens feel themselves related to water only in a spiritual way. If we think of water as the old water-air, the Sirens belong to that water as air belongs to the water of today. And as the air produces chaotic sounds in the wind, so the spiritual element in the Sirens produces what belongs to water or water-air; the spiritual element is combined with water-air as air is with our water. And the activity of the Seismos, regarded as cosmic force, is the part played by fire in nature's economy. This is what the myth means, this is what Goethe means. And his presentation of the matter makes everyone acquainted with the reality feel that Goethe had a dim apprehension of these things. He knew that things are thus in the world we enter between falling asleep and waking, the world we find again if with understanding we turn our gaze back to the primal sources of our present existence.

But consider, my dear friends, what a shock you would have if you were suddenly in full consciousness—not as in dreams but quite consciously—transported into an element, into a sphere, where you had no solid earth beneath your feet, a sphere where everything that should be earth was fire, and where there was no earth! There you could even melt if you wished, and become hot or cold in the element of fire. And in the water-air, where you could not breathe but only experience alternations of light and darkness—think how alarmed you would necessarily be at first by the insecurity into which you had plunged, in all this surging and whirling. What then entered into man in those cosmic epochs when the earth solidified (as must once have happened, for at one time men had been living in this surging and weaving element I have described) so that he too could stand firm? What was it that took hold of man? The Sphinx-nature! This gives the firm centre of gravity in the surging element. The same force that gave to the earth the form whereby it has become this solid planet on which man can stand, at the same time wove into man what can be described, pictured, as the nature of the Sphinx.

Now in this scene Goethe introduces what can actually only be experienced between falling asleep and waking. And he believed this can best be presented not in the concepts of our modern waking consciousness, but in Greek concepts. He finds them more flexible and more suitable. Therefore he transfers the whole scene to Greece, thinking that with ideas taken from Greek nature he will be better able to characterise all that man experiences today between falling asleep and waking, all that he experienced in ancient times when air was not opposed to water, nor fire to earth, but when the Sirens formed the opposite pole to water-air, and some being like the Seismos formed the opposite pole to earth-fire or fire-earth.

So now he allows this world to make its appearance in his “Faust”. And why does he do this? It is all a question of proceeding from Homunculus to Homo, the point is that Homunculus should be given a prospect of not remaining merely Homunculus but of becoming Homo—of understanding enough to become man. Therefore his experience of the world has to be enlarged. And so aptly does Goethe bring this about that when he introduces Homunculus to this ancient cosmic world he at once places Sphinxes in it. “The Sphinxes have taken their seat”, and these form the solid element. There is a surging all around that, in these days, could not be suffered, for mortal terror would assail mankind. Everything is surging. But though the whole of hell break loose when the spirits behave as the Sirens and Seismos are doing it is pointed out that man has found his foothold—his centre of gravity:

“What a sickening thrill hereunder!”

Here is pictured the world of which I have been speaking,

“What a dire and dreadful thunder!
What a heaving, what a quaking,
Rocking to and fro and shaking,”

Were you to plunge into this world you would soon experience the ‘rocking to and fro’.

“What unbearable annoy.”

But now comes the reflection:

“Yet we” (the the Sphinxes) “budge not, though the nether
Hell should all burst forth together.”

Into the ideas of men something of such a conception perpetually flows. Men do not know it, but their ideas are influenced by what dwells at the foundations of existence. And this is the cause of many fanciful theories. The theory that the mountain ranges were formed by fire, is quite right for more ancient epochs of cosmic evolution, but this was earth-fire, fire-earth, not fire as we know it. This has introduced an element of confusion into modern ideas. And from a higher point of view, most modern ideas are confused. They can only be understood—however strange this may sound, my dear friends, it is true—these ideas, these theories can often only be understood if they are translated. They are heard in the ordinary, common-place, philistine language of men; they first begin to have meaning when translated into the language that must have been used between falling asleep and waking, for then it becomes clear that these theories bear within them faint indications of earlier earth-epochs. And the only way to understand the scene beginning here, is to realise that Goethe wanted to show the experience man would have were he conscious from falling asleep to waking, an experience that would develop in him a consciousness of a former cosmic condition of the earth.

Think how clearly Goethe must have foreseen the knowledge of Spiritual Science, to have presented these things so correctly. And that is not all. Homunculus is to be introduced to this world. Goethe seems to say—if once more I may be permitted to express it rather strongly—“Now when I turn to the ideas of philistine science, I naturally find nothing able to make a Homo of Homunculus; I can get nothing from that quarter. But if I make use of such ideas as can be acquired when a man consciously experiences the world he enters between falling asleep and waking, and, absorbing them into my soul, embody them into the scene of ‘Faust’, then perhaps I shall be more successful in acquiring, a wider knowledge of man, so that Homunculus may become Homo.”—Therefore Goethe makes Homunculus plunge, not into the philistine, scientific world experienced by man today, but into another world, introduced here, the world man experiences from the time he falls asleep to the time he wakes. In that world a man experiences so many things; curiously enough, he experiences something of how unequal in their evolutionary stages are the beings who live close to us in the cosmos. We understand nothing, literally nothing, of this world, when we consider these beings side-by-side, giving them all an equal value. When we observe ants or bees, or the whole unique insect-world in general, then, my dear friends, we arrive at the conclusion (I have put this before you at other times, in other places, as the view of Spiritual Science) that these are either forms left behind from former epochs, or forms anticipating what is to come later—like the bees, the hive of bees; they are beings projected into our epoch, though by their form they actually belong to another.

You see, when scientific nit-wits describe the world—as for instance Forel who made such a study of ants, then one finds most amazing things said. For if these people cling to their crude scientific methods, and never come to Spiritual Science, of course they are unable to give any explanation of what is really to be wondered at in this world—this world permeated everywhere by reason; not over the single ant, but over the ant-hill as a whole, over the whole ant-world, over the whole bee-world, cosmic reason, so much wiser than brain reason, is outpoured. And, in a certain respect these all really belong to a former world. Just think how aptly Goethe describes it when he brings in the ants, the emmets; and when he makes a mountain arise, as it was in an earlier cosmic evolution, and as one sees it in another sphere of reality, during the time between falling asleep and waking, he makes ants appear and begin to busy themselves with what the mountain has brought into existence. But, as companions for these ants, he makes other strange beings. For in fact the ants together with pretty well the whole of the insect-world constitute a race that does not properly belong to the earth as it is at present. This world of the ants feels itself as an anachronism in the present world. The ants have not much in common with it and have no real companions. The other animals are of quite another kind. There are tremendous differences between the soul-spiritual quality of the insect-race, for example, the ants, and that of other animals. The companions of the ants are actually not the physical animal-forms of today, but spiritual elemental beings that Goethe introduces as Pygmies, as dwarfs, as Dactyls; though the ants have succeeded in acquiring a physical nature on earth, the pygmies and the dactyls are more closely akin to them than to the beings of the present day. Thus, Goethe knows of this ant-race belonging to an ancient cosmic epoch, and introduces it covertly into this scene.

Now how has this world of ours arisen? As you know, its present condition has developed out of the old. We have now spoken of the old condition, and the present one only needs to be mentioned, for it is all that surrounds us on the physical earth. But this present earth has not come about without a struggle. It was through a mighty cosmic conflict that the old developed into the new. And the question arises: Can one observe this struggle? The answer is that we observe it when we can become conscious of waking from a very vivid dream to a condition of half-wakefulness; when we are aroused from a state of deep sleep to one less deep, and though not quite awake, are on the way to being so. We are approaching the sense-world but have not completely left the world below, and we find ourselves in a struggle closely resembling the conflict that went on when the old world was changing into the new. Again Goethe presents it all so faithfully that, while to express the old world-order he makes a dream arise, he also represents the waking from the dream by describing a struggle in the cosmos. The present comes into conflict with all that belongs to the past. The pygmies belonging to the old world come into conflict with the herons belonging to the waters of the present. The sight of this conflict as it takes place is at the same time an awakening. And Goethe makes it so clear that we are concerned with an awakening that he even alludes to what often happens on waking: one hears something that appears to be still in the dream spiritually, in imaginative picture form, and which then passes over into external reality—the coming of the cranes of Ibycus that appear in this scene. In the first part of the scene, Goethe shows us what can be experienced in dream-consciousness when it is fully developed, something which points to earlier earth-conditions; and this he believed he could more easily accomplish with Greek ideas than with those of the present day.

And now, for Homunculus. He has not yet got so far as this, for the man of today is not able to become fully conscious of what takes place in that lower sphere. Goethe intimates this quite clearly. Man today is hampered by fear, by anxiety, even though these may be unconscious. I have often spoken of this. Homunculus will not venture into that world and says so quite clearly. When he makes his re-appearance in the scene, he declares that he will not go in; he wishes to rise, that is, he wishes to become Homo, but into that world he refuses to enter.

“From place to place I flit and hover,
And fain would I in the best sense exist.
Impatiently I long my glass to shiver.
To risk me though I do not list
in aught I yet have seen. ...”

Thus it is a dangerous world into which Homunculus will not plunge. He would like to take the step from Homunculus to Homo in a less perilous world.

Now, had someone asked Goethe “Then you don't think much use can be made of the dream-world, the sleep-world, in changing Homunculus to Homo in the human head; but what about philosophy? Philosophers reflect upon the riddle of the world. What about philosophy? How would it be if Leibnitz or Kant were asked about true manhood?” Then Goethe would have put on a very sceptical expression—very sceptical indeed. He ascribed all kinds of good qualities to modern philosophers, but he did not believe them capable of penetrating into the being of man, of contributing anything to enable Homunculus to become Homo in a human life-time. Here too he thought one would get nearer by using Greek ideas. Goethe was well acquainted with the life of ancient Greece, with the times in which Anaxagoras and Thales lived. Their ideas came nearer the old Mystery outlook, they still retained some knowledge of those spiritual worlds from which for man only dreams arise. For this reason he makes Homunculus meet two ancient Greek philosophers, of whom the one, Anaxagoras, still knew a great deal of the old Mystery-wisdom, especially of the secrets of the fire-earth. Into the thinking, into the wise philosophy of Anaxagoras, ideas still rose up of the ancient Mysteries connected with what happened in the fire-earth.

With Thales, too, there were still recollections of old ideas, associated with the secrets of the water-air; but at the same time Goethe makes it clear that the conceptions of Anaxagoras though loftier, are becoming superseded, and that with Thales the new age is beginning. The history of the new philosophy, the history of philosophy in general, begins rightly with Thales. I have mentioned this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. He is, it may be said, the original philistine, as Goethe's shows him here; he has to introduce the philistine outlook of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that indeed in a certain, but only shadowy, way is connected with the secrets of the water-air.

Thus, in the first part of this scene in which he is describing things out of experiences of the dream-world,the world of Seismos, to which the pygmies belong, Goethe is describing all that is associated with the creative forces of Seismos. And the element of water that he uses to make the transition to the present time, describing it not as water-air, but as water, with herons and so on—this element of water he places in contrast to fire; water versus fire, actually water-air versus fire-earth. And water and fire come into conflict—pygmies versus herons. And it is the same battle, only in another sphere, transferred into the sphere of reason, that takes place between Anaxagoras, the philosopher of fire, and Thales, the philosopher of water, as has previously taken place between the pygmies as representing the earth or earth-fire, and the herons, as representing the water or water-air.

So good is the parallelism that, in this second stage of his representation, Goethe correctly shows how Homunculus, who has not ventured himself below into the subconscious element with a view to becoming man now takes refuge above in the conscious. He wants to learn how to become Homo from the philosophers, from those who would still preserve in consciousness much that should be experienced in the subconscious. But it turns out that, because the philosophers derive their impulses from different spheres of experience, they do not agree, and themselves come into conflict, the same conflict of ideas as those that lie at the foundation of cosmic conflicts. There is the same conflict between the views of Anaxagoras and those of Thales as between the pygmies and the herons—the very same.

And what is Goethe doing? He first pictures what goes, on down in the unconscious world, and then leads up to the world of consciousness but associates this world with the recollections arising from the unconscious, recollections specially clear in Anaxagoras. This is why Thales looks upon Anaxagoras as a visionary.

But we have already had to do with a second stratum, with the sphere in which the waking consciousness too is intermingled, albeit in a more or less spiritual fashion, or as I have described it, half-asleep and half awake. This is the second layer of experience that Goethe has shown. And it is very significant that he gives what is experienced in this sphere in a different form from that in which he gave the first. He makes the scene open with the Sirens. We are in the world of sleep, the world of dreams; to be in this world, there is no necessity to do anything; Goethe, therefore, simply places it before us. Then we wake up out of this world, and in waking come to our ordinary-consciousness. For a special reason Goethe has combined Lucifer and Ahriman into the one Mephistopheles. This waking he shows in the experience of Mephistopheles, and it is interesting that, as long as Mephistopheles represents the condition of being but half-awake, he is still down below, experiencing it through the Greek Lamiae. Then the scene rises into conscious life, But if Homunculus-Mephistopheles is now to enter fully conscious life, the life of reason, the man must rouse himself, he must pull himself together, and wake out of dreams to reality. Hence, when he wakes, Mephistopheles meets the Oread, who indicates very clearly in Goethe's language that this is so,

“Up hither,up; My mount is old,
And still loth keep its primal mould,
Honour the rude cliff-stair ascending,
Last-spur of Pindus, far extending.
Already thus firm-stablished
I stood as Pompey o'er me fled.
That fabric of a dream will fade
At cockcrow with the nightly shade.”

While sleep-consciousness is being shaken into waking consciousness, the Oread points out that a transition is now taking place from the world called the world of illusion—though in one way it is, as I have shown, a world of reality—a transition to the world where mountains stand firm, and everything does not rock up and down. And Goethe does not hesitate to indicate quite clearly how one wakes out of this world. Think how often we are wakened out of the world from which dreams surge by the crowing of a cock. Goethe makes it perfectly clear that we are coming up into the waking world where philosophers have to hold forth, where through what they have to say it is expected that Homunculus will become man.

There is much I could add, perhaps tomorrow. In the meantime I shall only draw your attention to the fact that, after we have done with this world, Goethe still points us to a third. And just as it was the mountain nymph, the Oread, who gave the first indication of this waking world, so now it is another nymph, that is, an elemental being, who does the arousing. The tree nymph, the Dryad, leads Mephistopheles to a third layer of consciousness, in which understanding and clairvoyance are united: unconscious, conscious, super-conscious. And, in a certain respect, Goethe already points to the world we also would point to through Spiritual Science. Only, he does so in a quite unique way. The beings whom Mephistopheles finds next are the Phorkyads.

From our coming performance you will see what pleasant, beautiful beings these Phorkyads are, and particularly what an impressive, heart-stirring language they speak! And yet, anyone realising what experiences a man must be prepared to meet, on consciously winning through to the spiritual world, will understand this meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads.

This matter cannot be completely dealt with in one lecture; we will speak further about it tomorrow.

What yesterday I particularly wanted to make clear in connection with Goethe's is “Faust” was that more goes to the making of man's being than can be known or fathomed either by the understanding or by other forces of the human soul. Goethe himself felt deeply that the spiritual forces,that can be developed today in man's conscious life, cannot go so far as man by nature reaches. Those who believe that what is today called science needs only to be extended in order to know, to a certain measure, the possible and the impossible, simply say: It is true that, with what science offers today, one gains only a very limited knowledge of man. But this science will be widened, it will press on over further and further, and then we shall come increasingly near to the knowledge of man.

This is a very short-sighted outlook and is untrue. Knowledge of man does not depend upon whether the scientific outlook accepted today extends more and more widely, but to our having recourse to forces and faculties for knowledge different from any of those applied by modern science. However far modern science may advance on its own lines, what Goethe felt to be unknowable within the being of man can, in no case, ever be penetrated by it.

All science, my dear friends, all officially accepted science that deals with the spiritual, in reality relates only to earthly being—what has being on the earth-planet. What is called science today can never pronounce judgment on anything beyond the processes of the earth-planet. But man is not earthly man alone. As earth-man he has behind him the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and within him is the germinal basis of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions. Science can know nothing of the different planetary life-forms beyond the earthly; for the laws of science apply only to what is earthly. Man in his entirety, therefore, cannot be known by these laws; he can only be know if knowledge, be extended beyond what is earthly.

Now yesterday I pointed out how man exists in states of consciousness lying, as it were, both below and above the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Below the threshold of ordinary consciousness lies much from the regions of which dream experiences spring. But beneath this threshold of consciousness there also lies a very great deal of what a men experiences in waking, life, between waking and falling asleep. For even a little reflection will show you that men would know far more about their dreams if they exerted themselves to know a little more about waking. If they would make an effort to know something about being awake, they would find that, during this waking time, they do a great more dreaming then they suppose. The fixed and solid boundary between waking and sleeping is really only apparent. We might say that not only do men dream during their waking hours, they sleep too—sleep as regards a very great many things. As we all know, we are in a genuinely waking condition only as regards our ideas and part of our feelings, while the greater part of our life of feeling, and above all of our life of will, is wrapped in dreams and sleep. Sleep-life projects itself into waking life. We could be far clearer about dream-life, if we tried to perceive the distinction between those ideas that surge to and fro, evoking all kinds of images as they come and go, ideas that might easily be mistaken for dreams, and those other ideas, in which man is active with his whole will. Only in a small part of the whole world of human ideas does a man find that he uses his will to connect one idea with another; whereas, in his waking life, very often there are moments when he abandons himself to the flow and the caprice of his ideas. Consider how, when you give yourself up in this way to the flow of your ideas, one idea calls up another, how you recall things long forgotten. You begin with an idea which has to do with the present, and this evokes long-forgotten experiences. That is a process often not very distinct from dreaming. Because men have so little inner, technical thinking power, with which rightly to follow their daily waking life, few are able to set the right value on sleep-life and the dream-life arising from it. Nevertheless, my dear friends, we know there are scientifically conceived theories about dreams that maintain something like the following. Freud's school and others, mostly, though not all disciples of the psycho-analysts, say of dreams that they are images evoked in man by certain wishes in his life not having been fulfilled. A man goes throughout life wishing all kinds of things, but—say these people—it is undeniable that many of our wishes are not fulfilled. Then, when consciousness is dimmed, these wishes appear before the soul, and because they cannot be fulfilled in reality, they are fulfilled in idea. So that in the opinion of many people today dreams are wishes fulfilled in phantasy. I should like the people who maintain this just to consider how they manage to dream they have been beheaded. All such things, so often today forming the content of theories, are terribly one-sided. And men's heads are bound to be full of this one-sidedness unless they turn to the investigations of Spiritual Science—investigations into worlds unknown both to the external world of the senses and to external intellectual thinking, and yielding conclusions beyond the grasp of human senses or human intellect.

From what was said yesterday, however, you can gather one thing concerning dreams with the utmost surety, namely, that in them something is living and weaving which is connected with our human past, with the past when we had an existence still associated with earth-fire and water-air. While unconscious in sleep, to a certain extent we call back our past. Today with our brain consciousness and our ordinary free-will, we are not in the position consciously to transport ourselves into that world. While passing through the earlier stages of our evolution we were indeed unconscious or subconscious. Yet relatively it is not particularly difficult to have this experience. If you follow up your dream life, you will certainly find it extraordinarily difficult to give a clear interpretation of your dream pictures. The way they follow one after another is generally completely chaotic. But this chaotic character is only superficial; below the surface man is living in an element that is by no means chaotic, it is merely different, totally different, from the experiences of waking life. We shall immediately see the profound difference if we are clear in just one case as to how far dream-life differs from waking life. It would be very unpleasant if our relations with other people were the same in waking life as they are in dreams. For in dreams we are aware of a bond uniting us with almost all those karmically connected with us; we experience a link with all the human beings with whom we have any karmic connection. From the moment you begin to fall asleep till you wake, a force goes forth from you to innumerable people, and from innumerable people forces come to you. I cannot say that you speak, for speaking is only learnt in waking day life, but if you will not misunderstand me, if you will apply what I am going to say to the communications we have in sleep, then you will know what I mean by saying: In sleep you speak to innumerable people and they speak to you. And what you experience in your soul during your sleep is imparted to you by innumerable people; and what you do during your sleep is to send thoughts to innumerable people. The union between men in sleep is very intimate. It would be highly distressing if this were continued into waking life. You see, it is the beneficent act of the Guardian of the Threshold that he hides from man what is beneath the level of human consciousness. In sleep, as a rule, you know if anyone is lying, you know as a rule if anyone has evil thoughts about you. On the whole, men know one another in sleep comparatively well, but with dimmed consciousness. That is all covered up in waking consciousness, and it must be so, for the simple reason that man would never attain the ego-conscious thinking he is to learn during his earth-mission, nor be able to manage the free will he is to acquire, if he were to continue to live as he lived during the periods of Saturn, Sun, and especially the Moon period. Then, in his external life, he lived as he now lives from falling asleep to waking.

But now we come to something else significant. Out of the unconscious life between falling asleep and waking, dreams emerge. Why then are they not a true picture of life below the threshold of consciousness? Ah! were these dreams direct and true reflections, they would be every possible thing. In the first place they would impart significant knowledge concerning our relation to the world and to men; they would also be stern monitors. They would speak dreadfully severely to our conscience about the various things in life about which we are so willing to give ourselves up to illusion. I might almost say that we are protected from the effect these dreams might have upon us if they were true reflections of life below the threshold of consciousness—we are protected by our waking life permeating us with forces so strongly that a shadow is cast over the whole life of dreams. Thus, we carry the ideas, the images, of waking life into our dream-life, into the life of sleep, and through this dreams arise. Suppose, for instance, you were to dream of some personality who took it upon himself to impress upon you that you had done something really tactless—unfitting. That happens sometimes. Others, too, might admonish us during sleep, and might speak to our conscience. The experiences and customs of waking life have given you the wish—I might even say the strong desire—not to listen to this; during sleep you don't want to hear anything this person says to you. Well then, the wish is transformed into a darkening of experience. But if at the same time, there is such intense activity of the soul that the picture surges up, then something else from waking life is superimposed upon what you were to have experienced as a picture, something said by a kind friend to whom you would rather listen than to the admonisher—What a splendid fellow you are, always ready to will and do what is best and most pleasant!—Sometimes, from waking life and its reminiscences, the very opposite can be hung over what is being experienced. Actually, waking life is the cause of all the illusions and deceptions arising during the life of dreams.

Furthermore it is possible for a man today, in the present cycle of evolution, to come to a knowledge of Spiritual Science. There are, I know, many who do so and say: I have been studying Spiritual Science for many years, and yet am no whit advanced. I am told that I can achieve this or that through Spiritual Science, but it does not help me forward.—I have often emphasized that this thought is not the right one. Spiritual Science brings progress to everyone, even when it does not develop an esoteric life. The thoughts of Spiritual Science on themselves bring progress. But we must be careful about subjective experiences that take place really in the soul, for it is strange that what springs up as new, in the path of anyone beginning to study Spiritual Science, in its picture character is, at first, no different from the world of dreams. What we experience, my dear friends, when we become anthroposophists, appears to differ very little from the world of dreams. But a more subtle differentiation shows a most important distinction between ordinary dreams and those perceptions that flow through spiritual life, when consciously admitted into thought.

Much that is chaotic may also appear in the dream-pictures experienced in the soul of a spiritual scientist. But if these pictures are analysed according to the guidance Spiritual Science can give, they will be found to become, especially as they progress ever truer reflections of man's inner experience. And we must pay heed to this layer of experience, hidden as it is from ordinary understanding and from the ordinary life of the senses. This experience runs its course like a meditation, a meditative dream, yet is full of meaning and, rightly regarded, throws much light on spiritual secrets. We must mark how it gradually creeps into the life of ordinary ideas—this layer of life that closely resembles dreams, but that can lead us into the spiritual world. But we must not merely look at its single pictures, we must look at the meaningful course these pictures take. If we pay attention to such things, we come to the differentiation of the three layers of consciousness which I showed you yesterday. Goethe divined it in a beautiful way. One of these layers of consciousness appears, without any help of ours, when we dream in the ordinary way; if we are not interpreters of dreams, if we are not superstitious but try honestly to find what lies behind the dream-pictures, then this dream-world will be able to reveal that, before these earth-lives, as men we passed through earlier stages of evolution.

And then we have the ordinary waking day consciousness we know, or at least think we know. We know the fact of its existence, we do not always venture to explain it fully but we know it exists.

The third layer is where supersensible knowledge enters in. For the reasons already mentioned, supersensible knowledge is of course something for which man has to strive, both now and into the future.

I pointed out to you yesterday how, in the first half of the scene in the scene in the second part of Faust, which we are now to consider, Goethe embodies the characteristic features of dream-life. And the moment the Oread begins to speak to Mephistopheles, and the philosophers appear, we have to do with the world of ordinary daytime reality. The moment the Dryads point out the Phorkyads to Mephistopheles, we are dealing with a reference to conscious supersensible knowledge. Goethe is directing his thoughts and ideas to the three layers of consciousness when he asks himself the question: How will Homunculus, to whom human knowledge is accessible, become a Homo?—Not through the ordinary knowledge of the understanding of the senses, but only by having recourse to other layers of consciousness. For man in his being is wider than the earth, and intelligence and the senses are adapted only to earthly things. But we explained yesterday how the equilibrium of the Sphinx fails when man plunges into the world of antiquity, how man really feels insecure in it, how Homunculus feels himself insecure. For man knows little more about himself—forgive me but this is true—he knows little more about himself than he does about a Homunculus; and about a Homo he knows nothing. And Homunculus, as Goethe pictures him, does not enter into all the whirl of the Sirens, the Seismos, and so on, because he is afraid of the stormy, surging element into which man dives when he forsakes the world of the senses to enter the world from which dreams arise. Homunculus does not dare to enter there, but wants to find an easier way to become Homo. He is on the track of two philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, from whom he hopes to learn how it is possible to put more into his human nature that can't be given him in a laboratoryby a Wagner. This is what he wants. We already know that Goethe had little hope of what could be experienced through the new philosophers, and had no wish at all to test people's patience by, perhaps, taking Homunculus to Königsberg to get information from Kant on how to become a complete human being, how to widen human nature. But Goethe sought to live himself into the world of the Greeks, believing that by so living in their more pliable and flexible ideas, he could grasp human life out of another layer of consciousness better than through what the more recent philosophers could produce out of understanding and the consciousness of the senses. Thus, he does not introduce Homunculus into the society of Kant, or of Leibnitz, Hume or Locke, but brings him into the company of those philosophers who came nearer the older outlook, the outlook of the ancient Mysteries, where something of man's nature could be known, if not with such clearly experienced consciousness as today, yet with a more all-embracing consciousness. But, at heart, Anaxagoras and Thales our only imitators of the old Mystery wisdom. Everything said by Anaxagoras in this scene, however, goes to show that it is he who has the more knowledge of ancient Mystery wisdom. Thales is really the inaugurator, the initiator, the beginner, of the new tendency in science, and knows but little of the old secrets. Naturally he knows more than his later philistine followers because he lived nearer the time of the ancient Mysteries, but he knows less than Anaxagoras. From what he says we can gather that Thales can only give information about what occurs in the world of the senses around him, how mountain ranges and such physical features were formed by slow and gradual processes. You might think it was Lyell, the modern geologist, speaking. Anaxagoras would explain the present out of the past, explain the earthly from what went before, when earth was not yet earth. He wants to find his explanation in those times to which, in their nature, the ants, the comets, and also the Pigmies belonged. I referred to this yesterday. Anaxagoras lives entirely in that world which today is a supersensible, or if you like, subsensible world, without knowledge of which, however, we cannot understand what has to do with the senses. Anaxagoras here reflects one of Goethe's deep convictions. For Goethe has put this point beautifully into one of his aphorisms, where he says: “What no longer arises, we cannot think of as arising. What has already arisen, we cannot understand”. And in another place: “Reason as applied to what is becoming, understanding to what has become”.

What Thales sees around him is what has become. Anaxagoras enters into all that has gone before the becoming—the actual arising. Hence Goethe distinguishes strictly between understanding that is directed to what is nowadays regarded as the object of science, and reason that extends beyond the obvious and intellectual, to the supersensible, even the supersensible that held sway before the existing conditions of the earth. In Anaxagoras, Goethe sees the representative of a knowledge, a science, that devotes itself to what is still coming into being, and is at home and all that is done by Pigmies, that is to say, at home in all that such beings do that certainly today develop a physical existence, but like the emmets, for example, really belonged by nature to a previous age.

So when Anaxagoras meets with Homunculus' request, he would like to give him the opportunity to enrich human nature through his own (Anaxagoras') knowledge; he wants to take Homunculus into the world of the Pigmies, the emmets, and so forth, and even wants to make him king there. It is already clear to Anaxagoras that the world of which Thales speaks, the world of present conditions, cannot be much help in changing Homunculus into Homo. Could entrance be made into the world of becoming, however, into the world preceding ours, something might be achieved towards that end. But Homunculus is undecided: “What says my Thales?” He still thinks he will not venture into that world. When he encountered it as a dream-world, he dared not enter it, and now it confronts him as the thought of Anaxagoras he still does not summon up sufficient courage, or at least he would first have Thales' advice. And Thales deters him from plunging into the world of Anaxagoras' thought. What kind of world is this? Fundamentally, it is the world of the ancient Mysteries, but flattened, levelled down, for human understanding. It is the shadow form of the concepts of the ancient Mysteries. That is why they cannot hold their own against the world. If we have real, living concepts of becoming, we can arrive at an understanding of this world—grow into it. But Anaxagoras' shadow concepts are no match for Thales' objections, for these come from the present sense-world. And just as fleeting dreams, that are reflections of higher spiritual worlds, fade away from man when a cock crows or a door slams, so everything in the thought-world of Anaxagoras fades when it meets other thoughts drawn from the present world of the senses. Thales has only to draw attention to the presence of the sense-world, and he does this very forcibly. As the present world kills the preceding world that arises before us in dreams, so do the cranes strike dead the Pigmies and the emmets. This is merely an image. Anaxagoras first turns to the world that re-appears in the vague experience of dreams. When he is obliged to realise that this world will be of no advantage to Homunculus, he then turns to the higher world. To begin with, in wonderful words, he invokes among heavenly phenomena, all that has remained of a previous period of he earth—he invokes the Moon. After he has widened his thoughts and ideas concerning what is left over from the Moon period—emmets, pigmies, creatures of a lower kind, and all this has proved useless to Homunculus, he looks upward to where the Moon has still remained from the old Moon period.

Think how clearly in this scene Goethe actually points to all these secrets lying at the basis of earthly evolution. He even makes Anaxagoras address an invocation to the Moon, out of the ancient Mystery-wisdom. It is a wonderful passage in which Anaxagoras turns toward the Moon. It shows most distinctly how, in Anaxagoras, Goethe was wishing to portray a personality standing within the spiritual world but only with his understanding, the understanding that only studying the present can never reach the spiritual at all, but, in Anaxagoras, still preserves the spiritual out of the old Mysteries. Anaxagoras says:

“The powers subterene erstwhile adoring,
This crisis in, I turn above, imploring,
O Thou, that agest not eternally,
Three-named, three-formed, enthroned supernally,
Thee in my people's woe I call on Thee!
Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom-lightener [or bosom-widener], deeply pensive one!
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty intensive one!
Open thy shadows' awful gulf alone!
Thine ancient might without a spell make known.”

But he has still only shadows; instead of achieving anything for Homunculus, he perceives how from the Moon desolation falls upon the earth, and how all the life still left there is destroyed by a phenomenon of the elements. As being characteristic of Anaxagoras it is significant that he addresses the Moon, this remnant of a previous period of the earth, as “Luna, Diana, Hecate ...”

For Anaxagoras, therefore, the Moon is not a unity but a trinity. In so far as it fulfils its course above in the heavens, it is Luna. In so far as it is active in the earth itself, it is Diana. The forces working cosmically through the Moon as it circles the heavens, have—one might say—for brothers and sisters the earthly forces; the Moon is not only present cosmically, it exists also in an earthly way. The same forces that are cosmically associated with the circling Moon in the heavens, also live and weave through what is earthly, and belong to significant subconscious forces in man. They work in man's nature and belong to forces in him that are subconscious but important. What works within the earth through man having a certain relation to Nature out of his subconscious, that never comes to complete consciousness, was called by the Greeks Diana. Diana is generally said to be the goddess of the chase. Certainly she is that too, because this subconscious holds sway in the pleasures of the chase; it does so, however, in countless other human feelings and will-impulses. Diana is not only goddess of the chase, she is the working, creating goddess of all half unconscious, half subconscious striving, such as is gratified in hunting. Man does much of this kind in life, and this is one of the ways.

Then there dwells in man, but also especially in the earth, a third figure, the figure of Hecate, the sub-earthly state of the Moon. It is from within the earth, from what is sub-earthly in it, that those forces work upwards, which—so far as the Moon is a heavenly body, work in her from above downwards. All that the man of today knows of this Moon is the abstract mineral ball he believes to revolve out there, round the earth in four weeks. The Greeks knew a threefold Moon—Luna, Diana, Hecate. And being a microcosm is an image of every trinity, and image of Luna, Diana, Hecate, as the threefold Moon. And we have learnt to know the threefold man. We know the man of the head; this man of the head, since he is the product of the periods of Saturn, Sun, and Moon, the product of all previous ages, can be brought into relation with the heavenly survival, with Luna. So that the head in man would, as a microcosm, correspond to the macrocosm Luna. The man of the centre, the breast, would correspond to Diana; it is in the heart that those subconscious impulses arise of which Diana is the goddess. And all that plays out of the extremity-man and is continued into the sex-man, all the dark, purely organic, bodily feelings and impulses, prevailing in the human being, come from the sub-earthly power of Hecate. And Goethe lets all this sound forth, making it all quite clear for those who wish to hear. To the realm of Hecate belongs, for instance, Empusa who appears in this scene among the Lamiae around Mephistopheles. The Lamiae express rather what belongs to Diana, whereas, in Empusa, all that belongs to the sub-earthly is working, all that dwells microcosmically in the lower nature of man, and is to be awakened in Mephistopheles. This is what Goethe makes ring out for us.

Anaxagoras wishes to show his science to better advantage than he did when alluding to the earthly, to earthly survivals, to the emmets, his myrmidons as he calls them. He turns to the threefold Moon that as macrocosm is the same as man as microcosm. And we ask: Had Goethe a presentiment that, in the threefold Moon, the head-man, chest-man, and limb-man were microcosmically present? Well, my dear friends, read the following lines:

“Thou bosom-widener, (Diana)
Profoundly pensive one, (Luna)
Thou tranquil brightener, mighty, intensive one!” (Hecate)

Here you have, fully expressed by Goethe and made obvious by his description of the middle one as “breast-widener”, the three qualities of Luna, Diana, and Hecate, in so far as these three also apply to threefold man.

You see, my dear friends, there are good grounds for maintaining that Goethe's foreseeing knowledge penetrated deeply in the truths on Spiritual Science. What, however, is written in a work like Goethe's Faust has to be taken in its true character. It when you consider Goethe's characteristic attitude with its foreseeing perception of the truths of Spiritual Science, that you can understand how in a certain sense he repeatedly felt the spiritual, the supersensible—but never the less as something uncanny. As I said yesterday, he lived within his northern world, and felt in sympathy with what this environment offered him in the way on ideas and concepts. However great a genius a man may be, he con only have the same concepts as his fellows; he can combine them differently but he cannot have different concepts. The two layers of consciousness, the subconscious and the superconscious, cannot be approached in this way. The ordinary philistine, my dear friends, can make nothing of all this, and is glad if he is not obliged to deal with the other layers of consciousness. But Goethe, who strove with every fibre of his soul, to penetrate the being of man, often felt it a grievous human limitation that he should have no ideas, no concepts, with which he could see into the would whence man arises, into which, however, no one can look with his understanding or his ordinary knowledge. And then, from all he had felt through his natural ability, or that he had experienced in other ways, and through what he had particularly noticed in Grecian art in Italy, there arose in Goethe the thought that, were man to steep himself in the ideas and life of Greece, he would come nearer to the supersensible than with modern ideas. This was so deeply rooted in Goethe that, from the year 1780 onwards he continually strove to make his ideas as supple as were those of the Greeks. He hoped in this way to reach the supersensible world. But what arose out of this? There arose his strenuous endeavour to come to knowledge of the supersensible world not from the outlook of Greek life, but by gaining ideas through which he would be able to grasp the supersensible world in the life of soul. It is interesting how, while he was writing this scene, Goethe was steeping himself in everything possible to bring Greek life vividly before his soul. Today we are no nearer to Greek life than men were in Goethe's days. And yet such a work as Schlosser's Universal Survey of the History of the Ancient World and its Culture, published in 1826, and immediately read by Goethe among many other works transplanting him into the life of Greece, enabled him, by his sympathetic attitude towards Greek life, to bring it vividly before his soul. But what idea had he in all this? Just think! he writes: We are called upon to look back on what is most universal, but utterly past, in ancient history—what cannot be brought back; and from there to let the different peoples gradually surge up beneath out gaze.

In the last twenty years of the eighteenth century during which these scenes of Faust were being created, Goethe occupied himself intensively with studies that should bring vividly before his spirit the far distant past and show him how it flows into the present. Goethe is not one of those who make poems by a turn of the hand; he plunges deeply into the world leading to the supersensible, so that as a poet he can give tidings of it. And his belief in the Greek world changed to a certain extent his way of representation. Because in his very soul he sought Greek life, the concept of truth, the concept of good, drew near the concept of beauty. And the concept of evil approached the concept of ugliness. That is difficult for present-day man to understand. In Greek thought it was different. Cosmos is a word meaning beautiful world-order, as well as true world-order. Today men no longer think, as did the Greeks, that beauty is so closely allied to truth, and ugliness to evil. For the Greeks, beauty melted into truth, ugliness into error and evil. Through his attitude to the Greek world Goethe acquired the feeling that anyone organised like the Greeks, who stood in such close relation to the supersensible world, would experience the untrue and evil as ugly, and would turn away from this because of his experience of beauty, while he would feel truth to be beautiful. This feeling was developed by Goethe. And he believed he might perhaps draw nearer the supersensible by saturating himself with feeling for the beauty of the world. But just as one can only know light by its shadow, one must also be saturated with feeling for the ugliness of the world. And that too Goethe sought.

For this reason he sets Mephistopheles, who is of course only another side of Faust's life, among the prototypes of gliness, the Phorkyads, who are in very truth the prototypes of what is hideous. And in so doing, my dear friends, Goethe touches on a great mystery of existence. You will have realised, from the lectures I have given here from time to time, that even today there are people in possession of certain secrets. Particularly the leaders of Roman Catholicism, for example, the leaders, are in possession of certain secrets. What matters is how these secrets are used. But certain initiates of the English-speaking peoples are also acquainted with mysteries. Out of a profound misunderstanding, does not only the Roman Church—that is, its leaders—keep these secrets from its adherents, but certain esoteric initiates of the English-speaking peoples do the same. They have various reasons for this, and of one of these I will now speak.

You see, my dear friends, the earth has a past, the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; it has a present, the earth-period; it has a future, the periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. In evolution there is both good and evil. Out of the cosmos, out of cosmic evolution, good can only be recognised from the past, from the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and half the earth-period. Wisdom and goodness are associated, in this looking back into the past. Wisdom and goodness were implanted into human nature by those members of the higher hierarchies who belong to man, at a time when this human nature was not yet awakened to full consciousness, as it is on the earth. For the coming time, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods, and at present on the earth, for the coming half of the earth-period—it is already beginning—man must preserve goodness if he wishes to attain it; he must develop the impulse for goodness out of his own nature. For in his environment,in what is new that approaches him, the forces of evil are revealed. Were these forces for evil not revealed, man could not arrive at free-will. And those initiates to whom I refer know this important secret, my dear friends, and will not impart it because they do not wish to help mankind to maturity. They know this secret. If what arose as human nature on ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon, and still continues further—if what was evolved for us men on Saturn, and possesses a past, were to arise now out of earth-conditions, it would be fundamentally evil, it would only be able to absorb evil. It is only possible to receive evil from external conditions. That man can acquire freedom of will is due to this exposure to evil and his being able to choose between the evil that approaches him, and the good he can develop out of his own nature. This is if he has confidence in what was planted there in previous ages. Hence these initiates say to those wishing to be initiated: There are three layers of consciousness, (that is the formula always used in these English-speaking schools os initiation) three layers of consciousness. When a man plunges into the subconscious, from which dreams spring up, he experiences an intimate relation with other beings (I have described this to you before) also with other men; these beings do not appear in the present world. When, as is the case today, man is living in his day-consciousness in the perceptible, rational world, he is in the world where he goes through birth and death. And when he raises himself to the world—that he will enter as physical man in the future—to which he attains through supersensible knowledge, then that is the world where he first experiences evil. For it is then that a man must find strength to be a match for evil, to hold his own against it. He must learn to know evil.

The natural consequence of this is the necessity for men of the present to shed light on the past, so that they may be prepared for the inevitable encounter with evil; and this can be done only through Spiritual Science. To these three layers of consciousness, the initiates of the English-speaking peoples continually draw attention. This will be the basis of that conflict that is of the utmost importance, though the present age has little external knowledge of it. This conflict will be between those who want what is a necessity to take place, and secrets of this kind to be imparted, and those who wish to keep mankind in immaturity. So far the latter have had the upper hand. It is most important that these things should be known. You can see from this, my dear friends, what mischief will be set on foot if the truths of Spiritual Science are withheld. For man will be exposed to the forces of evil, and he will only be protected from it by giving himself up to the spiritual life of the good. To withhold the spiritual life of goodness from men is to be no friend to humanity. Whoever does this, be he Freemason or Jesuit, is no friend to humanity. For it means handing men over to the forces of evil. And there may be a purpose in doing so. This purpose may be to confine goodness to a small circle, in order by the help of this goodness to dominate the helpless humanity who are thus led by evil into the follies of life.

You can imagine, my dear friends, that anyone like Goethe, who has a presentiment of all these things, will have some hesitation in approaching them. From many things I have said in your presence about Goethe's particular kind of spirituality, you will be able to form a concept of how he would approach these subtle, but world-shattering matters with only really relevant ideas. Hence, in conceiving his Faust, he did not wish to be thought that man, wanting to make progress in culture, must fearlessly expose himself to the forces of evil; instead, he clothes this too, in Greek ideas, by confronting Mephistopheles with primeval ugliness, with the trinity of Phorkyads, the three prototypes of ugliness. Instead of pointing men unreservedly to the reality of evil, as Spiritual Science must do, Goethe points to the reality of ugliness as contrasted with beauty. Hence the characteristic behaviour of Mephistopheles towards the Phorkyads. Had Mephistopheles remained in his northern home, that is to say in a world that has certainly advanced beyond that of the Greeks in the world-order, he would have been obliged to meet with the bitter, but essential world, from which future evil flows. Instead of this, Goethe makes him meet in the world of antiquity the prototypes of ugliness, the Phorkyads. So that he places him, as it were, in prehistoric times before the history of evil. By employing Greek concepts, he places most solemn truth before men in a way that could still arouse their sympathy. And here too Goethe shows his deep knowledge of the matter. We know—you may read this in my Occult Science—that the future is in a sense the reproduction of the past on a higher level. Jupiter is a kind of repetition of the Moon; Venus of the Sun; and Vulcan of Saturn. On a higher level, the earlier appears in the later. It is the same as regards evil. Evil appears in order that man may develop goodness out of his own nature with all possible strength. But this evil will show distorted pictures, caricatures, of the forms of the primeval age.

You see, what we now are is largely because we are constructed symmetrically, the left-man and the right-man working together. Physicists and physiologists wonder why it is we have two eyes, what use we have for two eyes. If they knew why we have two hands, and of what use they are to us, they would also know why we have two eyes and of what use these are. If, for instance, we could not touch the left hand with the right, we could never arrive at ego-consciousness. By being able to grasp the right-man with the left, by gaining knowledge of the right-man by means of the left, we arrive at consciousness of ourselves, at consciousness of the presence of the ego. To look at an object a man must have more than one eye. If, by birth or accident, he has only one eye, that does not matter: it is not the external apparatus but the faculty, the forces, that are of importance. When we look at a man the axes of the eyes are crossed. In this way the ego is associated with sight; through the crossing the left direction is associated with the right. And the farther we go back the closer is the relation, in common with the consciousness. This is why Goethe gives the three Phorkyads one eye and one tooth between them, a representation that shows his deep knowledge. Thus the three have but one eye and one tooth. This implies that the senses are not meant to be working together, they are still isolated from one another. On the one hand relationship is expressed, on the other we are told that the elements are not yet working in collaboration, that what arises through the right-man and the left-man cannot yet appear. Thus accurately does Goethe express what he wishes to say, and he suggests infinitely much.

Now, if you think over what you know from Occult Science namely, that the present bi-sexual-sexual human being has sprung from the uni-sexual being, and that male and female have only been developed in the course of evolution, you will see that a retrograde evolution takes place when Mephistopheles meets with evil in the form of ugliness, joins with it in going with the Phorkyads: “Done! here stand I” (after he has thrown in his lot with the Phorkyads) ...

“Here stand I, Chaos' well-beloved son!”
Phorkyads: “And Chaos' true-born daughters, we, undoubted.”

To which Mephistopheles replies:

“O fie! Hermaphrodite must I be flouted?”

He becomes ‘hermaphrodite’ when it is intended to show the condition preceding the bi-sexual, the condition to which I have just referred. Truly Goethe gives his descriptions from inside knowledge! In this scene we may recognise how deeply he had divined and entered into the truths of Spiritual Science.

Now, remember now not long ago I said that no one can ever arrive at a satisfying conception of the world who, misled by what man is now, what he has of necessity to be, comes on the one hand to abstract ideals, ideals having no forces. (Forces such as those in nature that cannot fit into the physical world-order, but have to disperse like mist when the earth reaches her goal, that is, her grave). No one can find a satisfying world-outlook who is either an abstract idealist of this kind, or a materialist. As I said, man must be both. He must be able to rise to ideas in conformity with the age in which he lives, and also look at material things in a material way and form materialistic ideas about them. Thus, he must be able to form both a materialistic and an idealistic conception of the world, and not set up a unity with abstract concepts. Having on the one hand scientific concepts, on the other idealistic concepts, we must then let them interpenetrate each other just as spirit and matter do. As I have told you, in processes of cognition the ideal must permeate and illumine the material, the material must permeate and illumine the ideal.

And Goethe found this out. It occurred to him how one-sided it is when, in abstract concepts, men seek a world-outlook inclining more to matter or more to spirit. Hence he was drawn to seek his world-conception not in abstract ideas but in a different way. And this he describes as follows:

“Since so much of our experience does not admit of being openly expressed and directly imparted, long ago I chose this method, namely, to reveal the hidden meaning to the observant by dint of contrasted images playing into one another.”

Now, can anyone express more clearly that he is neither idealist nor realist, but both idealist and realist, letting the two world-outlooks play into one another. Goethe seeks to approach the world from the most diverse directions, and to come to truth by means of mutually reflected concepts. Thus, in Goethe's impulses there is already concealed the way that must be taken by Spiritual Science in order to lead mankind towards the future—the health-giving future.

One would like, my dear friends, what Goethe began to be continued; but then it would be essential for such works as Faust to be really read. Man has, however, more or less lost the habit of reading. At best, men would say when they read:

“Diana, Luna, Hecate!
Thou bosom widener, profoundly pensive one!”

Oh! poetry. Then there is no need to go deeper into it, no need to meditate over every word! Thus men console themselves today when offered anything they are not actually bound to believe; for they like to take things superficially. But the universe does not permit that. When you consider the deep truth I have just shown in connection with the meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads—a truth that has been preserved in many occult schools of the present day—then you have the opportunity of understanding, together with much else that enables you to realise it, the intense seriousness of our striving after Spiritual Science, the seriousness that must underlie our endeavours. It may be said that there sometimes escapes, half consciously, from those who have come into contact with what is essential for man in the future, an pious ejaculation, like Nietzsche's, in his Midnight Song: “The world is deep, Yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”.

We must indeed say that the day gives man day-consciousness; but, so long as he clings only to what the day brings, man of himself becomes simply Homunculus, not Homo. For “the world is deep, yea, deeper than the day e'er dreamed”. And since Goethe does not wish to lead Faust into merely what the day brings, but into all that conceals the eternal, he has to let him take his way in the company of Homunculus, and of Mephistopheles who confronts the supersensible. Goethe thought he could do this by steeping himself in Greek ideas, and by bringing them to life within himself.

From our considerations of yesterday and the day before, we have been able to see how Goethe's creative work is steeped through by a certain outlook suggestive of that of spiritual science—although this outlook may be but dimly foreshadowed. And it is indeed very important that we should make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with the character of Goethe's spiritual life. It is only by shedding before the soul the light of a deepened observation upon all that such a life of spirit contains that this life appears in the right connection with the whole evolution of mankind. But I wish to add something here to all that has been said. I should like, that is, to point out how really it is only possible rightly to comprehend the whole structure, the whole manner, of Goethe's spiritual life if this is done from the standpoint of spiritual science. It is not merely that from an unspiritual standpoint we can naturally never find in Goethe's work all that yesterday and the previous day we were able to discover by considering it anthroposiphically, but also it only becomes clear how such a life of soul is possible within the course of human development, when we look at it from the point of view of spiritual Science.

In various connections I have called your attention to other manifestations of Goethe's soul-life, manifestations that, for ordinary human life, may perhaps seem—but only seem—to be more remote than what is represented in the all-embracing Faust poem,that should indeed be of the greatest interest to every man. I have spoken to you of the special mind of natural science which Goethe cultivated. And it is particularly important and significant that he should have done so. It may be said that Goethe's individual way of thinking where natural science is concerned is precisely what in most spheres at present still meets with complete lack of understanding. Nevertheless, it appears to me of quite special importance for the various branches of present day spiritual life—and not least for the religious life—that an insight should be gained into this particular form, this individual way, in which Goethe looked upon nature. You know how he sought to establish for the inanimate world a natural science founded on his own interpretation of the primal phenomena, and how he built up a botany on the basis of metamorphoses.

So far as all this is a matter of general knowledge I should like today to give you a brief description of the primal phenomena and metamorphoses.

What was Goethe's intention when he turned not to hypotheses and theories but to the so-called primal phenomena for his explanation of nature? Since the eighties of the last century I have been doing my best to give mankind, from various aspects, an idea of the true basic character of the primal phenomenon. But it cannot be claimed that so far there has really been a very wide understanding of the matter. Perhaps we can get the best view of what Goethe understood by the primal phenomenon in inanimate nature when we consider how he came to build up his special Theory of Colors. He tells of this himself. I know that what I now have to say is an abomination and a heresy for the present day scientific conception of physics. That, however, is of no consequence. What physics does not recognize today, my dear firends, the physics of tomorrow will find itself obliged to accept. In reality, present day physics is not yet ripe for Goethe's theory of colors.

As I said, Goethe himself tells us that up to the beginning of the nineties of the eighteenth century he believed, as did other men, in the so-called Newtonian theory of colors—in that theory built up by Newton on a certain hypothesis. This theory declared that something imperceptible lay at the basis of light—we need not go into that now. In essentials it is immaterial whether it is represented, as it was by Newton himself; as currents of matter, or as oscillations, or as some kind of electrical impulse. The arising of colors was conceived as follows—that the light in some way contains the various colors unseparated as if naturalized in a kind of supersensible entity, and that by means of the prism or other devices, the colors were made to issue forth from the unified white light.

One day Goethe found himself obliged to abandon this conception that he shared with others, and he did so in a way that, naturally, must appear to modern physics both primitive and foolish. He studied this Newtonian physics, this Newtonian optics, and accepted it as one does as a matter of course when knowing of nothing better. But he found that when wishing to apply this optics, this theory of colors, in order to think out anything that had to do with art, with painting, he could do nothing with it. This Newtonian physics serves for a materialistic physical representation, but is useless when it comes to art. This increasingly disturbed Goethe and incited him at least to look into what happens in the appearance of colors from the point of view of physics. So, from Councillor Buttner who was a professor at Jena, he managed to procure the apparatus to see, through his own investigations and experiements, what views he could form concerning the appearance of colors. It goes without saying that Professer Buttner promptly placed all the apparatus at the disposal of His Excellency von Goethe. But, once in his house, it served, to begin with, only to collect the dust. It was long before he made his investigations—not indeed until Councillor Buttner expressed his need of the apparatus, and the desire for its return. Goethe put the things together for dispatch. However, he thought he would first have a quick glance through a prism, believing that if he looked through it at the white of the wall, so this white would then be broken up into seven colors, he would assuredly see them. (This would, as has been said, appear to the modern physicist both foolish and primitive). But—nothing! The wall remained white! This puzzled him. According to customary notions this was foolish but, my dear firends, it was sound thinking. He took a peep through the prism; the wall was still white. That made him appeal to Councillor Buttner to let him keep the instruments, the apparatus, and he then set up his further investigations. And from these investigations there now grew first his science of colors, and, secondly, his whole outlook on physics, that is to say, on inanimate, natural phenomena. It was an outlook that rejected all hypotheses and theories, that never thought out anything about natural phenomena, but traced back one set of natural phenomena to another, traced them merely to primal appearances, primal phenomena.¹

Thus he became clear that, when color is perceived, at the basis of this lies some kind of working together of super imposed lightness and darkness. If darkness laps over lightness, the bright colors appear; if lightness laps over darkenss, then there appear the deep colors, blue, violet and so forth. If over brightness, lightness any form of darkness is projeatd, such as dark material and so forth,or the actual prism, the bright colors appear, red, yellow and so on. Here it is not a matter of any theory. Darkness and lightness are working through immediate perception. It is simply perceived that if darkness and lightness work together, colors arise. No hypothesis is expressed here nor any theory—merely something that is simple fact, something that can be perceived.

Now it did not concern him merely to invent hypotheses like the wave theory perhaps, or the Emission theory, and so on, hypotheses that would say that colors arise in such and such a way; it was simply a putting together, as lightness and darkness had to be put together for yellow or red, blue or violet, to appear. Goethe's way was not to add to phenomena hypotheses and theories in thought, but to keep strictly to letting the phenomena speak for themselves. In this way Goethe brought a theory of colors into existence that led in a wonderfully beautiful way to the grasping of what has to do with color in the realm of art. For the chapter on the effect of color with reference to moral associations, in which are found so many significant indications for the artist, belongs to the most beautiful part of Goethe's theory of colors.

This then was the basis of Goethe's whole understanding of inanimate nature—never to seek for theories or hypotheses. According to him these can be set up as scaffolding. But, as when the building is finished, the scaffolding is not left but removed, so one uses hypotheses merely to show the way in which things may be put together. They are discarded as soon as the primal phenomenon, the simplest phenomenon, is reached.

It was this that Goethe also tried at any rate to outline for the whole of physics. And in the large Weimar edition, in the volume where I have published Goethe's general scientific essays, you will find a chart in which Goethe has detched out a complete scheme for physics from this point of view. In this chart the acoustics of particular interest, that, like his theory of colors, is indeed merely given in outline. Some day it would be interesting, however, to set up an acoustics that would fit in with music in the same way as Goethe's theory of colors does with painting. Naturally this could not be done yet, for modern natural science has taken a different path from that founded on Goethe's world conception and on his conception of nature.

It was this that he was trying to do where inanimate nature is concerned. And he was looking for something of the same kind in the life of the living plant in the theory of metamorphoses, where, without setting up any hypotheses, he followed up how the stem leaf was transformed, metamorphosed, and took on various forms, growing afterwards into the petal, so that the blossom is simply transformed stem leaf. Again this is an outlook that will have nothing to do with hypotheses but keeps to what is offered to the perception. What we need here is not fixed concepts but concepts that are as much on the move as is nature herself while creating; that is, she does not hold fast to forms but in ever transforming them. We must have such concepts, therefore, that the majority of mankind is too lazy to develop, concepts in a state of inward transformation, so that we are able livingly to follow them in their forms that change as they do in nature. But then, free from hypotheses and theories, one confines oneself to pure percept.

This is what is characteristic of Goethe, my dear friends, that he rejects all theory where natural phenomena are concerned, and really is willing to apply thinking only for assembling phenomena in the right way, so that they express themselves according to their essential nature. One can indeed put this in a paradox. I beg you to keep this well in mind. It was precisely through this that, as we have seen in the last two days, Goethe was driven along the right path into the sphere of the spiritual, that, for the phenomena of external nature, he did not destroy their integrity by all kinds of theories and hypotheses but grasped them just as they were offered to the life of the senses.

This, my dear friends, has a further consequence. If we form theories, such as those of Newton or spencer, that is to say, if we cloud by theories and hypotheses what nature herself offers, we may think about nature in the way that is possible during human physical life, but the matter is not then taken up into the etheric body. And they become overdone, all these theories that do not arise from pure nature and from the simple observation of nature; all these theories and hypotheses make indeed a caricature of the human etheric body and also of the astral body, thereby having a disturbing effect on man's life in spiritual worlds.

Goethe's sound nature turned against the destruction of the forms demanded for itself by the etheric body. This is exactly what is so significant about Goethe, and why I tell you he can only be understood anthroposophically—that he had an instinct for what did not originate in immediate reality, and perceived that, when he formed concepts like those of Newton, the etheric body was nipped and tweaked. This did not happen to others because they were less finely organized. Goethe's organization was such that while looking into things thus his etheric body was nipped and tweaked. And neither theory nor the most beautiful hypothesis prevented this, when only the white appears and he has to realize: The wall is still white in spite of the fact that all the seven graded colors are supposed to appear. This has not happened. And Goethe's way of experiencing this is indeed a proof of his thoroughly sound nature and of how he, as microcosm, was in harmony with the macrocosm.

Yet another side of the matter may be brought to your notice. We know, my dear friends, that man is not only the being who lives between birth and death; he is also the being who lives between death and a new birth. Into this life between death and a new birth he takes the sun of inner forces developed by him when in his physical body. Now when, after a few days, he is parted from his etheric body, he looks back upon it; and it is important that this etheric body should have been so used by him that in looking at it thus he is not deluded by a caricature. Now this is what we have particularly to note. If we look at nature in its purely natural aspect, as did Goethe, rejecting theories and hypotheses, and allowing only primal phenomena to have weight, then this understanding and regarding the primal phenomena thus, is of such a nature that it sets free within us sound, healthy experiencec and feelings of the kind that Goethe described in his chapter on the effect of color with reference to moral associations. It goes without saying that the perception of sense phenomena ceases with life. And what remains in our soul and spirit from pure perception, the only thing Goethe allowed to hold good as natural science is thoroughly sound and in harmony to do with the world of soul and spirit. Thus, we may say that Goethe's natural science is in accordance with the spiritual, in spite of his keeping to the phenomenal and physically perceptible. This is because it does not sully through theories the purity of its outlook on nature by influencing the spirit either ahrimanically or luciferically. Theories of this kind darken for the soul and spirit the purity of outlook upon what is earthly.

Now I told you yesterday that man has not lived only on the earth, but before he trod the earth he went through successive developments on Saturn, Sun and Moon. After he will have left the earth, or rather when the earth has left him, he will continue his development on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. But I told you that scientific concepts are possible only in relation to the earth evolution. In actual fact, if we cultivate a sound natural science, we then have the impulse not to represent the earth evolution so that everything is mixed up in it that is in keeping with Saturn, Sun and Moon—though naturally this is in reality connected with the earth evolution—but a sound natural science will take the earth as earth and represent it in its conformity with law. This is what Goethe did. And, why man is so little able to rise to a sound understanding of the Moon, Sun and Saturn evolution, is because his earth evolution is not sound. Even though Goethe himself never arrived at this conception of the evolutions on Moon, Sun and Saturn, anyone going deeply into his natural science—a science free from anything else and concerned merely with the earth—just through this prepares his spirit to separate what is earthly by means of a sound knowledge of the earth, and prepares himself as well to form a sound conception of what can be seen only in the supersensible, that is to say, the evolution of Saturn, Sun and moon, and all that is spiritual. It is possible, therefore, to say that it was just by his outlook being directed so exclusively towards the supersensible, that Goethe had the necessary qualifications to work in his Faust upon all we have been witnessing these last two days. Goethe lived thus in the spirit where spiritual comprehension is concerned, because he did not apply to natural phenomena any confused theories or hypotheses out of the spirit. The one thing determines the other.

What finally I called your attention to yesterday is that Goethe was not idealist on the one side, realist on the other but took the outer phenomena realistically, and in an idealistic way what was to be understood idealistically. He did not, however believe it possible to found a world-conception either through the one or the other, but allowed both to be mirrored in his soul as they are reflected also in external reality. Though Goethe himself did not entirely follow this out, yet it led in a wholesome way—if his ideas are really absorbed—to the possibility of a right representation of the two kinds of life that man has to experience. And it may be asked why then is it that mankind's usual outlook today is so little inclined towards the spiritual, and, although concepts of the spiritual world are formed, they are so abstract that with them external nature cannot be understood? How is it that for present day man idealism and realism so fall apart that, either they found a half-hearted monism of little significance, or they do not arrive at any world outlook at all—how is this? This comes about because man wishes today to found his world outlook in a quite definite way. He either becomes a scientist, learning to know nature and trying to instill into her all manner of theories and hpotheses—for in the realm of thinking today the heritage of the natural scientist is not primal phenomena but theories and hypotheses—and seeking to permeate natural phenomena with these; or, he becomes a theologian or philosopher, trying to acquire from tradition certain concepts, ideas, about the spiritual. These are so thin, so shadowy, that with their inadequate power it is impossible to comprehend nature.

Just look around at what is given out by the theologians and phiolsophers today; where do you find any firm ground from which rightly to throw light on nature? And among the real adherents of modern natural science, when they are not monistic garbage, where do you find any serious possibility of rising from natural science to the reality of divine spiritual forms and realms of existence? Even if sound thinking is developed, it is not possible today to unite the two spheres in their present guise. The two spheres are only united when we have the faculty of devoting ourselves in Goethe's way to science and the observation of nature. That means directing the gaze to the phenomenon to what appears, without intermixing useless theories unless these build up the phenomena; it means making merely a useful servant of thinking, but not letting it interfere in results. Where nature is concerned we have to allow her the power of interpreting herself. Not to weave fantastic ideas about nature, but to be completely materialistic, letting the material phenomena speak for themselves—that is our task when it comes to sound natural science. Should we really come to a natural science of this kind, we shall then understand human life between birth—or shall we say conception—and death. And by looking on one side into nature thus, we must also be able to look into the spirit without the light of impossible theories and hypotheses. We shall not then be confined to abstract theologies or philophies but give ourselves up to spiritual perceptions. And it is precisely through the power that sets free in us a direct observation of nature—Goethe's observation—that spiritual perception, perception of the pure spirit, can be induced. Upon the man who confusedly mixes his concepts and ideas about natural phenomena, these concepts take their revenge, preventing his perceiving the spirit. He who looks simply at nature sees her in his own soul in such a way that he can look upon the spirit too with reality. In this respect, Goethe's world outlook can be a good educator for modern humanity.

But in this case, outlook on nature and outlook on spirit must be independent of one another. We must, however, be conscious that we can do nothing with either by itself. If you wish to remain pure theologian or pure phiksopher, my dear friends, then it is exactly as if you had something with two different sides and chose to photograph the one side only; and it is the same if you want to be purely a scientist. You should be able to make the two into one whole, letting the one be reflected in the other; that is to say, instead of seeking to unite them through abstract concepts, having first developed pure perception in each separate sphere, you let the things unite themselves. They are then mirrored in one another. And then too, my dear friends, by means of what this reflection is able to do, you get a sound outlook upon human life as a whole. Then you see natural phenomena external to man according to the way of Goethe's natural science. But when you observe man you see that what exists for external nature does not go far enough to explain him. For that way you only come to a ‘Homunculus’ not to a ‘Homo’.

You see how, for the understanding of man, it is necessary to approach him from two opposite directions; with natural science and with spiritual science, letting the two reflect one another. Thus, they may be suitably applied to man. Then in the human being the life between birth, or conception, and death, is reflected in what appears to one as life between death and a new birth; and vice versa, the life between death and a new birth is reflected in the life between birth and death. We are not here inventing any theory supposed to explain the one or the other, but we let not theories but two perceptions, two things perceived and not united by concepts be mutually reflected in the perception.

It proves that Goethe was definitely on the way to the new spiritual science that, through the sound development of his soul, he should have come to such perception of the mutual reflection of what was essential in external reality. And if Goethe was still to some extent uncertain, even for his own time, because, as I am always having to emphasize, his knowledge of Spiritual Science was but a premonition, nevertheless his judgment was sound in much concerning the spiritual life—and this can be followed in our time up to the regions where Goethe never actually arrived but for which he had prepared.

It is regrettable that everything in connection with Goethe is so little understood. I am not finding fault, my dear friends, for everyone able to look right into things neither blames nor criticises, realizing he must speak only positiviely; I do not find fault with what has happened, I only set forth what is demanded for the future. And the demand for the future is that mankind should go more deeply into the ideas that were already being prepared in Goethe's way of thinking—whatever name you give all this. And Goethe's way of thinking works with tremendous reality and in accordance with reality. It is of great importance to take heed of this.

I have to draw your attention to this so as to point you to a right understanding of man's usual procedure when he wants to explain some phenomena of nature or of life. Let us look at a perfectly average man who is clever—nowadays the clever man is average—thus, we are going to observe an average man. The average man lives, does he not, from birth to death.

BIRTH--------------------- DEATH
EARTH LIFE

In his 35th year, let us say, or 45th or 42nd—in some year of his life perhaps even earlier—he wants to discover something, possibly to form a world-outlook, enlighten himself about some matter; what does he do? He ferrets among the stock of ideas that we may take it he has when 42 years old. Let us assume he wishes to be really clear about, let us say, the Copernican world-outlook; he gathers together, then, all the concepts and ideas he can find. If he looks about in his soul life and can find something that suits him, when he has assembled a whole series of the kind of concepts in which he finds nothing contradictory, then he has finished, and understands the whole matter. This is the way with the average man. Not so with Goethe, my dear friends. Goethe's soul worked in a completely different fashion. Those who are ready to write his biography never take this into consideration, and some kind of person makes his appearance who was born in Frankfurt in 1749 and died in 1832 in Weimar—but it is not Goethe. For his soul worked differently. If in his 42nd year any phenomenon confronted him, there did not work in him merely the abstract image arising from the gathering up of all kinds of concepts into a suitable outlook. When Goethe in his 42nd year contemplated a plant, or anything else about which he sought enlightenment, there worked in him with reality the whole of his soul-life, not merely abstract concepts but all his real life of soul. Thus, at the age of 42, when Goethe wished to reflect upon the life of a plant, there worked in him in part unconsciously those impulses that he had not merely gathered together but which had been working in him since his childhood. It was always his entire life of soul that was active. That is what never happens in modern man; he wants to arrive at an unprejudcied conception, but this does not go tyond snatching up a few concepts that can be perceived easily and with little effort. This is exactly the reason why we can make such great discoveries about Goethe when we reconsider the various phases of his life all together.

For example, I have tried to understand what comes latest in Goethe's point of view by always returning to Nature, the hymn in prose that he wrote during the eighties of the 18th century, in which is contained in embryo what belongs to a later period. What at that time existed in an unripe state was nevertheless active. And I have often referred before to how Goethe as a seven year old, collected minerals, piled them up on a reading desk he took of his father's, placed a candle on top, and then went through a kind of divine service in which, however, he sought to make a sacrifice to the ‘Great God’ who worked through natural phenomena. In the morning—fancy! a lad of seven he caught a ray of the sun with a burning glass, making it light his candle. He kindled nature's fire above his minerals. Here in childish fashion is already pictured forth all that afterwards worked in his most mature conceptions. We understand Goethe only when we are in a position to grasp him rightly in this way, out of his being as a whole. Also, when he is thus understood, we first arrive at a notion of the spiritual world that we are able to discover in the light of Goethe's world outlook, which then, however, with the ideas of his time he himself could but slightly develop. For consider, if we think, really think, about nature in Goethe's way, in the sense of the theory of phenomena, primal phenomena, and in the sense of the theory of metamorphoses through thinking of this kind we cannot help releasing in our souls forces that lead to perception of the spiritual world. And at length they lead us also to the perception of man's life after he has passed the gate of death. It is just with such a concentrated perception of nature, of pure nature, as Goethe's that a true and comprehensible idea of immortality is established.

It is precisely through this that power is gathered for these opposite representations needed for perceiving the supersensible that man experiences between death and a new birth. Man gains the power for this perception by first developing a keener insight into pure nature, nature unspoilt by theories and hypotheses. Where the external world is concerned man makes the greatest mistake in believing that everything must go in one line, in one stream. If any man speaks thus of Monism to one who sees right into the matter—as, having founded an abstract Monism, many speak today—when an abstract Monism of this kind is put before one who can see into things, it seems just as though a man were standing there with left and right side properly developed and another were to tell him that it was an illusion, a false dualism, and that man has to be built monistically. It is not the proper thing he would say, to have a right and a left side, something here is wrong.

Our world outlook must be just like that. And as there is nothing wrong about our having two hands, and the right one be aided by the left, there is nothing wrong either in having two world outlooks that reciprocally reflect and enlighten each other. And those who declare it a mistake when two world outlooks are demanded, should also declare that some sort of artificial arrangement ought to be devised so that the right and left hands and the right and left legs would not move and be active in the world in such a shockingly separate fashion and that right and left should be forcibly dovetailed into one another and man should be a monism and, thus handicapped, continue his way through life.

For those who have penetration and see the reality instead of distorted abstract theories, the striving for an abstract idealism on the one side and a material realism on the other, as Monism, is as onesided as the grotesque comparison I have just made. And it is really in the spirit of Goethe's world outlook that I have pointed again and again, in a way that today arouses much antagonism, on the one hand to a pure and direct perception of nature, free from hypotheses, a perception that is alive and not thought out, thinking being applied simply to introduce the perception; and on the other hand to a phenomenon of the spirit where again thinking is applied merely as introduction to the perception, the spiritual perception, that leads us into the realm where we have to seek man on the other side of his life, that is between death and a new birth.

Now, if among people today you put forward the outlook of Spiritual Science, you are met with theories to refute it that sound really logical, clever theories. I have often said that it is very easy to think out arguments against Spiritual Science. In two successive public lectures in Prague² made the attempt to oppose Spiritual Science in one, in the other to show its foundations—lectures not too well received in some quarters. But at least I made the attempt to hold them. It goes without saying that one can quite easily find counter arguments to Spiritual Science; this is possible. How should it be otherwise? Whoever believes that it is not possible takes approximately the same view as anyone who says he cannot prick his left hand with the needle he holds in his right. Of course it is possible, but it does not get us anywhere. It may be said that at the basis of this opposition, that works with such apparently perfectly logical theories, right within it, there lies something entirely different. One speaks indeed, my dear friends, of the unconscious and the sub-conscious. What really is significant for man in the sub-conscious soul life, the sub-conscious spiritual life, is misunderstood, particularly by the psycho-analysts, but also in other quarters. I have often spoken of this here. In reality the analytical psychologist of today speaks of the unconscious life of the spirit in the same way as the blind speak of color. They are forced to do so by the requirements of modern science, but their science has not sufficient to go upon—it works with inadequate means. (I referred to this last year in Zurich and also here).³ For the capacity must really be there always to discover rightly what is in the subconscious beneath what is going on in the conscious.

You see, we may say the matter stands thus. The conscious is here, the subconscious lies beneath it (see diagram). Now how stands the matter today? since about the 16th century very strong ahrimanic influences have made themselves felt in man and in man's whole thinking. This has its good and bad sides. Above all it has the effect that natural science has developed in a particularly ahrimanic way. To this ahrimanic science Goethe opposed his science that I have described to you. And from the lectures I gave you a week ago you can gather that nothing takes place in the human soul nor in be human spirit without something happening in the subconscious also. By evolving the present form of thinking about nature, two quite distinct feelings have been developed in the subconscious—fear of and lack of interest in the spiritual. If Goethe's natural science is not developed, natural science cannot be cultivated at all in the sense of modern thinking without there developing at the same time subconscious fear and indifference towards the spiritual world. People are afraid of the spiritual; that is the necessary consequence of the impression made by modern natural science. But it is a subconscious fear of which men know nothing and this subconscious fear dresses itself up, and in all kinds of bespangled theatrical garments appears in man's consciousness. It clothes itself, for instance, in logical reasons. Fear transforms itself into logical reasons, with which logical reasons men are now going around.

Those with penetration note what clever logical reasons man brings forward; however, they know also how beneath, in the subconscious, there sits fear of the spiritual—as the unknown always brings fear in its train, the hydrophobia of dogs can be traced to it. And lack of interest in the spiritual is also there, and this is particularly evident, because when man develops a right knowledge to nature, the spiritual can be quite palpable to him. For I should like to challenge any man wanting exhaustive knowledge to say out of what earthly natural phenomena, without recourse to the spiritual, he can explain the shape of the human head. The obvious correct scientific explanation of the human head leads back to what is known only scientifically as I have made clear. If we take interest in what is actually there in the nature of man, this leads naturally and of necessity to the spirit. It is mere lack of interest that induces us to say: nothing here points to the spirit! This is only when it has been excluded. We pay no attention to it but begin by building for ourselves empty theories, well prepared hypotheses and theories which soon fail us when put to the test, however carefully they have been prepared. In the main, the modern natural scientist behaves like someone who carefully cleans the scales from a fish, afterwards declaring it has none. So the modern scientist cleans phenomena of all that points to the spirit, because it does not interest him. But he is as ignorant of his lack of interest as he is of his fear. Therefore the lack of interest, too, dons disguising garments, and these are beliefs in limits to knowledge, quite consciously these limits are spoken of—ignorabimus. But what is referred to here is really immaterial; we could at will invent a quite different collection of words for what du Bois-Reymond, for instance, spoke of in his lecture about the limits to knowledge of nature, and they would be worth just as much. For what we wish is completely immaterial. It would be caused by our lack of interest, like the fish bereftaf its scales with which we have just compared it.

In an article called “Der Internationale Kitt” (International Cement) are found the-following: “It is one of the greatest disillusionments of world history that even this spiritual power—the spiritual power of Christianity—has failed where war is concerned, and has set up no dam against the onsweeping tide of hatred and destruction. Indeed, during this division between the peoples, in Christianity itself particularly ugly phenomena have come to light as, for example, the way theology with its attempt to drag down the highest absolute values into the relativity of world events. By trying to rationalize this and bring it into some kind of formula man has even gone so far as to try to justify through the ethical God of Love, what is dreadful and profoundly evil. This is instead of humbly remaining, in face of the frightful submergence of love and life, by Luther's ‘Deus absconditus’, the hidden God, that also comes to appearance in the world dynamics that is indifferent to ethics. Through this ethical and religious glorification of war, political aims were thrust upon the God of Love—aims that appear depressingly like those of rulers and cabinet ministers.”

Those who follow contemporary literature will know that this is perfectly correct—that on all sides the intentions of those in power are foisted as divine intentions upon God. So that this man is justified in thus describing many of the regrettable things happening today.

He goes on to say: “This is not all. Even the mutual tension among the Christian Churches has become accentuated. The historical opposition has been re-revived between the followers of Luther and those of Calvin. The extreme Anglicans have become alienated from continental Protestantism to such a degree that they will hardly allow it the name of Christianity; not to mention the breach among the international Christians in the mission field. Thus, a popular ideal limited by national feeling again to have gained the day over the international, communal ideal of Christianity.

“But where that has happened Christianity has shown itself a traitor to the Gospels—a Judas who betrayed Christ. For the true being of Christianity points to an all-embracing human society, and only in this form can it develop.”

And so on.

My dear friends, this man says a great deal that is clever, but he does not go so far as to ask: If Christianity has been followed for nearly two thousand years, how is it that although by its nature it should make the conditions we have at present an impossibility, it has not done so? It means nothing, my dear friends, just to say that men are bad Christians and should be better ones, if what is meant by this is that they should live up to the Christian example. I could give you hundreds of quotations from what has been said recently by seriously minded men, from which you could see that already in various places there is arising a definite but subconscious impulse that something like a new world outlook is needed. But the moment men should really come to what is necessary, that is, to a world outlook that is anthroposophical, they obscure their own concepts and these concepts immediately degenerate into fear and lack of interest. Men are afraid of Spiritual Science. This may be seen very clearly in individual personalities and in what they say and how they live. Or they show indifference to Spiritual Science; they are not capable of it in any way; it does not appeal to them. One then comes to astonishing contradictions, naturally not seen by the modern reader, for modern reading is done in the way I pictured yesterday and on other occasions. This writer of the article, a man who as we said is to be taken seriously, is justified in writing as he did. But, listen to this; he says something else must happen for Christianity to be able to develop its international significance and activity. He then makes all kinds of suggestions, for instance: Why should it not be possible for Christianity to encourage the international impulse to prevent hate and destruction? And he then goes on: in August, 1914, the Free Chuches in Britain could still write to Professor Harnack—“With the exception of the English—speaking peoples, no people stand so high in our affections and esteem as the Germans. We are all immeasurably indebted to German theology, philosophy and literature.”

There we have something—he continues—that is quite delightful. We have British theologians paying compliments to German theologians in the most wonderful way; could it not be like this in future?—

That is all very well, my dear friends, but when your thinking accords with reality you notice that this is written in August 1914, at the very moment of the outbreak of hostilities. In the light of facts the conclusion would be that inspite of British theologians writing this, it could do nothing to prevent the holocaust. You see, therefore, instead of from left to right man thinks from right to left, or the other way round, according to how the matter stands. Whereas the result of thinking according to reality is that we must investigate what, in spite of people making each other polite speeches, is really wrong and what is lacking. The writer says that if we but do what was done in August, 1914, we shall go forward. But we can begin all over again for, as the reality proved, that did nothing to help. Correct thinking would run like this—something is not right, Christianity must have been out of its calculations. What it failed to take into consideration was that Christianity has no part in what the times of necessity demand. It is this that such men lack - willingness to enter into what is demanded by the impulse of the age. Thus,it can be seen that people are recognizing that the old way of looking at the world has come to grief. But they do not want anything new, they want the old again, once more to be able to suffer disaster. That however, naturally remains in their subconscious. They wish for the best as a matter of course, but they are too fond of comfort seriously to look for what is necessary.

This, my dear friends, is what is ever and again in the background when we have to speak of the significance for the present time of all that is connected with the name of Goethe, or also of what is naturally greater than this, of the whole spiritual world and the knowledge of it. There too one need not be critical. We do not need to say how thoroughly bad those men are who neglect to do what should now be done, but confine ourselves to finding out what ought to happen. We should look to what is positive. Perhaps then we may say: “If only there were not so dreadfully little that I can do—I can do so terribly little, what indeed can be done by one person alone.” my dear friends, such questions are often asked under the impression that it would be possible in my lectures to give a definite concrete programme for individual people; but by being given in a general way this would naturally become abstract and empty. Today it is our common concern that many people should realize how, among those to whom control is given in some particular sphere, there will be many failures. This is because the leaders of our time are striving against something they ought not to resist. And it is important that we should not be eaten up by a false feeling towards authority, nor stand in great awe of anything because we have no real knowledge of it. For as today it is not a matter of accepting historical authority without question. But there is need for observation and attention, and the ability to form a judgment concerning how, in the various spheres of life today, this life is often given a wrong lead by those in authority. This is done with insufficient insight, above all, often with insufficient thought. For it should be the result of reflection, not of the lack of reflection. It is tremendously important to examine in our subconscious how much perverted belief in authority we still carry in us—to realize also that it is Spiritual Science itself that actually leads us away from belief in authority, and if its judgments are allowed livingly to permeate us has the power to make us free men with independent judgment. It is always thought that the world must run its course as if it had but one meaning and ran on one track. Then we accustom ourselves to look upon nature in the way of science, then we shall look upon everything in the same manner; when we accustom ourselves to look upon the world in accordance with abstract theories—or, as we often say, idealistically—we shall see everything in that light. But life does not take its course with only one meaning and on only one track; it demands of us in our thinking flexibility, change of form, multiplicity. This is something that fundamentally we can make our own only by cultivating Spiritual Science aright, something that is at present of great importance for finding our right path. For that reason I should like in this lecture to enlarge upon something in connection with Goethe. It is nothing very special I want to say about him—that as you have seen has appeared as though of itself—but I just want to touch on important truths of Spiritual Science that may fitly be connected with what we find treated artistically by Goethe in the actual scene to be represented. Many turn away from Goethe in scorn because they find him unscientific, just as they find Spiritual Science. But many would profit if only they would go deeply into such a spirit, such a soul, as Goethe's. For it frees us from the false belief—really a superstition—that we can make progress with concepts having only one meaning, with life that has only one meaning. There is no development, my dear friends, without its reverse, an opposite development and where there is reversed development there will also be development. When you direct your mind whole heartedly to the primal phenomena and metamorphoses in nature, without obscuring your vision by theories, this leads not to a mere onesided conception of nature, but to a development in the soul of that other conception which turns towards the spirit. And when you develop this conception correctly, you can no longer approach nature with false theories but are induced to let nature, through her material phenomena, be her own and only interpreter.

Thus it is, too, when in the sphere of Spiritual Science, one has to express in words anything as serious as what was put before you yesterday concerning the evil connected with the appearance of the Phorkyades; or what it was necessary to say about man having in his subsconscious much that does not enter his consciousness. Through misunderstanding such things are often taken ill. Just think! when with real knowledge it is said that certain things are in the subconscious how the hearer jumps to the conclusion: this man is no friend of mine, even though he allows that these things are unconscious; he imagines that in my subconscious I am doing all kinds of things sub rosa. So also may our contemporaries think: This anthroposophist insults us by saying we have subconscious fear and apathy—he is running us down. But, my dear friends, the world has not only one meaning. I do not confine myself to saying people have fear and apathy in their subconscious. I say also that in your subconsicies you have the whole spiritual world—but you have to realize it. That, too, is in the subconscious; it is the reverse side. In Spiritual Science one does not make any assertion that does not involve a second. And those to who I say: You have subconscious fear, subconscious lack of interest, should remember that I also say: It is true that you are not conscious of your fear and apathy; you disguise them by all kinds of untruth and by your belief in limits to knowledge. You have, however, the whole world of your subconscious about which to make discoveries if you will only take the plunge. I am not only accusing these people as they think, but telling them besides something good about their subconscious. This is what can make you see that life is not one-sided, nor can it be so represented in Spiritual Science.

Thus indeed, on the one side, we speak in the way we often have to speak. When we have to show aversion, fear and apathy as having been instilled into man, we have also to warn him of the dangers he has to overcome if he wants to make his way to the spiritual world—how he must overcome certain disagreeable things—that is certainly one side we have to make clear. But, my dear friends, just consider what a fund of experiences that give happiness to the soul lie in the conceptions of Spiritual Science being able to open our eyes to the life among our fellows which we lead here between birth and death; what experiences that bring joy to the world are opened out to,us when we know we can live more intimately ith those who have passed through the gate of death. And imagine, when once this idea of two-sidedness is really grasped, when once the world is looked upon rightly in the sense of Spiritual Science, what Spiritual Science has to say will not demand of us only a hard struggle to enter the worlds of the spirit, but over the hearts of men it will be able to pour a whole host of experiences that give comfort. It will have a whole host of other experiences that bring joy to the soul of man so that it grasps that it will become increasingly capable of living not only with those who surround man in the perceptible world, but also to lie with all those with whom he has entered into some kind of connection in this life, after they have passed through the gate of death. My dear friends, could we with reason even desire that the knowledge carrying our souls in full consciousness beyond the gate of death should be easily acquired? No, indeed; if we are intelligent and reasonable, that is something for which we could not even ask. men of the future will be obliged to undergo hardship to find their world happiness. To this end they will have to make up their minds to seek knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

This is what I wished to say to you today.

• 1. In Man or Matter by Dr. Ernst Lehrs the words “light” and “dark” have been reserved for referring to the primary polarity, “lightness” and “darkness” being used to express their visible effects. The same principle has been followed here.
• 2. Given 19.3.11 and 25.3.11
• 3. Given 5.11.17

Yesterday I spoke to you of the scene from Part II of Goethe's Faust that had just been performed, and I should like to run over again the main thoughts then under consideration. For in this scene we are dealing with one of the most significant of Goethe's creation, with a scene he added to his Faust after having wrestled with the problem of Faust for about sixty years. Moreover, we have to do here with a scene through which we can look deep into Goethe's soul, in so far as it was dominated by the urge for knowledge—dominated above all by the great seriousness of this urge. While grasping all the knowledge in this poem of Faust we must never forget, however, that everything revealed in it with such lofty wisdom in no way prejudices—as is frequently the case with lesser poets who attempt anything of the same kind—in no way prejudices the purely artistic force of its construction. I have drawn your attention before to what Goethe stressed to Eckermann, namely, that there is much concealed in his Faust, many riddles of man to be recognised by Initiates, but that he had taken trouble to put it all into a form that, regarded merely from the theatrical standpoint, can with its pictorial quality impress even the simplest natured minds. Now let us bring again before our souls just the main points of what was said yesterday about all that is thus concealed, and afterwards go on to what we could not then touch upon. I mean, the conclusion of the scene.

I said yesterday that this scene shows clearly how Goethe was following up the problem of man's self-knowledge, man's comprehension of himself. For Goethe, knowledge was never something merely abstract and theoretical; to grasp the truth was for him a scientific urge. Also, for him—as it will increasingly be for future human evolution—what he sought in his soul as knowledge was something that has to be an impulse to experience life in all its fullness, to experience all that life can bring to man in the way of fortune and misfortune, of joy and sorrow, of blows of fate and opportunities of development. But, in addition to this, the urge for knowledge must be related to all the claims life makes on a man, as regards his behaviour towards society as a whole, as regards what he does and creates. Faust is not meant to be represented merely as a man striving after the highest knowledge, but as one bound up in his innermost being with all that life demands and brings. To this end, Goethe seeks knowledge for his Faust, that is, knowledge of man, comprehension of the self, comprehension of the forces at present latent in mankind. But Goethe sees clearly that ordinary knowledge, dependent on the senses and conditioned by the understanding, cannot lead to this self-knowledge. For this reason he introduces into the Classical Walpurgis-Night Homunculus, the product that was supposed to be, for mediaeval research, the copy of a human being that, within external nature, the physical understanding was able to put together out of natural forces and natural laws. All this comes into the idea of Homunculus. Yesterday I went more deeply into what Goethe meant to convey in his Homunculus, apart from any superstition connected with him; but now let us consider his more obvious meaning. In his Homunculus-idea he wished to represent what a man, here in the physical world, can recognise in himself. Whoever makes use only of the knowledge offered him by science, or by the study of physical life, can never gain knowledge and comprehension of man in accordance with Goethe's conception. He will never know Homo, the human being; he will be able to picture in his soul only Homunculus, an elemental spirit who has come to a standstill on the path to becoming man. Goethe wrestles with this as with a problem of knowledge: How can the idea of Homo grow out of the idea of Homunculus?

The whole mood and tenor, the whole artistic structure of the Classical Walpurgis-Night shows how clearly Goethe saw that the problem of human nature con only be solved by a knowledge based on investigation pursued, outside the body, by man's soul and spirit.What he wishes to ray forth from his Faust is his conviction that information concerning man can be given only by those who admit the validity of knowledge acquired outside the instrument of the physical body. Hence, true Spiritual Science, true Anthroposophy, alone can lead to the knowledge of man, of Homo; while all the other knowledge dealing with the physical world, can only lead to the idea of Homunculus. As far as possible, during the whole of his life, Goethe was ceaselessly occupied in striving towards this supersensible knowledge. He sought it on various paths, and those paths that opened out to him he endeavoured to portray artistically in his Faust. Faust was to represent for him a man who at last arrives at a real knowledge and comprehension of mankind.

Now, in Goethe's time Anthroposophy was not yet, and could not have been, in existence. Hence Goethe tried to associate himself with his contemporary culture, in which thee were still echoes of atavistic spiritual vision. And after showing all that is in the Romantic Walpurgis-Night of the first part of Faust to be inadequate for knowledge of man, his great desire was then to take refute in the Imaginations of the Grecian myths. We have so often spoken of Goethe that we can easily see what lay beneath this idea of his.—Goethe felt and experienced that man is not to be grasped through the concepts of physical understanding. But he had no wish, as yet, to supersede these by his own Imaginations; therefore he sought to give a new form to those of ancient Greece. Thus, if we wish to give a more exact description of the scene just presented, we may say: Goethe wanted to show how a man, Faust, has been approached (from outside, but that is of no importance) by the idea of Homunculus, the only idea to be obtained in this respect in the physical world. He wanted to show how such a man, by his state of consciousness undergoing a change through his leaving the body, will then behave differently. He will behave like a man who, asleep at night outside his body, becomes able to perceive what is around him, all that surrounds him of a soul and spirit nature. Then, if he goes to sleep consciously, as it were, retaining his consciousness in sleep, if, sleeping on, he can take with him into his sleep-knowledge the idea of Homunculus acquired in his physical life, he can so transform it that it seizes hold of human reality. This is what Goethe wished to represent; and to help in the task, he took the pictures of the Grecian myths. He shows often in this scent how far in his feeling he was removed at least form the superstition of the pedant, who sees nothing more in such myths than poetic fiction and creations of fantasy. And I have often told you that, as a result of this superstition, it is claimed that legends, traditions, myths, persisting among simple peoples, are conceptions of nature transformed by fantasy. These superstitious pedants have really no idea how small a part fantasy plays in the creations of simple minds, not how prevalent among them is a certain atavistic power of beholding reality in dreams.

Now in the myths developed by the Greek spirit, there is not merely poetry, there is a true vision of reality. And the element Goethe first presented was the one in which all ancient peoples have seen the impulse in the soul that brings about its separation from the body. Connection with the outside world was much closer for the men of old than for the present-day abstract rationalistic man. In olden days when men climbed a mountain, for instance, they did not merely experience a physical, barely perceptible difference in the breathing, a densification of the atmosphere, or a change to the eye in perspective; for them it was a passing from one condition of the soul to another. For a man of those days the ascent of a mountain was a far more living experience than for modern man who has become so abstract. They felt with special vividness, what some sea-farers still experience today in a primitive, less delicate way, that, to a certain degree, soul and spirit actually free themselves from their instrument, the body. The more sensitive sea-faring folk still have this experience. But the men of old felt as a matter of course: “When I sail out on the open sea, and am no longer connected with the solid earth and its definite forms, then my soul frees itself from the body, and I see more of the supersensible than when I am surrounded by earth's rigid outlines.”—This is why, when Homunculus is to be changed into Homo, Goethe introduces a gay festival of the sea, and it is Thales, the man of natural philosophy, who conducts Homunculus thither.

And we see the Sirens. I spoke of this yesterday so today I shall not dwell upon the dramatic an pictorial way in which everything here is put into external form. I will, however, point out that the deeper mystery that Goethe would also have us see, the mystery of the Sirens' song, lies in these demonic beings belonging on the one side to the sea, but being able to become living, as demonic beings of the sea, only when the moon shines upon it. The moonlit sea lures forth the Sirens who, in their turn, lure forth man's soul from within him. The state of consciousness in which the supersensible world can be perceived in Imaginations, in pictures, is therefore brought about by the Sirens. Above all they practise their wiles on the Nereids and Tritons, who are on their way to Samothrace, to the sacred Mysteries of the Kabiri.

Precisely why does Goethe introduce the Kabiri? This is because his Homunculus is to become Homo, to become man, and because the Initiates of the holy Mysteries of the Kabiri in Samothrace were above all destined to learn the secret of man's becoming. It was this secret that was represented in the Kabiri. Here in the physical world is accomplished physical becoming, but this has its counterpart in the sphere of spirit and soul, a counterpart only to be seen outside the body in Imaginations. Unless the abstract idea of Homunculus is brought into connection with what can be seen here, Homunculus can never become Homo. Thus Goethe believes in all that the Greek felt when thinking of his Kabiri in Samothrace; he believed something was to be found there over and above the abstract idea of Homunculus, through which it might grow to the idea of Homo.

Let us without prejudice speak of what this really involves. In what man can experience of himself through ordinary knowledge, that amounts only to what he is as Homunculus, Goethe saw something to be compared with the unfertilised human germ-cell. Considering the unfertilised germ-cell in the human mother, we recognise it as something from which no physical human being can arise. It must first be fertilised; only then can there be a physical human being. And when we think with physical understanding alone, in these thoughts the inner being of man can never be lit up, for this is only what can be produced one-sidedly, and may be compared with what can be produced by the woman one-sidedly. All it is possible to grasp with out physical understanding, must be fertilised by knowledge gained outside the physical body. Half the riddle on man is hidden from the mere physical power of understanding. The atavistic clairvoyance adapted to ancient times wished to point, in the Mystery of the Kabiri, to what, in the spiritual connection of nature, is the other half of man's becoming which in its turn points to the immortal in man. That is why Goethe thought that possible through the impulse of the Kabiri the developing of Homunculus into Homo might be represented.

But Goethe, as one who sought knowledge, was not only to a high degree a serious seeker, but, at the same time, something which, my dear friends, is very much rarer in the sphere of knowledge than one might think—a deeply honest soul. He wished to test how far he would get by breathing new life into such a mystery as that of the Kabiri. Those who seek knowledge with less honesty make a few antiquarian studies, perhaps adding a few fantasies founded upon these, and then consider they know something of what is expressed in the Kabiri Mystery. Yes, my dear friends, the honest seeker after knowledge never knows as much as the seeker who is less honest, for he always considers himself more stupid than those who light-heartedly piece together information from here and there, which, easily acquired, is then said to be absolutely complete. Goethe was not one of those who took knowledge thus light-heartedly. He knew that, even if he had striven for it from the year 1749 to the year 1829, in which he wrote this scene just witnessed (a scene written in the most difficult circumstances about two years before his death) even if he has grown old in this striving and has never relaxed, nevertheless, for the honest searcher after knowledge there is always a remaining sting. Perhaps in some direction one ought to have done better.—This is what worked so intensively out of Goethe's very nature—this absolute honesty. This made him recognise, where the riddle of the Kabiri is concerned: As a modern man who can no longer call upon clairvoyance, I cannot know what the Greeks thought about the Kabiri—I cannot know this for certain!—But perhaps that is not of most importance, for Goethe had the feeling that there was a kind of knowledge of the Kabiri Mystery within him, which, however, he could not wholly grasp. It was like a dream that not only immediately fades, but of which one knows that, although it passes away so quickly, it contains something most profound; it hovers so lightly that the understanding, the intellect, does not suffice, the soul-forces do not suffice to give it clear and definite outline. It is precisely in this intimate inner development that there lies the significance of this scene. We do not understand it at all if we wish to explain every detail. For Goethe has called up pictures for the very purpose of showing—“Here I am close to my goal yet cannot reach it.”

Thus, he introduces the Kabiri to show how, perhaps not he but someone who fully grasps the Kabiri Mystery, may find the bridge for Homunculus, with the help of that Mystery, to come to Homo. He himself cannot yet succeed in this, and has therefore chosen other paths in the imaginative world. That is why he makes the philosopher Thales conduct Homunculus into the presence of Nereus. Now Goethe thought very highly of Thales, though not to the point of giving him credit for being able to show Homunculus how to become Homo. This Nereus has a great gift of human understanding and knows how to transform the divine into the demonic, thus foreseeing the future, so that it may be supposed he knows something about changing Homunculus into Homo. But here again Goethe wishes to show that this is not the path. For on this path we come to a one-sided development, raising the human critical understanding to a demonic height that not only runs to dull criticism but to actual prophetic criticism holding in mind the good side of human criticism. Nereus, however, a kind of priest among the demons, is not in a position, either, to approach the Homunculus-problem. He does not even want to do so. Goethe has the feeling that, should human understanding be developed to the demonic, should the critical faculty of investigation possessed by man be—shall we say—demonised, he would then lose all interest in this most profound human problem of raising Homunculus to man. Thus nothing is to be gained from Nereus. But he does at least draw attention to the imminent approach of his daughters, the Dorides, sisters of the Nereids, and among them, the most outstanding of them all, Galatea. Yesterday I tried to indicate what is represented in this picture of Galatea.

You see, my dear friends, the modern man of research sees everything telescoped into a single moment of life. In the Greek world-conception—by no means confined to what is generally known as classical Philology—what live in the human being was still closely connected with all that lives in the whole of external nature. All that contributes to the becoming of man exists in another form, weaving and pulsing through every process of nature. But we have to be able to discover it. Our present capacity for knowledge is not sensitive enough to penetrate into the regions through which we participate in external nature, in the experiences of the great universe. These experiences are, indeed, concealed in man, in his development from the human germ-cell, from conception, fertilisation, to birth and his appearing as a human being. The same processes that then take place, in concealment within the human being, are going on continuously all around us. It was precisely this which, in the Kabiri Mystery was disclosed to the candidate for initiation—how in nature conception and birth are living. We see the moon rise and set, we see the sun rise and set, feel the warmth the sun sheds around, receive the light it radiates; we see the clouds moving, look upon their changing forms. Within all this weaving and pulsing through the world lies the impulse of becoming. But modern man no longer perceives this; he will perceive it, however, if he develops himself further through Spiritual Science. And formerly he perceived it with an atavistic sense of cognition, with the atavistic perception and conception of olden times.

Here we must have recourse to that finer capacity for perception still existing in days of yore. It might be said that what happens when, instead of direct sunlight, moonlight is on the sea, moonlight is reflected on the waves, is experienced half consciously as dreamy presentiment, as the foreshadowing of a dream. Man today looks at the way moonlight is reflected on the waves; and all the physicist can say is that moonlight is polarised light. That is an abstraction that says very little; and the physicist experiences nothing of what is actually happening. We experience it today if someone burns us with red-hot tongs; our capacity for sensitive feeling takes us that far. But in the Greek world-conception it was recognised that something of soul and spirit lives in the rays of the sun, something similar, yet distinct, is living in the rays of the moon, and that something actually happens when the moonlight—that borrowed sunlight—is wedded to the waves of the sea. It knew what was surging there when the pulse of the moonlight throbbed in tune with the waves of the sea. When the moon was thus wedded to the waves, the Greeks perceived in this light-enchanted weaving the impulse surging, pulsing, through the external world which, from conception the birth, pulses and surges in man. Outside in nature the Greek perceived in another form what is present in man when, in the physical sense, the mystery of human becoming is being accomplished.

Goethe, by putting into new and artistic form what intimately and delicately the Greeks might have felt, shows clearly how it echoed in his own feeling. He expresses all this by making Thales point to the retinue of the moon approaching on little clouds, accompanying Galatea's shell-chariot. This shell-chariot is the generating force in external nature pulsing through the sea. Goethe associates it with Luna, the Moon-force, the Moon-impulse. Thus, once again he evokes a significant Imagination from the Greek world-conception, in order to draw nearer the process by which, in man's conception, the abstract Homunculus-idea can become that of the Homo. Only when we can with feeling experience the intimate details weaving and surging in Goethe's wonderful pictures, do we really enter into what in this scene was living in Goethe's soul. We shall never go deep into all this scene contains if we try to grasp it with our bald, abstract concepts, and without arousing in ourselves an intimate sympathy with what Goethe was able to experience.

Thus, if I may express myself in dull, theoretical fashion, we shall come nearer the solution of the Homunculus-Homo problem if this idea, seen from outside the physical body, is planted into the generative impulse weaving, throbbing, through nature. Even before he brought Homunculus into contact with this generative impulse, Goethe had called in Proteus, the demonic being whose inner bent of soul Goethe regarded as most closely allied to his theory of metamorphosis. He has endeavored in this theory of metamorphosis, to follow up the changes in the living form, from the lowest order of beings up to man, hoping in this way to come nearer the riddle of man's becoming, the riddle of Homunculus-Homo. We know that Goethe had far to go before being able to arrive at the solution. He thought to recognise that the foliage leaf changes into the petal of the flower that, in its turn, becomes the stamen and pistil of the flower. He also believed that the bones of the spinal column are transformed into the skull bones. There he stopped, for he could not press on to the crown of this metamorphosis-idea, that appears for us when we know that a metamorphosis takes place in the forces which, from one incarnation, from one earth-life to another, permeate the human body. What today is my head has its form through the metamorphosis of the rest of the body of the previous incarnation; and what is my present body will be, with the exception of the head, transformed till, in the next incarnation, it becomes my next head. This is the crown of Metamorphosis. But Goethe could only give us the elementary stages of the idea of metamorphosis which flows on into Spiritual Science. He came nearer its further stages when trying to grasp and put into poetic form the problem of Homunculus-Homo.

And he set forth with honest doubt all that could be reached through Proteus as the representative of the metamorphosis-idea. Proteus appears in his various forms that exist, however, side by side. Everything that can lead to the birth, the supersensible birth, of the Homunculus-idea is here brought in by Goethe. Now he again comes to a standstill. Then fresh light flashes in. In contrast to all that is demonic, the elemental beings of a spiritual nature, Nereids, Tritons, Dorides, Nereus, Proteus, and so forth, in contrast to all these, there appear the Telchines. These, the oldest artists, as it were, of the earthly world during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, remind us that Goethe was trying to approach the riddle of man, not only by the path of physical science, but also by another path of the senses—the path of art. As man, Goethe was neither one-sidedly a scientist, nor one-sidedly an artist; in him scientist and artist were consciously combined. Hence, as he stood before works of art in Italy, he said that he saw something there suggesting that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, worked in accordance with the laws nature applied, the same laws that he himself was tracking down. And if you let Goethe's book on Winckelmann work upon you, you will see how Goethe sought to come nearer knowledge of the riddle of man by way of art, how he sought to follow the course of natural phenomena to the point where, as he so beautifully expresses it in this book, nature becomes conscious of herself in man. What can be done here by the artistic conception of nature—seen from the other side, from the standpoint of supersensible knowledge—is made evident to us with the appearance of the Telchines, those ancient artists who first depicted Gods in human form.

Goethe intimates that, whereas he generally leads the human consciousness away from the physical to the superphysical, here he is making one look back from the superphysical to the physical; the Telchines are in the superphysical, but what they mean, what they stand for, passes over into the physical. They are portrayed as being in contrast with all the other figures—those dedicated wholly to Luna, to the Moon, and referred to by the Sirens as follows:

“Helios' initiated
Ye to bright day consecrated
Greet us in this stirring hour,
When we worship Luna's power.”

Thus they actually belong to the Sun. On the island of Rhodes they erected statue after statue to Apollo. The attempt has been made to solve the Homunculus-Homo problem by looking across to the supersensible world; but that too has been unsuccessful. And Proteus himself energetically denies that anything is to be gained from the Telchines for the transformation of Homunculus into Homo.

And what happens next? There now appear the Psylli and the Marsi, kinds of snake-demons, who bring with them the previously described shell-chariots of Galatea. The Psylli and Marsi are demonic snakes, who draw into the spiritual the souls of human beings; at the same time they are servants in the world man inters on leaving his physical body. In that world there is no separation between the purely animal and the purely human, the animal from passes over, merges, into the human.

Now after being shown by means of the sailor boys, and the Dorides who represent that world, how difficult it is to put before man the relation of the spiritual world to the world of the senses, we then see the shattering of Homunculus against the shell-chariot of Galatea. There is deep meaning in the Dorides thus ushering in the sailor lads in this scene. The Dorides are demonic beings of the sea, the sailors, human beings. Goethe is wishing to show how man is abel to approach spiritual beings from the other side of existence, and how destiny (we are distinctly told the sailor lads have been saved by the Dorides) brings man into connection with the Gods. But here in physical life this relation is immediately broken down; there is no continuous connection when the superphysical and physical wish to unite—the Gods will not suffer it.

Then at the end of this scene we ar confronted by this wonderful picture. After everything ha been tried through majestic Imaginations to turn Homunculus into Homo, there follows, as the highest, nearest, most significant approach to the solution of the riddle of man, the actual plunging of Homunculus into the generative force of nature in so far as it shows itself through the moonlit, moon-enchanted ocean waves. Into these waves Homunculus now plunges. And what do we see at the end of the scene? A flashing-up, a flaming forth, a manifestation of all the elements—earth, water, fire, air, all these elements overpower what is here taking place. And it almost seems to us that sunk with our cognition into sleep, we ourselves learn to know the Imaginations which, in the other side of existence, can alone interpret the riddle of humanity—it seems then, that through the rolling on of the generative forces we are called back into the life we must live out in the body. I told you yesterday that the force underlying impregnation, conception, pregnancy, embryonic life and birth, is only a more extended, more intensive form of the same force as that which lures us back from our nightly sleep, or from the sleep of cognition, to physical waking existence. These forces are identical. Every morning when we wake, the force that wakes us is, though different in intensity, the same as that by which a human being is conceived, carried as embryo, and born. One only of these is seen here on earth, and that merely in its external, not in its deeply mysterious, inner aspect. The other passes over us unperceived. The holy mystery of waking is unperceived in its passing. We sink down into a spiritual world, we are submerged in a spiritual world; we wake up, take possession of our body, and are in the physical world of the senses.

There are, nevertheless, even among those who are not clairvoyant, some men who when they are asleep know quite well what is actually living above, and through their sleep dreamily experience the spiritual world in its reality. Then they wake through the same force as the one living in Galatea's shell-chariot—the generative force of nature with which Homo-Homunculus unites himself on his way to becoming man. Some men know this even when not clairvoyant. There is, however, in clairvoyance, a knowledge that is perfectly clear concerning this waking. It may be understood in imagination only as a diving out of the spiritual world, down into the physical world of the senses, the world that lives in the elements of fire, water, earth, air. And on returning to this reality, all we think to have gained above in the other world, towards making a Homo of Homunculus, is dashed to pieces.

Faust is to plunge into the reality of ancient Greece; he is to meet Helen in person. And when you turn the page from the mighty finale of this scene where it runs:

“Hail the ocean! Hail the surge!
Girt with holy fire its verge,
Hail the water! Hail the fire!
Hail the chance that all admire!
Hail the breeze that softly swelleth!
Hail the grot where mystery dwelleth!
All we festally adore
Hail ye elements, all four!”

When you turn the page, you come to the third act:

“Admired much and much reviled Helena,
Leaving the shore where we but now did land, I come
Still drunken with the unrestful hallows' tumultuous
Commotion, that from Phrygian lowlands ...” and so on,

Faust is to enter Greek reality, he is to be wakened out of spiritual perception, highest spiritual perception, of the Homunculus-Homo problem, wakened into the Greek world. He is to wake there consciously, as Goethe wished to do; the moment of waking has to be brought about so as to show that what has been perceived in the spiritual world, in the supersensible, concerning the riddle of man, is shattered when the descent is made again into the external, physical reality of the body. That is an external process in nature, when the moon disappears and dawn breaks. But man today experiences this relation at best as something allegorical, symbolic or poetic. The reality underlying it is little recognised. We meet it here in something that is at the same time an embodiment of the problem of knowledge and also of true poetry. Goethe has indeed succeeded in leading Faust into the supersensible world in a noble way, and in making him wake to life in Greek reality.

We might remind ourselves here that it was during the eighties of the eighteenth century that Goethe took flight to Italy—for it was indeed a flight. Having studied nature in the north, he then wished to discover, for the benefit of his conception of the riddle of the world, what he believed that art of the south alone could give him. He gained much for we know what Goethe had become by the nineties of the eighteenth century. By then he had grown older, and that means younger in soul, for as a man outwardly ages, in his soul he grows young—youngest of all when he comes to dying. The life of the soul runs backward.—And so we come to about the year 1829. We may trace and experience what Goethe may then have felt: If, when I had the opportunity of really penetrating the art of the south, of making the spirit of Greece alive before my soul, if at that time I had only been able to take the plunge into the spiritual world that I now merely divine, how much richer, more intensive, all my experience would have been.—The characteristic mood of this second part of Goethe's Faust depends on our recognising in it an artistic representation of what has been experienced in life by a soul grown young again, a soul who in thus growing young has been enriched to a very high degree. That is why no philistine will be able to make much of this second part of Faust. And I can perfectly understand it when Schwaben-Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, in many ways so spiritually minded, and who has said so much that is good about Goethe's Faust, has found that this kind of thing is tedious—the cobbled together patchwork of an old man. But philistinism, my dear friends, however learned and intelligent, can never penetrate into all the poetry, the lofty poetry, of the second part of Faust. No one can enter into this who does not allow his poetic sense to be warmed through, fired, by what spiritual vision gives.

Tomorrow, after the performance, we will say more about this scene, in connection with Goethe shown there concerning his own impulses.

In the two lectures following the performance of the later Walpurgis-night scene, from the second part of Faust, I hoped to evoke the feeling that, in the whole of his inner life, Goethe was in reality on the path to the supersensible world. I wanted you to feel that he succeeded, as perhaps no other artist, no other poet, has ever done, in developing an artistic creation out of this spiritual life, so that in this creation neither the art not the wisdom falls short and, in its own place, each of the spheres—of striving and wisdom—achieves harmonic expression.

I should not like you to think that in what has been said I have been wishing to give an interpretation of this poem; that was not at all my aim. For in this sphere I consider interpretation to be utterly useless. All that was attempted in these studies was to create the possibility for you to absorb and enjoy a poem, a work of art, in the same element in which it was created. Such studies should simply teach the language, as it were, the spiritual language, in which such a work is written, and should not expound or interpret, for as a rule that too often results in misconstruction and misinterpretation.

Now, if we keep to this mood in the matter, the following may perhaps be of use. You see, there are two fundamental feelings at the base of all striving for knowledge, of every kind of striving towards spiritual experience. One of these feelings comes from man having to think, having to form ideas, as he lives his life between birth and death in the physical body. I think you will agree that we should not be complete human beings, were we not to think about things and about ourselves. Then, too, if we wish to make our lives fuller in the physical body, between birth and death, we have not only to think but also to will. And feeling lies midway between thinking and willing; sometimes it partakes more of thinking and forming ideas, sometimes more of willing. Hence, for the purpose of our proposed study, we may ignore feeling, and consider the one pole of forming ideas, thinking, and then turn to the other pole of human activity, the willing. Man is a thinking and a willing being. But there are special features about this thinking and willing. The trivially-minded, average man looks upon what can be attained as the attainment of a goal if, on the one hand, he thinks as clearly and forcibly as possible, in his own opinion, at least, and if he wills in accordance with his needs. What distinguishes the man of learning who is fundamentally honest, is that he finally admits, when he tries to advance on the path of thinking, that with his thinking in the physical body he still only goes a certain distance towards his goal.

With this thinking, my dear friends, it is exactly as if a man were striving towards a goal; he cannot see it though knowing in what direction it lies. He wants to hasten towards it, but although he knows where the goal must be, it is wrapped in darkness. He imagines it will only become clear when he reaches it. And while he is feeling that he is still nowhere near the goal but a considerable distance from it, some being seems to seize from from behind, and to stop him going farther. And he says: Thinking, the forming of ideas, drives me in a certain direction, then I am stopped; were I to pursue the path of thought in this direction, I should never be able to reach the goal thinking itself has indicated.—Thus he comes to one of the boundaries to which he is by nature subject in the life between birth and death. And it may be said that whoever has never experienced the suffering and blows of fate arising from the goal of thought, has certainly no very deep cognitional life. If, by the inner constitution of his soul, a man can fancy he is able to reach the goal of thought by thinking, he is doomed to superficiality. We can be preserved from superficiality only when by trying to think as deeply and clearly as possible, we begin to feel harassed by the hindrances to thought. This feeling of being frustrated in thought is a profound human experience, without which we cannot pass beyond superficiality into a really deep comprehension of life.

And this is not the only boundary set to the human being's full experience between birth and death; the other is encountered where the will is unfolded. This is the sphere in which there germinate men's desires arising out of the life of instinct. Man is driven to willing in the crudest sense through hunger and thirst and other instincts; and there is then a rising scale from instinct up to the purest spiritual ideals. In all these impulses, from grossest instincts up to spiritual ideals, willing is deployed. But now, if we are to try and establish ourselves in life with our will that passes over into action, we again come to a boundary. Fundamentally, Goethe's aim in Faust was to establish Faust in life by means of his will, so that he should be able to experience all that makes life happy, all that shatters life, all that gives freedom and all that is sinful. And if we try to take our stand in life with the will that passes over into action, the will translated into deed, we again find ourselves up against a boundary. But now it is a different feeling that arises. It is not so much that in our thinking we are stopped and hindered from reaching our goal, but rather that, while we are willing, we are seized upon, and our willing goes on no longer in accordance with our own wishes. In the act of willing one is snatched away. Someone else arises in our willing, who carries us off.

This then is the second feeling which, when experienced by man, leads him out of superficiality into a profound conception of life. Self-satisfied philistines, it is true, are of the opinion that a man reaches his goal by sufficiently developing his thinking and willing. But it is on these paths of complacency and self-satisfaction that the superficiality of life lies. There does not lie here what makes it possible in life's testing, after suitable probation and the crossing of an abyss, to enter another world, a world that cannot be lived through with the consciousness developed in the life between birth and death. A man is tested when, with suitable intensity, he realises in his soul the two boundary lines already referred to. Men must understand precisely from what Goethe has given, that it is not merely the bliss of endeavor—often imaginary and based on pure illusion—that can be experienced, but rather what leads a man to his goal over all hindrances, disappointments and disillusions. And whoever strives to avoid disillusionment, and refuses to transform, to metamorphose, the whole human being in certain moments of life, cannot press forward to knowledge of man, to the understanding of man.

We need not realise, my dear friends, that in this connection the Christ-permeated conception of the world and of life must, in the near future, experience a significant change. Hitherto, Christianity through the way it has developed in the different religious denominations is, usually, only at its initial stage. If we want to describe this development, we might say that it has created the feeling in man that Christ did once exist. And even this feeling that Christ once existed has been lost again in the materialistic research of the nineteenth century. What Christ brought into the world, Christ's connection with the striving of the human soul, into all this life will first pour in future through the researches of Spiritual Science, and through a spiritual kind of cosmic feeling—a supersensible experience. This will be seen if, to begin with, in this intellectual age, the majority of mankind can only have the experience in Imaginations, in imaginative pictures.

But these two basic feelings of which I have just spoken as arising from the two boundaries of self-knowledge and self-comprehension, these two feelings must find a crossing-point from a passive to an active Christianity. Just think how, for many people in the past, Christ has been nothing more than a helper in straits where a man is unable to help himself. Think of the strange way in which the Roman Catholic Church took on, at a certain time, the forgiveness of sins; anyone might sin as much as he liked, provided he repented and did due penance afterwards, he was forgiven. In short, Christ was there to help in time of need, to make good what men as a whole had no intention themselves of making good. And then look at the other, more Protestant error, where a man remains passive too, arranging his worldly life, his worldly activities, to suit himself, and then perhaps expecting that merely by belief in Christ, by a passive feeling of being united with Christ, he will be saved. This twofold passive relation to Christ belongs, and must belong, to the past. And what is to take its place must be a relation to Christ that is an active force, a going to meet Him, so that Christ does not do for a man what the man does not want to do, but gives him power through His being to do it himself. An active Christianity—or rather a Christianity that comes to activity—is what must take the place of passive Christianity in which actually (forgive the trivial mode of expression) a man does what he pleases on the physical plane, making God into a kindly friend who pardons everything if only man turns to Him at the right moment.

This my dear friends, will at the same time mark the dividing line between the age which must now belong to the past, the age that has led to so terrible a human catastrophe, and the age that must come. It is only when this coming age has passed over from a Christianity that is passive to one that is active, that it will be qualified to heal those evils that have already shown themselves and will continue to do so increasingly so long as the principles of the past prevail. These evils are rooted deep in human hearts and souls; and they must be healed if earth-evolution is to proceed.

The two basic feelings of the boundaries to thinking and willing may also be described by saying: The one boundary makes it clear that a man cannot arrive at knowledge of his own nature. As human beings we are so constituted that we cannot, on the one hand, arrive at our own human nature, cannot with our thinking reach ourselves. In willing we do this, for willing actually proceeds form ourselves; in willing we lose ourselves; but here another seizes us—another cosmic being is formed simply according to the principle of this duality. He is a dual being, not a monad, but a dual being. The one member of this twofold being cannot reach itself, the other loses itself.

Hence man is never correctly represented when shown as a mere monad, but only when an effort is made to show him as standing midway between being unable to reach himself, and losing himself. And when it is possible for men to feel both at the same time with all intensity, then he feels himself rightly as a man on earth. When he feels a kind of oscillation between the two, then he feels himself man on earth. In spite of this oscillation, what must be arrived at is repose of being. This repose of being is attained in the physical sphere by the pendulum, the balance; in the spiritual, moral sphere, man must be able to attain the condition of repose reached by the balance and the pendulum. He must not aspire to a position of absolute rest; that would make him indolent and corrupt. He should strive for the state of repose midway between the beats, midway between the not-reaching and the losing himself.

In order to develop these feelings correctly it is essential that other feelings be added concerning life and reality.

You know, my dear friends, I have often called your attention to the one-sided way in which evolution is understood today. Think how the whole of evolution is now conceived as if what comes after were always the result of what went before. Actually, the man of today thinks of the successive stages of evolution almost like a set of cardboard boxes fitting into one another. And then, as for development, one box represents the human being between birth and the seventh year; then the second is taken out, and that is the human being from seven to fourteen; the third from fourteen to one-and twenty, and so on—one always coming out of another. To modern man the most acceptable idea is evolutionary advance in a straight line.

This is really at the bottom of all the grotesque notions that are learnt at school nowadays, notions which in future will be regarded as scientific lunacy of the enlighted period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To imagine thus that there was once a nebular condition (the Kant-Laplace theory) and that then, one after another, cardboard box out of cardboard box, the successive stages always proceeded out of the earlier—this is an abnormal idea of present-day science. For things are not like that. Just think how evolution in the individual man between birth and death appears, to even a moderately unprejudiced observation! The actual limit of the first period in life is the change of teeth, as we know—the cutting of the second teeth. I have often drawn attention to this. How what is this second cutting of teeth at about the seventh year, at the close of the first life-period? It is a consolidation, a hardening, of the human being, when a hardening process takes place in men. It is like a drawing together of all the life-forces, so that eventually the densest, most mineralised part, the second teeth, can appear. It is a real concentration and densification of all the forces of life.

The second period in life ends at puberty. And the case here is exactly the reverse. Here there is no concentration of life-forces but, on the contrary, a rarefication of them all, a dispersal, an overflowing. An opposite condition pulses in the organism. And then again, only in a more refined way, in the twenty-first year when the third life-period ends, consolidation takes place in man, the forces of life are once more drawn together. With the twenty-eighth year there is again expansion. The twenty-first year has more to do with the placing of what is within man,the twenty-eighth more with his attitude to the whole wide universe. Approximately at the thirty-fifth year there is again a kind of contraction. That is the middle life—the thirty-fifth year.

Thus, evolution does not go in a straight line but, rather, in waves: contraction, hardening; softening, expansion. That is essentially the life of man as a whole. By being born here in the physical world, we contract into our individual skins; while we are living our life between death and a new birth, we are increasingly expanding.

What follows from all this, my dear friends? It follows that the idea of evolution going in a straight line is of no help at all; it leads mankind astray, and we must reject it. All evolution proceeds rhythmically; all evolution goes with the rise and fall of waves—expanding, contracting.

Contraction, expansion. Goethe sensed this in its elementary stages. Read his Metamorphosis of Plants; read his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants, and you will see how he follows the particular formation from foliage leaf to foliage leaf, then to petal, stamen, on to pistil; how he describes it as a continuous expansion, contraction, not only in external forms, the saps also expand with their forces and again contract—expand, concentrate; expand, concentrate. When in the eighties of the last century I wrote my first introduction to Goethe's scientific works, I tried to reconstruct his archetypal plant, tried to bring into a picture this expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction—on and on right up to the blossom. No one can really understand life who does not picture it in rhythm, as a progressive rhythmic process. It must be repeatedly emphasised that to imagine evolution as proceeding in a straight line does not help us to a true understanding of life.

The same applies to the understanding of man's historical life. In the most recent number of the periodical Das Reich (October 1918) where I dealt with Lucifer and Ahriman in life, I pointed out how luciferic and ahrimanic periods alternate rhythmically in historic evolution. Life never proceeds in a straight line; it goes in waves. But while this is so, it is associated also with an external change. And only by looking clear-sightedly into these relations can we arrive at a deeper comprehension of life. Those who think of evolution as proceeding in a straight line, say: First there existed the most undeveloped animals, then more and more perfect ones, up to the apes, and out of these developed man.—If we apply this to what is moral—I have often called your attention to this—if we extend this further, it follows that the genuine, thorough-going Darwinian says: We already see in the human kindliness, and so on. This again is a worthless idea, for it takes no account at all of the rhythm of life. According to this idea evolution goes on in a straight line, one cardboard box coming out of another. In reality the matter is like this. Imagine the most highly developed animals with their proclivities further developed in a straight line—this way you do not arrive at man, you would never come to man. But the more highly developed animals would evolve those very qualities you find attractive in the animal kingdom, in a most unattractive way. What you admire in animals as companionableness, as incipient good-will and social behaviour, when further developed turns to its rhythmic opposite—to the principle of evil. Mad man developed according to Haeckel's idea, then, my dear friends, there would have evolved from the anthropoid apes a human society inevitably destined to develop the war of all against all. For in all these aptitudes, good as they may be in animals, there lies the further evolutionary impulse to clash together in violent and most bloody conflict. That is rhythm, a wave-like rise and fall, and no one finds what is hidden in nature who does not see the possibilities of evolution in rhythm. To look only on the outside of events can never teach us to realise what in reality is there. Man was able to develop only because, in the higher animals, their evolutionary possibilities did not come to anything, for these were met by another wave of cosmic becoming which subdued the tendency to evil, in a way overcame it, by what men were meant to be in the very beginning. So that we have to picture it thus: The animal kingdom rises to a certain height; then comes the other wave to meet it, and this deadens the evil development.

My dear friends, reincarnation can also be regarded from the moral point of view. What would man have become had he just been born, over and over again on the physical plane, and being thus born physically on the physical plane, he had not been met by all that is constantly being taken up into the spiritual world and again sent down; were man not thus ensouled after birth then he would live always at war on earth. They would only with to live in conflict and would develop the most terrible fighting instincts. These fighting instincts rest on the foundation of the human soul; they are rooted in the human organism. But they are paralysed, if I may so express it, by what comes from above out of the supersensible, from those human beings who are constantly taken up into the spiritual world. This is expressed also in the outward form, my dear friends. It is altogether grotesque for those with inner sight when the human head is represented as having gradually evolved from the animal head. It is indeed complete nonsense. The truth is that, were the animal head to develop further, a fearsome monster would emerge in what, in the present incarnation, you evolve out of the lower part of your body. Were that alone to form the head, were it to form the head out of itself, the result would be a real abortion of a head—a horrible animal-monster. For that is where the possibility of such a monstrosity lies. Only because the spiritual comes from above and, as it were, washes up against it, is the human head able to arise. It springs from the relationship of two forces, the one pressing upward from the body, the other coming to meet it from the cosmos. This human head is constructed in a state of equilibrium; and it is because of its equilibrium that we are not able to deal freely with what we bring with us from the spiritual world. We slip into our physical head and cannot there clearly express what we actually are, when we hurry into existence through birth. If we could think as we did before birth, we should not think a Homunculus, we should think a man, a Homo.

You remember in my Christmas lecture at Basle (December 22, 1918) not long ago, I mentioned in passing that, before his birth, Nikolaus von der Flüe saw scenes that he lived through as a man after his birth. But when a man is born, and does not overcome being asleep in his cognition—that is, when he cannot develop waking existence outside his body, but thinks only with his body—then he never thinks a man but only a Homunculus. A man never reaches the real man by seeking to enter into himself through the head. It is really a fact thgat he seeks to enter in but is held back; somewhere in the middle of man there exists what his is unable to reach. This is within man himself, yet he remains Homunculus and does not come to Homo.

Actually were we in possession of every technical resource, we should put into the phial that represents Homunculus on the stage, only a horrible little monstrosity, small, and therefore not unattractive; and this is really what would come into being were it left to the human body alone, out of itself, to produce something. There would come forth a sort of animal that nevertheless would be no animal but a human abortion; something on the way to becoming human yet not quite succeeding. Neither do we succeed if we do not make the approach by way of this path to becoming men, this path that does not reach man. We do not then succeed for we do not thus enter inside ourselves.

And again, if man grasps himself through his will, he is immediately seized upon by another being. Then he loses himself, then all kinds of strange motives and impulses surge up into his willing. Only when a man endeavours to bring the inner forces into equilibrium does he succeed in becoming complete man.

Now, my dear friends, with what I have said compare three different passages in the second part of Goethe's Faust that you can now have the opportunity on witnessing. Think of the sublime moment when Faust appears before Manto. Goethe is trying here to shed over the whole incident the inner repose of the human soul called forth by experiencing equilibrium. Faust would like, on the one hand, to avoid the sentimentality of the abstract mystic, and one of his last speeches is “O, could I from my path all magic ban”. He did not want external magic, he wanted to find the inner path to the supersensible world. He is near it, and then again far from it. As I explained yesterday Goethe is perfectly honest when Faust is standing before Manto. But Faust, my dear friends, does not hold to this abstract repose; he is tossed from pillar to post. Hence from the one side he is continually thrown to the opposite, where man loses himself through the will. Compare all this with what happens to Faust in the scenes where he is developing his life with Mephistopheles. There you have always the Faust of will, who, however is continually losing himself by his impulses being seized by Mephistopheles. This is where a man goes astray in his willing, where he will lose himself; here you have all the dangers that threaten man's moral impulses. And this is expressed with tremendous depth in Goethe's Faust.

Then take the moment when Mephistopheles joins the Phorkyads, when he himself takes on the form of a Phorkyad, and in all his ugliness goes as far as admitting it. Previously he was lying, but when the Phorkyads surround him he is obliged to admit his ugliness. Read the speech of the Phorkyads again; they too acknowledge their ugliness, and are in a certain way honest in their ugliness. In this moment you have a contrast to that sacred and sublime moment when Faust stands before Manto. What makes us lose ourselves in motives of will is clearly seen when Mephistopheles appears for the last time in the Classical Walpurgis-Night. Faust appears for the last time visibly, in the external drama, precisely in this scene with Manto—Mephistopheles in the scene with the Phorkyads. Goethe wished to indicate from the depths of his profound experience that, fundamentally, what makes us lose ourselves in the motives of will can only be set right if we not merely abhor it morally, but also experience it as something offending our taste. This was at the root of Schiller's feeling too, when he placed what is moral in such close connection with the aesthetic in his Aesthetic Letters.

This is just what is so distressing, my dear friends, that in the recent development of mankind culture has been brought to such a high pitch as, for instance, we see in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, and this has all been forgotten. Imagine how Schiller believed that in these letters, written in the first place to the Duke of Augustonburg, he had brought about a deed of political significance. Whoever grasps the following two facts in their true depth learns much concerning the evolution of mankind. First he learns that Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were the outcome of his conception of Goethe's urge towards becoming; and, secondly, that this could be forgotten, that this forgetting has largely contributed to the present human catastrophe. Those who keep these two facts before them indeed learn much about the evolution of humanity.

And, from the point of view of drama, how great is the moment when in the terrible scene where Mephistopheles is among the Phorkyads we are shown how what is morally impermissible lives in man like a feeling that is aesthetically offensive. There, shown in all its atrocity, is the impulse, the essential impulse, that drives man to lose himself in the pole of will. Should a man fail to recognise this it will prove his ruin; only by realising it is one freed from it. You will find this expressed in the last scene of my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. There it is shown how only knowledge, a clear conception of who it is who tempts and seduces us, can save us from being led astray. It is therefore essential in the age of the consciousness-soul now entered that, in order to overcome temptation, we should strive in the right way to come to know the tempter, not allowing ourselves to sink down into a merely external knowledge of nature and a merely abstract mysticism.

In short, my dear friends, abstract mysticism, the ‘easy understanding of the divine within’, from which nothing results but a terrible egotistical abstraction—this abstract mysticism is just as bad as materialism.

As I said, take three moments in Goethe's Faust. Take purely artistically what you can feel as Faust stands before Manto; what you feel when Mephistopheles becomes a Phorkyad among the Phorkyads. And take the third moment when Homunculus crashes against Galatea's shell-chariot—feel what this Homunculus is. We come from the spiritual world seeking through conception and birth for physical existence. In this physical existence we meet with what, out of this physical existence, is given us as our physical body. Every evening we go back into the world that we leave at birth; every morning we, as it were, repeat our birth when we plunge again into our physical body. Then we can feel how, coming in from without, we do not arrive at what man is; we meet only with Homunculus, the manikin, the human being in embryo, and we realise how difficult it is to come to the real man. We might arrive at the real man could we contrive to have a perfectly clear conception just before waking, when all the evolutionary possibilities of the night are exhausted. This clear conception, my dear friends, would be a world-conception, it would be such that we should no longer feel ourselves hemmed in by any boundary, but feel as if poured out over the whole universe, over all cosmic light, all cosmic sound, all cosmic life, and in front of us a kind of abyss. One the far side of this would be a continuation of what we were feeling before we met the abyss on waking—namely, warmth. Warmth flows out over the abyss. Now, however, we cross the abyss by waking, into air, water and earth of which our organism is composed. Certainly we are approaching man, and by letting Homunculus fructify in the spiritual world, we have prepared ourselves to understand man. But in the ordinary course of life we do not do what I have just mentioned. The living conception we develop when sleep should have had its effect upon us before we wake, would have to be brought with us into waking life. This conception would be an experiencing ourselves in light, in cosmic sound, in cosmic life, a meeting with the beings of the higher hierarchies, just as here the physical body comes into connection with the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. This conception, developed concisely just before waking when sleep has done its work upon us, we should have to bring deep down into our physical body; then we should be able to understand what this human body is. But alas “the Gods will not suffer it”. We plunge down; it flashes, flames up, and we hardly notice it. Instead of looking into ourselves, we hear with our external ears; instead of feeling ourselves within our skin, we feel what is outside with our sense of touch. If we did not sink down into what we are able to reach only by the physical eye, the physical ear, through physical sound and physical touch, Homunculus would receive new life and become man, but against the resistance of the elements he is dashed to pieces. The light of the eye flames up instead of cosmic light, we begin to hear physical sound in the ear instead of cosmic sound, the life of the body is aroused instead of cosmic life—Homunculus is shattered. If we experience this consciously, we experience the end of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Thus, this end scene is taken from actual, true life.

These things are not there merely to be spoken of on Sunday afternoons in the Anthroposophical Society. They are there as truth, to become gradually known to mankind, so that as impulses they may with their being penetrate what must be accepted in the future evolution of man, if he is to advance to what can save and not destroy. For men will really find the correct connection with reality only if they adopt new concepts and from now onwards they begin to see what has always been extolled as the great achievement of the nineteenth century is at an end.

You see, my dear friends, it is not surprising that, from a certain point of view, this achievement of the nineteenth century, that continued into the twentieth, should be felt to be perfect. It is not to be wondered at all. Is it not true that before the tree becomes bare in autumn, it is in its fruiting in its most perfect stage of development. This natural science of the nineteenth century, that still haunts the twentieth, al these technical perfections that have reached a certain height, are the tree before it yields its fruit. All from which it has grown has to wither, and it is not enough that the tree should go on growing, a fresh seed must be sown in the field of human culture, a new tree must be planted. It does not suffice to think we understand the evolution of animals, to think of them as having advanced to the stage of man. It is not enough that frequently some spirit arises, who first writs articles of genius about animals, and later, to follow these, a book about the origin of man. Rather is it essential that men should discard the idea of a straight line in evolution, that they should learn to understand the rhythm of life, flowing like the waves of the sea, that they should learn how, in the inner being of man, the way does not go straight on, but across two boundaries. At the one boundary we feel almost suffocated, for someone seizes us and will not allow us to go where our thinking would take us. On the other side we feel as if the powers of Mephistopheles were dragging us to destruction. We must find the balance between what belongs to Homunculus and what belongs to Mephistopheles, between not being able to reach ourselves in Homunculus, and grasping the self only to lose it in Mephistopheles. The understanding of this equilibrium is what modern man must gain. And Goethe, foreseeing this in feeling, lived himself into this understanding when with absolute honesty he tried in his Faust to speak as he did of the riddle of humanity.

Mankind must strive to grow out of what today is the typical point of view of the crowd. Nothing is more resented at present than this striving, and nothing is more injurious to mankind than this hostility against any effort to rise above the commonplace. On the other hand, as long as this resistance is not definitely opposed by those who recognise the necessity of penetrating into the supersensible, there can be no sure human evolution. At the end of the nineteenth century Hamerling, in his Homunculus sought to make what we might call a last appeal to mankind out of the past, by presenting all that is decadent in modern humanity as Homunculism.

We might picture this to ourselves, my dear friends; suppose someone were now to read this Homunculus of Hamerling's which appeared at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century. I have given many lectures about it, even before the war I actually spoke of it, not without a certain significance. Let us suppose then that someone reads Hamerling's Homunculus and lets work upon him what Hamerling imagines as the evolutionary progress of his Homunculus. He thought it out at that time, when men had already broken away from Goethe and all that he gave, and wished to hear no more of it. Hamerling represented the evolution of his Homunculus, how he was completely under the sway of materialistic thinking, how he lived in a world where people did not enrich themselves with spiritual treasure but became millionaires instead. Homunculus was a millionaire. He pictured the world where men treat even spiritual matters with frivolity, the world in which journalism—with respect be it mentioned—that was already developing, has since sunk yet deeper into the slough. We assume then that someone reads this Homunculus, and he might say: Why, yes, this Hamerling who died in 1889, had, when he wrote his Homunculus, with his physical eyes actually only seen mankind as it then was, hurrying on its chosen path. He might continue: Had people then taken seriously what Hamerling emphasises in his Homunculus, had they let it work upon them a little more deeply and not just as a literary production, but as something to be taken in earnest, then indeed they would not have been surprised to learn that, because of men being as they then were, our present world-catastrophe had of necessity to arise. This is what anyone reading Homunculus today might say to himself. What is there in the development of this world-catastrophe to astonish us, when a writer in the eighties of the last century was able to represent the man Homunculus in this way? But, underlying this representation of man, of Homunculus, is at the same time the appeal not to stop short at the life that can give us only Homunculism, but to cross the abyss where Spiritual Science speaks of the supersensible knowledge that alone can change Homunculus into Homo. And so it might be said: Mankind is placed in the Homunculism which, in the scent we are today presenting, finds itself in a world the man of today is not very eager to enter—in a world leading to the region of the Phorkyads, between Homunculism and Mephistophelianism. Goethe divined this and represented it in his Faust; he also divined that a path must be made that will avoid the crags of fantastic, abstract mysticism, as it avoids the other crags of a phantom-like conception of nature, remote from all reality,a path that leads to supersensible knowledge where fresh social impulses will be found.

This is a very deep layer of consciousness. Let us penetrate it, let us permeate our feeling with it, let us learn to understand the language of this sphere of consciousness, coming as it does from the region where we feel: Through thinking, a man cannot reach himself; through willing he loses himself. To be unable to reach oneself in thinking is Homunculism; losing oneself in willing is Mephistophelianism. And when we feel this then we enter into such profound scenes with a language that makes intelligible what forms the conclusion of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Ultimately, everyone views the universe according to how the forces he has received enable him to represent it. But the present task of mankind consists in raising those forces, so that much of the universe may be seen that, to man's hurt, has not been seen during the last decades.

Thus, going deeply into such a profound scene as the one we are now producing, is a way for men to advance in the direction which mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind must seek. This is not the Goetheanism of the professors, not the Goetheanism of the Goethe Society at the head of which is not a Goethe enthusiast at all but a former finance minister bearing the significant name of Kreuzwendedich; neither is it all that men thought they must make out of Goethe's teaching at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. What must be sought will become something good and a good impulse towards man's advancement in the direction he must go—if in the coming age he is to find salvation and not destruction.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Translated by Steiner Online Library