The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This volume contains the only two sets of lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave primarily on musical subjects. The first group of three lectures, given in 1906, explains why music has always held a special position among the arts. Music is the only art form whose archetypal origin is in the spiritual rather than in the physical world, as is the case with architecture, sculpture, or painting. Since every night during sleep man's soul lies in the spiritual world—essentially a light-filled ocean of sounds—it is understandable why music speaks so directly and powerfully to almost everyone. The creative musician translates what he has experienced in the spiritual world into harmonies, melodies, and rhythms of music that is physically manifest. Music, therefore, is a messenger from the spiritual world, speaking to us through tones as long as we are unable to partake in super-sensible events directly.

In the remaining lectures, given in 1922–23, Steiner discusses man and his experience of the world of tones, an experience that has undergone profound changes during the course of evolution. Before the Atlantean catastrophe, described in detail in Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science, man perceived only those intervals that were larger than the seventh; such intervals lifted him outside his body and made any musical experience a cosmic-spiritual one. In the early post-Atlantean period man's experience of the interval narrowed to that of the fifth; in our modern age, the period of the experience of the third, we now perceive the fifth to be empty. This feeling of emptiness actually is caused, as Steiner explains, by the withdrawal of the gods from man.

An extensive course for singers and other practicing musicians planned for the later part of the year 1924 could not take place due to the onset of Rudolf Steiner's mortal illness. The only other lecture cycle musicians can turn to is the tone eurythmy course, given in Dornach in February 1924 and published as Eurythmy as Visible Music. The collection of lectures presented here is thus an unusual treasure.

Erika V. Asten

following the discussion after three lectures by Paul Baumann

On the Expansion of the Tone System

It is only really possible to make a few suggestions, because the questions posed by Mr. Stuten alone could be the subject of weeks of discussion if one wanted to answer them exhaustively. And we will see how far we get today. I would like to start with one topic, so that we can then perhaps move on from a center, so to speak. The extension of the tone system has been mentioned, hasn't it, and various speakers have, I believe, been interested in this extension of the tone system; I think there were also musicians and composers among them.

Now, the whole question is connected, as I believe, with another one that is perhaps not as easy to grasp as is usually thought. And here I would like to say first of all: I myself wanted to address a kind of question first to those personalities who have taken part in this discussion about the expansion of the tone system. I will just make a few preliminary remarks and then ask you to express yourself entirely according to your subjective experience.

There is hardly any doubt that with the point in time that Mr. Baumann characterized so well today as the advent of the seventh, a very significant turning point actually occurred in the musical experience of civilized humanity. I believe that we just do not know enough about the earlier musical experience; that is, theoretically, but we no longer experience it in such a way that we feel this change completely clearly and intensely enough. But what has emerged has not yet run its course, and perhaps we are in the midst of a transformation, if I may say so, of people's musical needs. Of course, such things do not happen so quickly that they can be clearly defined; but they do happen, and they can be recognized to a certain extent in the progressive development of humanity.

And here I would like to ask whether the individual previous speakers, when they reflect on what they experience musically, cannot point to something that signifies a kind of turning point in the whole of musical experience. To formulate the question more specifically: I would like to think that today, in musical experience, one could form an opinion about how different people - I will ignore more of the musical aspect for now - experience a single tone differently. Now, that they experience it differently is, of course, beyond doubt; but they experience it so differently that this different experience plays into their understanding of music in some way.

You can clearly perceive, I believe, that today there is a tendency, especially among people who experience music, to go deeper into the sound, so to speak. Isn't it true that you can stay more on the surface with a sound, or go deeper into the sound.

And now I ask the personalities who were previously involved in the discussion whether they can associate any idea with this when I say: the musical experience of the present is increasingly splitting the individual note in its conception, and, as it were, questioning the individual note as to whether it is a melody or not. I mean, whether any kind of idea can be associated with it? Because it is actually hardly possible to talk about the question of expanding the tone system without having a basis from which to talk.

A comment was made earlier about noises. Perhaps the whole discussion about noises can only be answered if such a prerequisite as I have stated here is first settled. Because if I assume, for example – I don't know whether these things are already being experienced very extensively subjectively today – that the gentleman who has been speaking here for some time, who has been talking about sounds, that he is particularly inclined to answer the question of whether a melody can be perceived in a tone can be perceived in the tone, in the broadest sense, then I understand him, then I completely understand how he enters into the individual tones, or into the individual sounds, which the other person merely perceives as a noise, and how, by delving into the depths of the sound, he does indeed find something in the tones that then form the sound that he can pick out, so that something musical comes about that someone who does not delve into these depths of the sound cannot follow.

This morning, Dr. Husemann pointed out that in another respect, too, present-day humanity is in danger of gradually splitting the personality more and more apart. And so it seems that there are already quite a number of people in the present day who simply have a different sound experience of a single note than musicians who have been very sharply trained in one direction or another. And this is connected with the other question, which has also been asked, namely how spiritual science should relate to the whole matter.

Now I would like to ask the precise question of whether any reasonable idea can be associated with it, if one says that under certain circumstances the individual tone can be felt as a melody by going into its depths, by emphasizing partial tones from the tone, so to speak, partial tones whose relationship, whose harmony can then itself be a kind of melody again?

Paul Baumann: It also emerged from my lecture that I associate noise with harmony, that is, with a summarized melody. Can we understand sound noise as something that is a summarized melody, perhaps a harmony, but that we would also feel musically? In reality, every sound is undoubtedly musical, but we do not need to address it as a musical art. We cannot distinguish it, but it can be felt very clearly in timbre that something particularly musical, something of the mobility of things, is speaking here again, that one can clearly distinguish the mere musical tone, which is not heard in itself, from what it very clearly resonates in.

That is not what I mean. What I mean specifically now is to expand the possibility of experiencing sound itself, that is, to go deeper into the depths when experiencing the sound, or, for that matter, to extract something from the sound, so that you actually experience something in the sound itself.

Paul Baumann: I mean the differentiation between what you need in musical art, what resonates, and what you also feel, something that has a musical effect in things.

I don't mean this now, but what you experience in a tone without it somehow contributing objectively. You split the tone itself and synthesize it again. I mean as a pure experience. From time immemorial, the tone was attributed to the spirit of clay. In layman's terms: at a historical performance of the Passau... play from 1250, the devil is introduced as a seducer right at the beginning, before the play even begins; and to make this atmosphere work properly, the devil has to blow into a fire horn; it sounds so shrill that it scares everyone. That is the basis of this sound spirit I am talking about.

Some opinions will still be expressed.

These are all things that do not apply to what I mean, the experience of a sound that appears as a melody. When a note is struck, a melody actually emanates from the note.

Dr. Stein: It seems to me that one must distinguish between the perception of sound and the sensation of sound. I feel something very deeply in my perception, and this feeling then goes deeper when I feel pain or shock.

I don't mean that we should define the things that already exist, but rather: whether we are living in a transitional period with regard to the sound experience, so that it actually becomes something different. I think that it is still understood in musical terms today as a note that is related to others, that is in a melody and so on, but that there is a possibility with the note to go into the depths, perhaps also to look for something below it and then, if one looks at this, only then is a fruitful examination possible.

Further expressions of opinion.

If you listen to a note for a long time, at the beginning of the “Freischütz” overture, for example, you may have a sensation that I can perhaps illustrate figuratively. So, so to speak, the sound would be: half of a bow – that should be a graphical representation – on this half of the bow, I would draw something like small nerves that go out from it, so that one has a sound sensation on this half of the bow, as if as if it were going in there, then going through again on the other side of the bow, then out again at nerves and veins, so that there is a certain inner movement, which is once on one side of this half bow, then once on the other. You could perhaps also express it dynamically, that you put a greater intensity into it and then back out.

Opinions.

The long hold is only to make it more noticeable. The long hold would also make it possible to notice the changes in tone. I am not so much referring to the illustrative curve, which can be drawn in this way, but rather to the one that is actually drawn here vertically on the board.

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Further comments:... It's the intensity? That's why I say: go deeper into the sound!

Longer comments from a participant.

Mr. van der Pals describes his experiences with a tone; an upbeat to Jacobowski's poems. A tone, indicated by the poem itself, by the content; one had no desire at all to move away from the tone; the tone was there, could just as well have remained there, was a melody in itself – I only moved away because one couldn't play it for half an hour.

Now that we have talked about this a bit, I would like to point out that things that develop sometimes come out very imperfectly in their first stages. For example, it can be pointed out that some things certainly appear in a really quite contestable way as Expressionist art – but that is not meant as a criticism of all Expressionist art, but only of some things that do not get beyond expressions – but that there is certainly an attempt at something in it that will one day mean a great deal.

And so I believe that, in a similar way to how we try to live with color and create from color in painting, this immersion in sound means something today, such as the beginning of progress in music. And if that occurs here or there and you don't like it, I completely agree. But I would like to know how one can actually understand such musical personalities as Debussy if not as a perhaps very vague forerunner of something future that lies in this direction. If we can admit something like that, we come to the conclusion that a certain possibility is indeed presented to us, namely the possibility that composing will be done in a different way than it is now, namely in such a way that the relationship between composer and reproducing artist becomes much freer, that the player, the reproducing artist, is much less determined, that he can become much more productive, that he has much more leeway. But this is only possible in music if the tone system is expanded, if you can really have the variations that are necessary, if you can really vary widely. And I could imagine that, for example, what the composer delivers would be more suggestive in the future, but that because it would be more suggestive, the reproducing artist would need many more variants, many more tones, to express things. If you find your way into the depths of the tone, you can distribute it in the most diverse ways by setting it out again in neighboring tones. In this way, a more flexible musical life would come about. I can only sketch the matter. One could go on talking all night, but we don't want to do that since we are meeting again tomorrow. But a much more flexible musical life will come about. And one can say: Today, this more flexible musical experience can really stand before us.

This is connected in a certain way with the other question that has been asked again and again, namely, how spiritual science should relate to music. In this question, there is always one thing that I dislike. Please, I do not want to offend anyone with what I say, but there is something about this question that I dislike, namely, it is actually posed in an unartistic way! It is actually always posed theoretically and in an unartistic way, even if the person in question does not mean it. And I feel that in a discussion about art, it is very easy to slip out of the artistic realm altogether and into a wild theorizing. Spiritual science, since it is not something intellectual, is not something that only takes hold of one part of the human being, but something that takes hold of the whole human being, will have an essential influence on the whole human being, on thinking, feeling and willing. Whereas our present materialistic-intellectualistic science basically only has an influence on thinking, on the intellectual element in man. Spiritual science will take hold of the human being fully. And the consequence of this will be that the human being becomes inwardly more mobile, that he comes to a greater variability of his partial experience and thus also to a stronger demand for the harmony of his partial experience. And when this happens, it essentially means an enrichment of the whole musical activity and experience. And then, in the case of such personalities, who are so permeated, so imbued, so vitalized by spiritual science, I might say, what can become reality in the field of music out of spiritual science will arise. There is no use theorizing about this. One should not theorize, one should rather feel today how spiritual science actually makes the human being more mobile and how, through this, the human being can also approach a more intense, more nuanced musical experience.

This can be linked to very big questions. You see, the spiritual science movement has often been criticized: Yes, there are mainly ladies there who are always interested in it, you don't see the men in the anthroposophical meetings. — I don't want to decide now to what extent this is statistically true or not. Some people have a newspaper article ready before they have seen the things, and they can't be dissuaded from it even if they then see the opposite of what they have written down. But on the whole – please, it is really not meant so badly – we can say: Because the male world has participated more in education, in the scientific and increasingly scientific education of the last few centuries, something has occurred for masculinity that could be called a solidification, a hardening of the brain. In women, the brain has remained more flexible and softer. These are, of course, radical expressions for the phenomena, but the phenomenon still exists. And so as not to be unfair, I will say: in men, the brain has become more solidified, and as a result they have become more proficient in the use of logic; in women, the brain has remained more agile, lighter, but they have not participated in the education of the last few centuries, which has so solidified the firm logic within itself, and as a result they have become superficial and so on. — Well, you can't just present things one-sidedly. But there is something in the whole matter that can make us aware of the fact that we urgently need to make what has been achieved in our own organization through the stiffening, drying out education of the last centuries, flexible again, by entering into this stronger handling of the ethereal. But here we are entering the musical element again. Here we are entering a completely musical experience. And that will naturally bear fruit.

But one would be quite inartistic if one wanted to create any kind of theory about what is happening. That always seems to me to be the same as if someone wanted to describe the weather of the day after tomorrow very precisely. I am not saying that there is not a state of consciousness in which one can do so to a high degree. But it has no real significance. It is better to let life live than to theorize about it in such a way.

Now, with this train of thought, the consideration has already been diverted from the musical to the human constitution. And so, in a spiritualized physiology, which in itself will already have something artistic about it, one will increasingly associate the musical with the human constitution.

Just think, there is something very deeply justified in Mr. Baumann's assertion of the connection between melos and breathing. Basically, melos and human breathing are two things that essentially belong together.

But now we must not forget: The breathing process is a process that takes place in the rhythmic system. This middle system of the human organization borders on the nervous-sense system, on the brain system, on the one hand. There is an interaction between the rhythmic system and the nervous-sense system. On the other hand, the rhythmic system borders on the entire limb and metabolic system. And this confluence also expresses itself, I would say, in the physical processes. Just think: when we breathe in, we push our diaphragm down, we push the brain water up to the head, so that with the breathing process we have a continuous up and down of the brain water. This means that there is a continuous interplay between the rhythmic movement of the cerebral fluid and that of the organs of imagination. On the other hand, there is a continuous collision of the cerebral fluid, which is going down again, with everything that is going on in the blood, in the metabolic system. More than one would think, the musical element is connected with this inner experience, thought of in organic terms. And in the following way: to the same extent that breathing approaches the head, the nervous-sensory life, with the interplay, the melodious element comes to the fore; to the same extent that the rhythmic system approaches the limb system, the actual rhythmic element comes to the fore; we have only transferred the word there.

And then, if you bear this in mind, you have a guide to answer, I would say, the whole bundle of questions that Mr. Stuten asked at the end, one by one. So what Mr. Stuten has put forward is correct. I would like to go into the one thing he mentioned about the connections between thinking, feeling and willing. This corresponds, in turn, to what I have just explained in terms of the organs. Then we have already discussed, and Mr. Stuten has repeated today, that what the actual musical forms are corresponds to the whole human being, that is, to the synthetic interweaving of thinking, feeling and willing.

Now he has also raised the question of the relationships between the thematic groups. These are, of course, specifically different, depending on whether they come from this or that composer. And now we can say the following: You were quite right to state that the melody corresponds to the imagination, the harmony to the feeling, the rhythm to the will, and the tone form to the whole person. Now we have a partial human being = thinking, a partial human being = feeling, a partial human being = willing, and the whole human being.

But now we not only have the whole human being in real human life, but the human being also lives all the years between birth and death. This whole human being is often present and continuously present, and changes, metamorphoses. And this is where the succession of thematic groupings comes into play. The human life cycle is something specific. And the underlying secret is this: in our consciousness, we do not know what the future holds, but in our feeling consciousness, we are attuned to how the future unfolds. Please observe purely empirically — one does not usually do this, but these things belong to a finer perception of a true anthropology, which then becomes anthroposophy — how the emotional life changes in a person whom one later learns has died. Of course, there are many things that prevent us from pursuing such things, but at least we can pursue them retrospectively. We can see very clearly in a person who died young how the whole emotional life tends towards death, how the future is already contained in the past life. This is also something that is part of the human life cycle.

All this plays a role when the musician lives out in the succession, in the recurrence of thematic groups and so on. The recurrence itself need not surprise you. For you need only look back over your life, if it has already been going on for some time; in particular, the usual periods, which do not cover the same number for everyone but are nevertheless present, could show you exactly the stages, could tell you: in this year a stage ended that lasted until that year, and so on. If someone experiences a phase of life at the age of forty-five, they will experience it again at the age of fifty-two at the next stage. And one can see the recurrence in human experience very clearly when one experiences something at the age of fifty-two, which does not have to be the same, but which, in its inner character, represents something similar to what happened in one's forty-fifth year.

All these things play a part in what is expressed in a musical work of art. For such a musical work of art is, at least at the moment it is created, always an expression of the whole human being. One can only hint at such things.

Some of the other questions that were asked, such as the relationship between Goethe's theory of sound and spiritual science, would really be too much to cover today. I believe that we can still meet on this or a similar occasion. And answering the question about major and minor, about the meaning of Greek music, would also be too much today.

With regard to the one thing that has been mentioned, the theories about breathing, singing and posture, I would just like to note that such things as described in the book mentioned are not without a certain significance if one knows how to take them sensibly.

It is extremely important to consider the human being as a whole. People who write such books do not usually do this, but they do provide material that can be useful even to the scholar, when it is viewed in the right light.

I also do not want to address the question of singing method today, because it can very easily be misunderstood if it is not developed out of some kind of premise, especially since there are so many different singing methods today. And you can meet people who have learned to sing using five or six different methods, which means they have forgotten how to sing altogether! Then, however, one cannot speak in such a simple way about the different singing methods.

Regarding what has been said about temperaments, about thesis, antithesis, synthesis, I must say that it is a rather unfruitful way of looking at things, because as a rule one can really develop anything from such bloodless abstractions. And just as you can say: Wagner – thesis, Bruckner – antithesis, which may be in principle, and spiritual science – the synthesis, so could another, who just classified differently, perhaps say: Wagner – thesis, Bruckner – antithesis, Mahler – synthesis. That would certainly be said by one or the other if one indulges in such bloodless abstractions.

Yes, I really don't think that we should extend the evening any further today, since we can't stay here overnight after all! Although I am happy to talk in detail about the issues I have noted down at a further get-together.

I would like to touch again today on some of the things I noted yesterday, which could no longer be properly discussed, with a few aphoristic remarks.

First, I would like to say a few words about the relationship between major and minor. If you want to get right into the intimacies of musical life, you have to be absolutely aware of how, in essence, musical life corresponds to a fine organization of our human nature. One could say that what appears in musical facts corresponds in a certain way to the finer inner constitution of the human being.

Yesterday I already hinted at a certain direction, how rhythm, which we experience musically, answers an inner rhythm in the rise and fall of the cerebral fluid and the connection that the cerebral fluid has on the one hand with the processes in the brain, and on the other hand with the processes in the metabolic system through the mediation of the blood system. But one can also point to, I would say, individually graded forms of the human constitution in this respect. Our most important rhythmic system is the respiratory system, and it is basically not difficult for most people, if they pay just a little attention, to experience how the course of thought, both the more logical course of thought and the more emotional, feeling-based course of thought, influence the breathing process. The breathing process is directly or indirectly connected with everything that a person experiences musically. Therefore, the particular breathing pattern of one or the other type of person sheds some light on the musical experience.

You see, there are people who are, so to speak, oxygen voluptuaries. They are constituted in such a way that they assimilate oxygen with a certain greed, absorb oxygen into themselves. Of course, all this takes place more or less in the subconscious, but one can certainly use the expressions borrowed from conscious life for the subconscious. People who absorb oxygen with a certain greed, who, if I may say so, enjoy absorbing oxygen, who are voluptuous in absorbing oxygen, have a very active, strongly vibrating astral life. Their astral body is inwardly active. And because their astral body is inwardly active, it also digs into the physical body with great desire, as it were. Such people live very much in their physical body.

Other people do not have this craving for oxygen. But they feel something, not like a lust now, but like a relief when they give up, exhale the carbonic acid. They are tuned to, as it were, removing the breathing air from themselves and finding a favor in the process that gives them a certain relief.

One can, by speaking the truth, say something that I would like to say, that makes a person feel a little uncomfortable. But that is one of the reasons why people reject the deeper truths, because they do not want to hear them. They then invent logical reasons for themselves. In reality, the reason is that people are subconsciously repulsed by certain truths. So they push these truths aside. And that is why they then find logical reasons for their evasion. It is certainly not so easy, for example, if you are a respected scholar and are opposed to this or that philosophical system because of an unhealthy gall-bladder, to simply say to your students: My gall-bladder does not tolerate this philosophical system! — So you then invent logical reasons, sometimes of an extraordinarily astute nature, and you console yourself with these logical reasons. For those who know life, for those who look deeper into the secrets of existence, sometimes logical reasons that come from this or that side are not quite so valuable. And so, for example, sometimes the melancholic temperament is based merely on the fact that the person concerned is a voluptuary of oxygen. And life more in the sanguine, life that is turned to the outer world, that likes to change with the impressions of the outer world, that is based on a certain love of exhaling, on a certain love of pushing the carbonic acid away from oneself.

However, these are only the external manifestations of the matter. For the rhythm, which we basically perceive only as the physical-secondary in the organism, is actually always a rhythm that takes place in the deeper sense between the astral body and the ether body. And ultimately one can say: we inhale with the astral body and with the etheric body we exhale again, so that in truth there is a rhythmic interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And so now the individual types of people live, so to speak, in such a way that when one type of person's astral body strikes the ether body, a kind of lust occurs; when the ether body strikes back at the astral body, a kind of relief occurs in the other person, a kind of transition into the sanguine, experiencing the sanguine.

And you see, the origin of the major and minor scales is connected with this contrast between types of people, in that everything that can be experienced in minor keys belongs, or corresponds, to the constitution of the person who is based on the lustfulness of oxygen, which is based on the fact that the astral body, when it strikes the etheric body is felt with a certain voluptuousness, while conversely the major scales are based on the fact that there is a feeling of well-being when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body, or there is a certain feeling of elevation, a feeling of relief, a feeling of momentum when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body.

It is interesting that in the outer world things are often designated in the opposite direction. For example, one says: the melancholic person is the deeper person. Seen from the other side, he is not the deeper person, but the greater voluptuary for oxygen.

Since the musical in its intimacies essentially draws on the subconscious, we can associate such things with the very subconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious aspects of the musical experience, without indulging in an inartistic, theoretical approach. You will notice in general that a truly spiritual-scientific consideration of art does not need to become inartistic itself, for one does not arrive at bloodless abstractions and a theoretical web of aestheticizing kind. If we want to understand things spiritually, we come to realities in a certain way, the mutual interaction of which is presented pictorially or even musically in such a way that we, with our description, are ourselves in it in a kind of musical experience.

And I believe that this will be precisely the significant aspect in the further development of spiritual science: that in seeking to comprehend art, it itself seeks to create an art of comprehension, that it seeks to imbue its work and activity in ideas with pictoriality, with reality, and that in so doing, what we have today as such a dry, abstract science will be able to approach the artistic. But if we take something that has been approached purely and simply from a scientific point of view, such as education, and make it relevant to the tasks of our time, as we do in the Waldorf school , then we are in any case leading what used to be scientific pedagogy to the level of pedagogical art and talking about pedagogy in the sense that we actually understand it as an art of educating.

If you read what I wrote in the last issue of “Social Future” about the art of education, you will see how there is an effort to transform the sober science of education into the art of education.

Another thing I noted refers to the interesting comments Mr. Baumann made in his lecture about the relationship between vowels and tones and colors. He described, as you recall, the dark vowels U, O, as those that have the clearest effect in terms of tone. In the middle stands A, and at the other pole, so to speak, stand E and I, the light vowels, which appear the least tonal, which carry something noisy in them.

But then the astonishment was expressed as to how it comes about that precisely the dark vowels also correspond to the dark colors, and the light vowels, I, E, correspond to light colors, but do not actually have the tonal in their characteristic, but rather the noisy. - If I understood correctly, that was the case, wasn't it?

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Now I would like to make the following comment. If we do not write down the color scale in the abstract linearity that we are accustomed to in today's physics, but if we write down the color scale in a circle, as it must also be done in accordance with Goethe's color theory, so that we say: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — if we proceed in this direction (see drawing), if we write down the color scale in this way, then we will naturally be compelled, by bringing to mind the experiential relationships between tone and color, to write U and O towards the blue side. But if we continue in Mr. Baumann's spirit, we will come to A and from this side enter the red and yellow, the light.

So when we move away from the blue in the sense of the accompanying colors of the individual tones, we are actually moving away from the color element and now touching it from behind. And therein lies the reason why we can no longer establish parallelism here in the same way as in the area where the tonal coincides with the color in a very evident way, because on the side of the color scale where the blue, the violet is, we are dealing, so to speak, with a going out of ourselves with the color. There is a sense of immersion in the external world. With sound, however, it is essentially also an outward movement. But when we come over here, we experience an onslaught of color: red and yellow colors rush at us. In this sense, behind this curtain, there is also painting here: it is the ability to paint from within the color. We live ourselves into the color. This is how we actually come out of the nature of the tones. This is the reason for the apparent incongruity that I pointed out to you yesterday.

Then I would also like to make a few comments about something that has been mentioned, that has been found – and it has not only been found by the one person mentioned yesterday, but similar things are being said and spread by a great many people – that one can feel the vowels, the tones, in the organism: I in the head, E more in the larynx, A in the chest, O in the abdomen, U very low down.

Now, these things are indeed correct, and you will no longer be surprised that these things have a certain correctness if you bear in mind that everything that exists in the outside world in the form of sound corresponds to very specific arrangements in our organism. But on the other hand, we must not forget: If such things are proclaimed without proper instruction – and proper in this case means only instruction that can speak from a certain spiritual-scientific experience – if such things are proclaimed without precise knowledge of the very interconnections that I have pointed out in a specific case today, that is, the interrelations between the astral body, the etheric body and so on, if they are trumpeted out into the world without reasonable guidance in the spiritual-scientific sense and people then do all kinds of exercises in this sense, then, indeed, quite embarrassing things can come about. If, for example, someone does breathing exercises of some kind and – as was hinted at yesterday – strongly visualizes the vowel when breathing and in doing so gets the feeling: the I sits in the head, the E in the larynx, and so on – this can certainly be right. But if he is not instructed in a sensible way, it can happen that the I remains in the head and sings continuously at the top of the head, and the E remains in the larynx and rumbles there. And if the A in the chest and abdomen also do their thing, then something similar to what Dr. Husemann has described in an excellent way for Staudenmaier in Munich, who also came up with very strange things because, as a person who has no experience at all in how to use such things, , he has actually gradually accumulated a whole legion of fools in his own organism, so many fools that these fools have simply suggested to him that this breeding of fools should now also be cultivated, that universities and schools should be founded so that all this folly can be taken even further. And you can really imagine that a naive mind has the answer for this: Now I'm supposed to pay taxes for him to live in his monkey cage with his magic, aren't I!

But today there are actually a great many things that simply boil down to the fact that the people who devote themselves to such things – and there is a certain greed even for such things – that these people are really driven crazy, you could say they are actually driven crazy. So such things are not entirely harmless, and it is good when attention is drawn to them.

You see, if you, as was the case with me before the war - now it is just no longer possible - if you had to travel, so to speak, through half of Europe more often, you really found a perpetual phenomenon throughout this half of Europe. I don't know how many people have noticed it, but those who live in spiritual science also acquire a certain talent for observation for external things, they simply see certain things. For example, they cannot simply stay in a hotel and not see all the letters in the porter's lodge for people who have arrived or who have not arrived. Letters are there from people who may have just skipped the city or this hotel due to the necessity of the trip and so on. Now, however, there was one recurring phenomenon in such porter's lodges, also in other places, again and again: these were the postings of a certain, as they were called, psychological-occult center. They sent such announcements to all possible addresses they could get hold of, about an “occult system” through which one could train oneself for all kinds of things. For example, one could train oneself to make a favorable impression on other people. In particular, one could train oneself as a commercial agent to easily persuade people to buy one's goods. Or one could also train oneself to do other interesting things, for example, to make the opposite sex fall in love with you easily and the like. Well, these things were sent out, and these things actually found a great deal of interest in the world. Then the war, didn't it, threw a bit of a wrench into these calculations for the simple reason that it had gradually become unpleasant that these things were being censored. And since censorship has not been abolished today either, at least in most areas, but on the contrary is still in effect in a very strange way, efforts to advocate occultism in this way have not yet been rewarded, and one notices less of these stories today. But I think they are being passed more and more from person to person, without using the postal system and similar things. So I just wanted to say that this vocal breathing game is not without significance and does have an embarrassing side.

Now yesterday various questions were asked that obviously relate to the statements I made in the first recitation lesson, which were only a few remarks for the time being, and that were linked to what Mr. Baumann said about the musical aspect. Well, with regard to the most important thing, of course, I must refer to the following lessons on declamation, but perhaps I can also make some aphoristic remarks there.

For example, the question was asked what changes in the way of speaking, in the art of acting, could be brought about by spiritual science. A term was used, if I understood it correctly – because it is possible that I did not understand it – that was supposed to replace physical eloquence. I think I remember this term, but I have absolutely no idea what is meant by “physical eloquence”!

Interjection: facial expressions are meant.

Oh, facial expressions as physical eloquence? Well, if that is meant, it is a rather occult expression. But perhaps we can also make a few comments on the matter by anticipating some of what still needs to be said in the lessons in context, and which perhaps can only be presented here in somewhat aphoristic form. I would like to say something about the way of speaking and acting in the art of acting, which has also undergone a rich history. One need only recall that Goethe also rehearsed his plays, for example, “Iphigenia,” with his actors in such a way that he had a baton, that he placed the greatest value on meter. And people in the second half of the 19th century would probably have described what Goethe called the beauty of his acting as a kind of chanting or something similar. There was indeed a great emphasis on meter. And one should not imagine that when Goethe himself played Orestes, for example, he went wild in the way that I have seen some Orestes actors go wild in on stages that are not even modern. When a certain Krastel played Orestes, yes, sometimes you felt the need to get a cage to contain his wildness. So one should not imagine that Goethe himself might have played the role of Orestes. On the contrary: he softened and smoothed out the very thing that was present in the content as strength and intense inner life by carefully observing the meter. So that there was moderation and balance in the manner of delivery that Goethe used for his Orestes.

As for facial expressions, it may be said that in earlier times – and these times are not so far back – these facial expressions were much more subject to the laws of theatrical art than they were in the last third of the 19th century. To a certain extent, stereotypical movements were used for certain types of feelings, and these were adhered to. So that it was less important, for example, to see in detail how some hand movement expresses some wild passion, but rather to see how some hand movement is, how it runs, how it has to connect to a previous hand movement, creating a beautiful form, and how it transitions to the next hand movement. So it was the inner shaping that was most important in facial expressions. And to the same extent that this artistry in both speech and facial expressions declined, to the same extent did the naturalistic immersion in the individual gesture and the individual word come about, and what then ultimately became the demand of naturalism for the entire drama was that which cannot actually be followed in the serious sense. Because, if it came down to only showing a front or back room in the stage set, where the same things happened that would naturally happen in a front or back room in three hours, , then one would actually have to say: the stage space would be designed in a completely naturalistic way if the side with the curtain were also closed – and the last naturalistic thing that one has striven for on the stage would actually have been achieved with something like that. It would have been quite interesting if, for example, the aesthetic wishes of Arno Holz had also led to the demand that the stage area be closed off at the front by a wall, so that it would now quite naturally depict a back room. One could have seen what impression such naturalism, such complete naturalism, would have made on the audience.

I know that when you take things to such grotesque extremes, it is very easy to find fault with them. But in the end, extreme naturalism really comes down to the fact that you can't really say anything other than that it is the last consequence.

And so it is with this pushing of the actor into the ordinary naturalistic way of speaking and into the naturalistic gesture. In more artistic times, the other tendency prevailed. There the gesture strove for the beautiful, plastic form, for the moving plastic form. And the spoken word strived more back to the musical. So that in fact the theatrical presentation was also lifted out of the ordinary naturalism, in that the actors moved as they did on stage for the older among us, with those tragedians and tragic actresses whom the younger ones no longer knew, like Klara Ziegler and others. There you could still see the last echoes of decadence. They couldn't do the things anymore, but they still did them with the last remnants of plastic stagecraft, and they still had in their manner of speaking what sound and even tone and even melos had in speaking.

It was interesting: those who, on the one hand, went wild, went wild naturalistically, like Krastel, on the other hand, did not want to become naturalistic – their temperament got the better of them – they did not want to become naturalistic. Therefore, however, they also took their path to the musical in speaking in such a way as the others did to the plastic in movement. I don't know if any of you still remember such things; but if you have seen and heard Krastel on the Viennese stage more than once, you may still have the sound of Krastel's singing in your ears.

So, by returning to earlier forms of acting and mime, we are dealing with a convergence of theatrical performance with the musical and the plastic. And basically, all art is based on the fact that certain archetypes of this art, I would say, split, that the individual forms, the differentiated forms of art emerged from what was a kind of singing art in prehistoric times. And when someone like Richard Wagner came along and directed his whole heart and soul back to the archetypes of artistry, then this striving for the Gesamtkunstwerk emerged from him. But the further we go back in the development of the human spirit, the more we find that what is separate today flows together. For example, at least for the older times of Greek civilization, we can assume that there was only a slight difference between recitation and song. Recitation was very much sung. And song approached recitation. What later became differentiated into recitation and song was thoroughly unified. And it was probably the same with the northern peoples. What the northern peoples had was not one-sided singing and one-sided saying, that is, declaiming; but it was the art of declamation that arose from the Nordic way— just as the art of recitation arose from the southern type. It was the art of declamation and the song of the north, which was based on quite different foundations than Greek song, which in turn were a kind of unity. So we are dealing with a differentiation of the arts. And it must be assumed that in the old form, singing, i.e. music, recitation or declamation and rhythmic movement, the art of dance, were connected in a unified way. They sounded together as a unified whole.

This art of dance was then the older form of eurythmy. And it is absolutely — although this can only be recognized with spiritual scientific research methods — it is absolutely, albeit in a somewhat different form, because everything is of course subject to development, as a eurythmic part in the Greek unity of singing and recitation art, this eurythmy. So that this eurythmy is definitely something that was part of musical life in older times. And basically we are not doing anything different today than going back to earlier forms of artistic expression in eurythmy. Except that we naturally have to take into account the fact that the arts have now advanced so much. So that the close connection between singing, recitation and eurythmy, as it certainly still existed in Greece in the time of Aeschylus, cannot exist. We have to take more account of the fact that we have come to a differentiation. Therefore, the forms of eurythmy today must be sought through real inspiration, intuition and imagination.

They are. I have always mentioned this in a certain way before eurythmic performances, in a kind of introduction: one must not imagine that something has simply been taken over from the old eurythmic forms; but what was previously done more instinctively has been raised into consciousness in the sense in which it must be done in our time. And this visible language of eurythmy is directly sensed and received from the spiritual world. For basically all human beings eurhythmy! All of you eurhythmy, namely your ether body. Then, when you speak, you eurhythmy. The secret of speaking consists in the fact that the entire ether body follows the impulses of the vowel and the consonant, the entire arrangement of the sentence formation. Everything that is presented in eurythmy is mirrored in the movements of the etheric body when people speak. And speaking is based only on the fact that what is spread throughout the entire etheric body in movements is concentrated in the physical through the larynx and its neighboring organs. So that he who can see the etheric body of the person speaking perceives speech twice: in the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs and in the etheric body as a whole. And when we practise eurythmy, we do nothing other than cause the physical body to perform the movements that the etheric body performs when a person speaks. The only difference is that we naturally have to round off, shape and transform everything that the ordinary human etheric body does into art, into beauty and the like.

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If every person were to practise eurythmy continually, I can assure you that not everyone would be able to do so artistically! The results are not always beautiful, although the process itself can be extremely interesting. And I once saw an extremely interesting group doing eurythmy. It was in Hermannstadt in 1889, and I was traveling from Vienna to Hermannstadt on Christmas Eve. And I had the misfortune of missing the connecting train in Budapest. So I had to take a train that went via Szegedin instead of Debrecen, and I arrived at the Hungarian-Transylvanian border on that Christmas Eve. There, where I had to wait for twelve hours, I met a group of people playing cards. It was, as they say, a motley crew from all the different nationalities that can be found in this corner of the world. Well, I took up the position of an observer. It was not a pleasant position, because the table at which I was to eat my supper looked so tempting that one would have liked to take out one's pocket knife and scrape off the dirt. And similar things could be observed. But I watched. The first player dealt the cards. Now you should have seen the eurythmy that sprang from the eyes of the others! The second played the cards – there were already two of the company lying on the table. Then the third played the cards, and then two more were lying under the table. And when the other cards were played, there was a colorful jumble: a wonderful but not beautiful eurythmy performed by these etheric bodies!

But there is so much to be learned about the human being and human nature by observing such scenes, where the human being's astral body comes into such a terribly angry movement, expressing all passions and then dominating the etheric body. And then there is the screeching of the etheric body when it screams! You can imagine that they shouted in confusion. And it was precisely this shouting that was then expressed in eurythmy. A lot can be studied from this. But when it comes to beautiful eurythmy, these movements must first be rounded off a little, translated into beauty.

But I am drawing your attention to certain processes that must precede the establishment of eurythmy if this eurythmy is not to be something fantastically contrived, but if it is to be what I have always presented in the introductions to the eurythmic performances. And I say such things in particular because it is very often imagined that everything that is presented in spiritual science and the art that is built up out of it is just pulled out of a hat. It is not pulled out of a hat, but is based on very thorough work.

Now this is, at least in essence, what I noted yesterday in relation to these matters.

There is still something about the Chinese scale. What was mentioned yesterday about the Chinese scale is not uninteresting when considered in connection with what I have just spoken about today. I said: the musical fact that takes place in the outer world corresponds to something in the human constitution. And if it is said today that the human being consists of these and these limbs, which interact in this and that way – physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on – then one can say in a certain way: there is also inner music in it, and this inner music corresponds to our outer musical reality.

But things are constantly changing as humanity develops. And a Chinese person is a different kind of human being from a European. A Chinese still has many connections between the physical body and the etheric body, the etheric body and the sentient soul, the sentient soul and the mind or emotional soul, and so on, which have already completely disappeared in European man. This constitution of the Chinese person now corresponds to the Chinese scale. And if one studies music history in such a way, for example, by taking a sensible approach to the development of the scale system, and if one has an understanding of the connection between the inner human organization and the outer musical facts, one can look back from the scales and from many other musical facts to the constitution of the respective human group or race, and so on.

Now, just a moment ago, I was also made aware of a difference of opinion regarding what I meant by delving into the sound yesterday.

I did not mean that tones are still present in the sequence of time, which might resonate together and then be perceived as one tone. This is not meant. Rather, what is meant is that today, in relation to the evolution of humanity, one begins to speak of an organization within the tone, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and going beyond the tone above, in contrast to what was experienced by many people until our world time simply as one tone. to speak of a division, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and, as it were, going beyond the tone above it to another tone. And then, I thought, when you have the actual tones that have been modified by the two neighboring tones that you have actually developed, when you have these three tones, you can express the varied main tone. It is then a slightly different tone. And you will notice that you have to shift one of the newly emerging tones downwards and the other upwards. But when you do that, you don't come across our usual tones, but tones that our current tone systems don't have. And in this way, I believe, an expansion of our tone system will indeed have to come about.

And it is also the case that, in a sense, an opposite process to our present-day tone system has led to it again. Our present-day tone system has also only come about through all kinds of superimpositions of tone sensations. Our tones would not have been immediately understood in certain ages.

I believe that a change is currently taking place in the way we experience sound, and that just as a very specific kind of music is emerging from the sometimes quite grotesque forms of experimentation, something is also announcing itself that wants to get out. For example, I have to say: either I don't understand Debussy at all, or I can only understand him in such a way that he foresaw something of this living into the sound. It is a completely different kind of musical feeling through Debussy than, for example, even in Wagner. Isn't it, you can say that.

So that is what I actually meant, that you find a kind of melody from the individual tone, which you then just spread out in time. But you only get this melody if you have a different tone system. That is what I meant.

There is still another question about Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone. This is, I would say, a somewhat complicated chapter, for Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone has not only one, but two sources, two starting points. From his correspondence with Zelter, we learn a great deal about the way in which Goethe, at his most mature point of view, thought about tone and music. But that actually had two sources. One source was that he had a certain naive musical understanding. He was not exactly diligent in music lessons. This may well be related to the fact that he was not exactly diligent in other subjects either, where the teachers were quite foolish. And, isn't it true that if we are familiar with Goethe's spelling at a certain age of his life, then we know that if someone were to get their hands on a Goethe manuscript from Goethe's archive today, say from around 1775 – so he was well into his twenties – a modern high school teacher would say of such a manuscript: “quite careless,” it would be full of red lines and “quite insufficient” would be written underneath. And so the one source actually shows more of his naive understanding of music than of what he had learned.

But then there is another source of Goethe's theory of sound: his attempt to gain a view, which could be called a general physical view, from his theory of colors. And, isn't it true, this theory of colors is very original and formed with enormous inner diligence and entirely from the matter at hand. But he could not conduct original research in all fields of physics. And so he formed many of his views on the theory of sound by creating analogies to the theory of colors. He sketched out – he only presented everything schematically – and provided schematics for the theory of sound in which he tried to bring the phenomena of music into an analogy with what he experienced in color, in the phenomena of light. That is the second source.

Now, as a third point — which is not a source but a way of looking at the matter — Goethe adds something else, namely that Goethe already had an instinctive feeling for those paths that we are uncovering today as spiritual-scientific paths. In many of Goethe's writings, one finds a remarkable experience that he then expresses in the most diverse ways, sometimes as theoretically as he did in his theory of colors, sometimes analogously theoretically as in his theory of sound, but also in poetry. What was instinctively present in Goethe's subconscious soul in this way lives its way into his works in a remarkable way. In this connection, those of his poems that remained unfinished, such as 'Pandora', are particularly interesting. Had this 'Pandora' been completed, it would have been something written entirely out of the spiritual world. It would have to be truly observed in the spiritual world.

Now, Goethe did not arrive at spiritual insight, but he was completely true inwardly. Therefore, he did not finish the matter, which remained stuck in this way, out of an inner weighing back and forth. And to study this, how Goethe always got stuck in such things, and because he was a true personality, a true nature, then left the matter alone, is one of the most interesting things in Goethe's poetry. It shows how Goethe had a feeling that, I would say, was of a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical nature. And that was the third thing. So that in fact he saw more in the world of sounds in an ingenious way than would actually have corresponded to his learned understanding of music.

But it was precisely this that helped him to overcome his prejudices. Therefore, a certain spiritual-scientific trait also comes into the schematic representation of Goethe's theory of sound. And what is found in these sound theory schemas, for example, about the relationships, the polar relationships between major and minor, can of course be interpreted in the most diverse ways. There is only a scheme, and there is one parallelized with the other, the other parallelized with the one. So of course you have to know Goethe very well if you want to understand how he thought of it himself. But you can see from it that there are ways to be found to get very favorable results. And Goethe's theory of sound could also be inspiring for a physicist in spiritual scientific terms, just as it would be for a musician. For there is certainly an artistic element at work in Goethe's scientific work. And in his scheme for the theory of sound, there is really something that gives a kind of, I would even say score-like impression. There is something musical in it. Just as you can also find something truly musical in the way Goethe's theory of colors is presented.

Finally, read Goethe's theory of colors with regard to its composition, to the sequence of results, to the sequence in the description of the experiments! I recommend that you do so. And then read any standard physics book, that is, the optical chapter of a contemporary physics book, and you will perceive a huge difference. This difference also has a meaning, because the time will come when one will already feel towards the scientific presentation: That which considers, considers more the how. — It is actually only in the way something is presented that the way it is understood is expressed. And it is also one of the saddest achievements of modern times that, in a sense, the less artistically one can write, the worse the style, the better lecturer one becomes, and the more artistically one writes, the worse the lecturer one is. Of course, this is not stated, but the system is set up accordingly. And what has been achieved in terms of barbarisms in scientific stylization in recent times will no doubt be the subject of interesting cultural-historical chapters in the future, the likes of which present-day humanity can hardly imagine. “Scientific barbarism of style in the 19th and 20th centuries” will probably one day fill many pages of future literary works, if there are still oddballs around who write as much about things as the current oddballs write about some things.

But now I believe that I have essentially exhausted the questions. I don't know if this or that has been left out, but you see, not everything can be exhausted at once. These things are only intended to stimulate here. These lectures and exercises are only intended to provide suggestions! I hope that you will not leave here without the feeling of having received such suggestions, after what I hope will be quite some time.

Question: What is the concept of art that is not art at all, actually? What is the essence of art, and how does it differ from art history?

The question is posed in an extraordinarily abstract way and, in my opinion, in an extraordinarily inartistic way, for the simple reason that a statuary of a relationship to art and art science that boils down to a distinction cannot be properly felt in spiritual science.

You see, if you want to understand how the spiritual scientific stimulates artistic comprehension, then you have to have a sense for the difference between the way some aestheticians have written about architecture, sculpture, music and the like. After all, Moriz Carriere was regarded by many people, not only in Munich, as a great esthete, perhaps not for an art historian in your sense, but that does not matter, one could also bring examples from this region. But when Carriere, the esthete, lived in Munich, there also lived a painter. I met one of those, and on a particular occasion, when I had all sorts of things to show him, we also talked about Carriere. And he said: Oh yes, I still remember quite well how we, when we were young painters, young badgers, were completely absorbed in the artistic, talked about Carriere and called him the “aesthetic grunt of delight”.

Now, one may indeed have great respect for the abstract expression of one's thoughts on the artistic; but to demand - after speaking of an artistic conception of art that one must simply feel - that one should now in turn give a definition of the essence of art, I think that is something that does not go quite well. Of course it would be terribly easy to define the essence of art, because it has truly been defined many dozen times in the course of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. And if necessary, one can still imagine what someone who does not think that the artistic can be grasped through the approach of the humanities means by art science. But the point is not to get stuck with certain prejudices that one has once adopted, but to be able to place oneself in the living movement of intellectual life and go along with what is really demanded today from the depths of humanity: a coming together of science, art and religion, not a furthering of the splitting of these three currents of human spiritual life.

Of course, you can still cause offence today if the way you look at art has to take a completely different form from the traditional, conventional approach of some art scholars. But today we are at the point where we have to move forward in the direction that has been indicated here. And that also means that questions such as What is the essence of art? What is the essence of man? - which, according to the definition, will eventually cease altogether. It is a matter of our having to understand more and more what people like Goethe meant when he says in his introduction to the theory of colors: One cannot really speak about the essence of light; colors are the acts of light. And anyone who gives a complete description of the color phenomena also says something about the essence of light. So anyone who addresses the facts of any field, any field of art, in a form that comes close to the experience of that field of art, gradually provides a kind of consideration of the essence of the field of art in question. But this will be overcome altogether, that definitions are placed at the top or somehow without context, that questions are raised: What is the essence of man, what is the essence of art and the like?

We had such a strange case here yesterday; someone said: Wagner - thesis, Bruckner - antithesis, and spiritual science should now be the synthesis. Yes, you see, something like that, placed in a certain place, if, for example, I said something sensible about Wagner, then said something sensible about Bruckner, and then knew how to say something sensible about something traditional, then, so to speak, summarizing the many, I could use the abstract, bloodless concepts: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to summarize. Then it would make sense. But as a single dictum it is impossible. So you have to have a feeling for something when something is an organism,

I will give you an example from another area: Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. The last chapter is about philosophy itself. Yes, what is said there about philosophy itself is said in addition to everything that has gone before. So that one has absorbed everything that has gone before. It is magnificent, a tremendous architectural conclusion. Please, take this last chapter away and take it for yourself, as something like a definition of philosophy – it is pure nonsense. It is pure nonsense! This is what draws attention to the fact that we must again enter into the experience of the whole from the understanding of the individual, how we must gradually rise from the stick we have been trained in, in terms of individual characteristics, to grasping the whole, to overlooking the whole.

And in this sense, I think that it does lead to a kind of understanding when one shows what is happening externally as a musical fact in its other pole in inner experience; and when one then empathizes with what is going on in the person, then I believe that this is indeed a more artistic conception than that of some musicology! And I would like to add that today, for easily understandable reasons, we cannot go far enough. If we had already progressed so far that we could take it all the way to the imaginations and the description of the imaginations, then we might also be able to create something similar to what the Greeks created when they spoke of Apollo's lyre, actually meaning this inner part of the human being as a living musical instrument that reproduces the harmonies and the melos in the cosmos. We are not even yet so far advanced that we can feel what the Greeks felt when they heard the word Cosmos. This word is not connected with some abstraction of a modern scientist, with a certain description of the universe, but with the beauty of the universe, with the harmony of that in the cosmos which is actually connected with the beauty of the universe.

Humanity once proceeded from a kind of interaction of that which is differentiated today. We must indeed be able to experience these differentiations, but we must in turn have the opportunity to see this differentiation together, to hear it resound together, to work ourselves into a living whole, so that what is the result of knowledge also becomes the content of an artistic work and the revelation of a religious experience.

That is what we must strive for again. That which is wisdom can certainly appear in the form of beauty and reveal itself in the form of a religious impulse. Then we will experience something that still belongs to a more distant future: that we ourselves find a synthesis between an altar and a laboratory bench. When we can stand with the reverence for nature with which we should actually stand before it, then science becomes a form of worship for us. And when we as human beings imbibe those skills, that manual dexterity that corresponds to such an understanding of nature and of the spirit and the soul, then all our dealings with science will also flow into beautiful forms.

Today this still seems like a fantasy. But it is a reality! For it is something that must be striven for and realized, lest humanity descend ever deeper into decadence.

A participant asks about the deeper meaning of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, and whether it has something to do with the context of the human constitutional elements. “But of course I am willing to go without the answer today if Dr. Steiner is too tired.”

That is not the reason, my dear Mr. Büttner, but I would like to say the following about it: I once said some things in Berlin and also gave some examples of the way in which spiritual science can be used to understand fairy tales, and I actually had to apply quite a lot of research effort to get to the bottom of fairy tales. Because, you see, I really don't want to be one of those people who live by the saying:

When interpreting, you are fresh and lively;
because if you don't interpret it, you just interpret it.

That was never my principle. Rather, it always took me a great deal of effort to get to the heart of a fairy tale, sometimes in all possible regions of research. And so I have to say: even if I were even more tired than I am today, it would give me the greatest pleasure to be able to make you happy with an interpretation, an explanation of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians. But I have never studied it and therefore have nothing to say about it. And so I ask you to wait until an opportunity presents itself in this or in a next life, after the matter has been researched.

Question: How does spiritual science view the phenomenon of instinctive so-called absolute hearing?

Dr. Steiner has made it very easy for us to experience the spirit of the living in her declamation. Inspired by this, I would like to ask what kind of singing a student should do? I can assure you that in the new way of practising art that has been entrusted to us, for the establishment of a new art of singing, for example, no teacher can really come into consideration as a helper for a male voice that is to be educated. I would therefore also like to ask whether a woman can also work as a trainer.

There doesn't seem to be much homeopathy in the question today! First, yes, that's right, after all, there is not much to be connected or connected to it, other than what is present in any other human ability. It is quite reasonable to assume, although I can only express this with caution here because it is a question that I have not yet dealt with in a truly research-based way, but it is reasonable to assume that this instinctive presence of an absolute sense of tone consciousness in a number of people – I believe in fewer people than one would usually think – is based on some peculiarity of the etheric or astral body, which is then somehow reflected in the physical body. But it would be necessary to conduct very specific research. It is only very likely to me that this absolute sound consciousness is based on the fact that a very specific configuration of the three semi-circular canals is also present in this case. So that is probable – but as I said, I would only like to express myself with caution here – this organ, which has many functions, including, among other things, an organ of equilibrium for certain equilibrium conditions, that this organ probably also has something to do with an absolute sense of tone.

Now to what was said in connection with Dr. Steiner's declamation. I can assure you, the question is indeed asked, but not actually asked in such a way that one finds out something that the questioner actually wants when he asks: What should be taught in singing, how should it be taught, so that what one has in mind in the spiritual-scientific sense by good vocal art can be achieved as quickly as possible? – Yes, I must say that, in my feeling, there is a great deal of philistinism mixed up in this question. Because it is true that one must seriously admit that spiritual science has a certain influence on people, that it has a certain effect on people and that people are not remodeled by spiritual science – they are not worked on from the outside — but that they come into a position to bring out of themselves certain forces that have so far remained latent in the development of humanity and to reveal a deeper human nature through them.

In this way the most diverse branches of human spiritual life will also be further developed. And among the many things that could be said about such a question, one thing can be said by pointing out that, above all, we should get away from talking about all the many methods of teaching singing. I do not like to say this at all, because the localities where these methods are hatched are so terribly populated that one does not know where to stop when expressing one's opinion about present-day methods of teaching singing! I do not want to dwell on this, but I would like to draw attention to one thing.

I believe that one must begin to understand what it means not to work according to a method, not to ask: How must this and that be placed, how must breathing be arranged, how must the many preparations be made before one even gets around to singing anything? Most of today's methods are actually preparation methods, methods of attitudes, methods of breathing and so on. One must disregard all of this, which actually amounts to regarding the human organism a bit like a machine and oiling it in the right way, bringing the wheels to the right axis height and the like. It is a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but you get what I mean. Instead of this, one should see that especially in art lessons an enormous amount depends on the personal, imponderable relationship between teacher and pupil, and one should come to associate with it an idea of what it means to actually lift one's consciousness out of the larynx and everything that produces the sound, and to be more consciously in touch with the surrounding air, to sing more with the environment of the larynx than with the larynx itself. I know that many people today cannot yet connect with what is said, but one must just gain these concepts. More emphasis must be placed on how one experiences, I might say, listening back, by singing but hearing, by learning to listen to oneself, but in such a way that one does not do something while listening, as if one were walking and constantly stepping on one's feet; that would, of course, disturb the singing. So when you come to live less in the physiological and more in the artistic as such, and when the teaching also proceeds more in the intervention of the artistic, then you will come upon the path to which the questioner may have been pointed.

However, I do believe that a pedagogy such as we cultivate through the Waldorf School will also gradually achieve success for art and singing lessons if we are given the external means to do so.

What Mr. Baumann meant yesterday with regard to the Waldorf School is also present in eurythmy and in singing, in the musical element. If it is not yet possible to do with the musical and the vocal as it should be according to his ideal, it is truly not due to our education, not at all to our education, at least not to the education of our teachers , but rather it is more a matter of the education of those who, from completely different backgrounds, could perhaps provide appropriately large rooms in which musical instruments can also be properly accommodated, and well-ventilated rooms for eurythmy and the like. I would like to make a point of mentioning this. And I believe that what could already be achieved in Waldorf schools today, including in the field of music and eurythmy teaching, could be quite different if we only had to deal with the pedagogy of our teachers and not with the pedagogy of other things that are necessary when a school is to be founded.

I was asked today – I don't know if the gentleman is here – whether he has a feeling that schools should also be founded in other places. I said that you just have to start at the beginning. If you have money, then we'll talk further!

Well, that is perhaps also something that hits the nail on the head. Or did you mean it differently? I don't want to ascribe to you, Mr. Baumann, that you couldn't have meant it differently.

Paul Baumann: Now the question about male voices,

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps it would be a disappointment if I left it out altogether: Can a woman also work as a creator for a male voice? Since I have already said that it essentially depends on the personal imponderable, I would naturally like to extend this to answering this question, and I do believe that under certain circumstances this could even be a very favorable relationship, that this man could even learn a great deal, much more than if he were to be taught by a man – especially if the woman is still beautiful or otherwise intact!

after a lecture by Professor Franz Thomastik on acoustic problems.

If I myself add just a few remarks, it is to point out, as it were, that this matter should not really be discussed at all, but rather that we should continue to work. I believe I am even expressing Dr. Thomastik's own views. It is indeed extremely important for the realization of the ideas that have been presented here to now really come up with the principles according to which the materials for the instruments must be used.

Now there is a certain difficulty because the materials we use for musical instruments are created in such a way that they represent something secondary. We must be clear about the fact that we do not actually perceive the real sound. In one of the last lectures - I think, as you were already there, I said: We actually perceive the sound as it expresses itself, announces itself in the air. And air is not the most suitable medium for sound among earthly elements. Sound would actually only be perceived adequately in its own ether. Among earthly elements, however, one would actually have to get used to perceiving sound in its own essence, if possible in water or in liquid, moist air, because that is where it actually is in reality.

I do not mention this to express a curiosity – reality is sometimes much stranger than one would think – but because the wood from which we build our instruments are taken from plants, because they are really formed from the clayey part of the moisture, both from the moisture of the earth from which the root grows and from the moisture in the air. And in a certain sense, one can see from the external configuration, let us say, of a tree whether the wood is suitable for a low or high pitch. The wood of a tree with more crenate leaves will always be better for a higher tone than the wood of a tree with different leaves (see illustration). This is because the tree is formed out of the tone; it itself produces the tone. And from this the principle will arise, which I have not yet had occasion to work out, but which will certainly be recognized if Dr. Thomastik's interesting explanations can be followed up further. Much will be able to arise from the things that have been stated here in a truly very spirited way, also in the spiritual-scientific sense.

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So we have to say that it is a matter of studying the tree entirely from its origin and studying the structure of the wood, which essentially originates from what the aqueous element, the moist element, contains, which is the actual sound carrier. For example, one way of doing this would be to study the absorbency of the wood in question purely from the perspective of the situation. One wood absorbs more water, the other less. This would already yield something; but it would still be a very rough processing.

I would like to make one more point. It is extremely interesting how Dr. Thomastik has developed, so to speak, an ideal architecture for musical listening. And this is definitely something that can be pursued further. I would just like to draw your attention to one thing. Reality is actually an extremely complicated thing, and it is extremely difficult, I would say, to construct reality from one corner of the world, so to speak. Let us say, for example, that one could ask: Why are our columns over there in our construction made of different types of wood? And one could relate these types of wood to the types of wood from which the instruments are to be built. That would be wrong, because that is not the function of these types of wood; rather, the function of these types of wood consists in something else, which I will discuss in a moment, when I have said something in advance.

You see, it is easy to imagine how to build if you want to create an ideal listening experience. However, the following would still have to be taken into account: even if you were to copy exactly some existing room, such as a concert hall in a particular location with good acoustics, and then move it to a different location, the acoustics might not be the same at all. That remains the case nonetheless. But one could imagine an ideal room built entirely according to acoustic principles.

Now Dr. Thomastik has explained something extremely important, namely how one is disturbed when sitting in the concert hall, and sitting in front of the orchestra. The bassist sweats profusely, struggles, and you have to watch all of this, you have to see the various contortions and the like. You are completely disturbed in your devotion to the sound by what is visually in front of you, and also disturbed by the construction conditions and so on.

But let us imagine a space that is constructed even more from the acoustic, but I don't even want to say from the acoustic, but rather entirely from the musical corner. Yes, such a space cannot be prevented from being seen from the inside when we are sitting in it. We also have to look at it. If we do not at the same time establish the principle that the room is darkened the moment the music begins, then we cannot, since we also have eyes, merely listen. We cannot build it only acoustically, apart from the fact that we would also have to enjoy it before the music begins; otherwise we would also have to enter in the dark. Rooms built purely according to acoustic principles would not be more beautiful to look at than an orchestra is!

So it is necessary not only to construct reality from one corner, but to have an organ for constructing reality from the most diverse corners. And you see, in acoustics, the combination of observation and perception of a much wider range of factors is necessary to bring about such things, whereby a sound is heard in a room that is supposed to be beautiful at the same time in a way that is appropriate because it is not only reflected by the wall on which it falls, but also absorbed. It always penetrates a certain distance and is only then reflected back. The sense of material is there when you hear the sound in a certain space that has walls made of a certain material. And so, in order to evoke these possibilities of reflection, you have to look at various things together. And the seven different types of wood for the columns were chosen with this in mind. They are there specifically to serve the acoustics, that is, the acoustics that are produced by reflection.

And so it is with many other things. For example, the double dome in the building over there, which provides a soundboard, is constructed from such points of view, as well as possible.

Well, of course, there are other things to consider, especially the fact that you can't always go to the place where the acoustics can be achieved in the simplest way. A lot can be achieved by intuitive observation.

And the organ sunk into the earth is an extraordinarily ingenious idea! But it would present a certain difficulty, because the pipes' relative neutrality with respect to the external air would end at the moment we actually sank the organ into the earth. It would sound quite different in winter than in summer; it would have to be treated and tuned quite differently in winter than in summer. Above all, winter and summer would become intensely noticeable. And many other things come into consideration. So a whole series of extraordinarily difficult problems arise that cannot be solved from the perspective of acoustics alone, or even from the perspective of music alone.

Dr. Thomastik made an extremely interesting comment. It was that Vienna was actually the meeting place for all great musicians, and that these musicians were loyal to Vienna, had a lot in Vienna, even though they were not exactly living in clover there! I will tell you a simple thing that will show you that Vienna was supposed to be a gathering place for certain people. You can study the geological conditions in Europe by going over wide areas, of course this is to be understood cum grano salis, but that is a very small granum: the Vienna Basin, simply the ground on which Vienna stands, and the surrounding area, contains so much of the confluence of all European geological conditions that almost all of European geology can be studied in the Vienna Basin. Now, if you have any idea of what that means, how intimately everything in the spiritual realm is connected with the soil, if you consider what it means that Vienna is actually a compendium of all European soil conditions in Vienna, and if you consider that the substantial as such, the relationships of the substances to each other are actually the scale - no, chemical equivalent weights are actually tone relationships (gap in the transcript) - if you consider all this, you will see that, inwardly, one really does hit the mark based on cosmic relationships when one says that Vienna also has a spiritual and intellectual milieu in which musical geniuses in particular feel at home and are pleasantly touched.

It is also interesting to note that Graz is an unmusical city. Well, I think one need only go over the Murbrücke and listen to the unpleasant rushing of the Mur, in contrast to other rivers, and one will see that nature, in the flowing of the Mur, behaves in an extraordinarily offensive musical way. Isn't that so? It has an enormously unpleasant, especially in the rushing, unpleasant gradient! But that is also due to the very special configuration there. How much more musical it is when, let's say, you take the north-west train towards Vienna! The entire ground structure is already musical there. The mountains and everything are arranged musically. Graz may have many lovers, but the entire Alpine world, including the ground structure, is unmusically placed.

So, if you go beyond the purely musical, then extremely far-reaching problems are suggested. And I would actually like to regard this as a particularly favorable success for Dr. Thomastik's very valuable discussion today, if you, my dear friends, were to suggest as many such problems as possible.

I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that it is truly extraordinarily significant that musical instruments basically arose out of the traditions of the fourth post-Atlantean period. And as the fifth post-Atlantean period is emerging, musical instruments are entering a period of decadence. This is connected with the entire evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period. And basically, this fifth post-Atlantic period is actually an unmusical one. The intellectual and the theoretical, which arose particularly in the 19th century, is something thoroughly unmusical. And it is connected with the whole inner character of the fifth post-Atlantic period that musical instruments have fallen into decadence. And of course it is not that easy to restore them to their former glory. Because – Dr. Thomastik will agree with me – if the demand were to arise for an organ builder to build an organ for him today that meets his ideals, we would have to wait until the next incarnation. I don't think that an organ builder today builds the kind of things that Dr. Thomastik mentioned in his interesting presentation. Dr. Thomastik does use a very beautiful comparison: if musical instruments were placed in the hands of a manufacturer, it would be like placing paints in the hands of a manufacturer. But that is the ideal of today's painters; they get their paints from the manufacturer, they no longer make their own paints. They become more and more dependent on the paint manufacturer, just as musicians have become dependent on organ builders, violin makers, and so on.

Now, from the point of view of spiritual development, it is therefore of very special importance that efforts such as those with this newly built violin emerge. Because the whole question of musical instruments is set in motion as a result. It actually serves the purpose we are seeking from our point of view: to combat the phenomena of decadence, which are so significant in all fields. And from this point of view, one would like to wish such work as that with this violin a really great success. Because this success is entirely in line with our humanistic endeavors.

These are just a few comments on the interesting lecture.

after a lecture by Leopold van der Pals

I would just like to say this: Mr van der Pals has rightly pointed out that, in something like the Chinese legend of the 'Moon Violin', there is no mention of the human being. And I believe he meant, didn't he, that this is something particularly striking, that the human being is thrown out of the human being's own being placed in the whole cosmos, in the musical sense. - This is connected with the inner meaning that such a legend has in oriental literature, including Chinese literature. In a certain sense, the human being is part of it: and what is meant is always a deeply felt, one could say for older times, instinctively clairvoyant knowing of the human being as being together with the whole cosmos.

In Chinese, there is a particularly deep awareness of the connection between the human head and the upper spheres, between the human rhythmic system, the lung-heart system and what is earth, in which man participates by breathing, in that the breath itself sets his rhythmic system in motion. And then it is the human being as a whole, in whom one senses that he is something new within the evolution of the earth, and cannot yet be directly related to anything cosmic, such as his head as a part or his chest organs as parts, but the relationship of the whole human being to the cosmos remains somewhat indeterminate.

But what remains indeterminate in the human being was called the moon in the human being. And there was a fundamental, if instinctive, awareness that what is, so to speak, the third link in a three-part human being is moon-like. This is also the basis of all spiritual scientific conceptions of the human being (see drawing, moon).

Now, we distinguish from this moon-like element that which, as it were, arises out of the entire rhythmic system, which, as it were, floats on the rhythmic system and represents the result of the rhythmic system. This is then the sun-like element (see drawing, sun). This would then have to be found mainly concentrated in the human heart.

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These two limbs of the human being are, as it were, located at the front in human nature. The solar aspect is that which he has not yet fully developed, not in the sense of the old planet, as my “Occult Science in Outline” suggests, but of the present sun shining in the sky.

In addition, there is that in man which is related to the rhythmic system: what is the structure of his nervous system, and what is related to the other planets. So that one has, for example, at the very top of the head, in relation to the entire nervous system, the central nervous system, Saturn (see drawing), that which then lies more towards the sense organs, towards the eyes: Jupiter, that which underlies the speech organs, the singing organs: Mars, that which leads more to the sympathetic nervous system: Venus and Mercury. So one would have the overall nature of the human being, as it came across from the moon, as that which underlies it. And one would have to distinguish five connecting lines that go back to the five planets:

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This would give us the inner organisation of the human being in the sense of an ideal, but very real, musical instrument within the human being.

This musical instrument would, as it were, be built up out of the moon-nature of the human being. And, as you know, in all older views of the human being, it is represented under the image of a tree or a plant. You only need to think of the world ash tree. This view goes back a long way. So you just need to imagine: the five stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, they descend on the human tree and stretch the lyre on it, so that it becomes a musical instrument. Above it all, descending from the spiritual universe, hovers the tuner of this instrument: the bird Phoenix, the immortal human soul.

This Chinese legend does indeed have a very significant meaning. And the reason why the human being stays away is because he is the music itself, because the legend does not talk about what is the main thing. It speaks of the parts that make up the entire musical instrument. It is a bit like when someone builds a violin and talks about the wood, the strings, the bridge, but not about the violin itself. In the same way, this Chinese legend speaks of nothing other than the human being, the becoming of these five stars, of the immortal soul; but precisely because the whole of which it is composed actually points to the human being, the human being is absent. It is this deep awareness of the connection between the actual music and human nature itself that underlies it.

That is why Mr. van der Pals was quite right when he said: anyone looking for the origin of melody is actually going completely astray if they try to find it in the present day. — He who would seek it would have to go back to the sacred scriptures and further and further back, and he would never come to the end of his research, because the melodies are really something that belongs to the ancient stock of an entire human cultural development.

One should actually say: it was not only that it arose from a truly deep feeling that someone like Nietzsche wrote as his first work: “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”, but – even if what what Mr. van der Pals said, that the art of music, as we understand it today, only really emerged at the end of the Middle Ages – musicality as such goes back very deep into the origin of humanity. And one could also say something along the lines of: the origin of all human spiritual life from the musical element. For anyone who has the right feeling for a small child would always want to say: the small child is actually born as a musical instrument. And the musicality of children is based on this primal connection of the melodious element with the human being.

But, as I said, to go into these things in detail today would truly be going too far. I just wanted to point it out. And the expression “moon violin” is also thoroughly justified, grounded in the whole view, for it is precisely the lunar nature of the human being that is appealed to here when one speaks of the fact that the moon violin is being built.

For those who think of music from the aesthetic point of view, there is something puzzling about it; for simple human feeling it is a direct experience which penetrates the soul; and for those who want to understand how it produces its effects, it is a rather difficult problem.

Compared with other arts—sculpture, painting, poetry—music has a special character. All the other arts have some kind of model in the external world. The sculptor works from a model, and if he creates a statue of Zeus or Apollo, it takes an idealised human form. It is the same with painting—and today the tendency is to give an exact impression of what the senses perceive. Poetry, similarly, tries to deal with some aspect of the real world. But if one tried to apply this theory to music, one would get nowhere—for how could one copy, for example, the song of birds!

What is the origin of musically-shaped sounds? How are they related to anything in the objective world?

It is precisely in connection with this art of music that Schopenhauer has advanced some interesting views; in a certain respect they are indeed clear and striking. He assigns to music a quite special place among the arts, and to art itself a quite special value in human life. His philosophy has a fundamental ground-note which may be expressed as follows:

Life is a sorry business, and through thinking I try to make it bearable. Pervading everything in the world is a blind, unconscious Will. It shapes the stone and then the plant—but always, in all its manifestations, with a restless yearning for something higher. The savage feels this less than does the genius, who experiences the painful cravings of the Will in the highest, most intense, degree.

Besides the activity of the Will—Schopenhauer continues—man has the faculty of forming mental images. These are like a fata morgana, like pictures in the mist, like the spray thrown up by the waves of the Will. The Will surges up to shape these illusory pictures. When in this way man perceives the working of the Will, he is less than ever satisfied; but a release from the blind driving-force of the Will comes to us through art. Art is something through which man can escape from the restless craving of the Will. How does this happen?

When man creates a work of art, it springs from his image-forming faculty; but genuine art, Schopenhauer insists, is not merely a copy of external reality. A statue of Zeus, for example, is not produced by copying; the sculptor draws for his model on the characteristics of many men, and so he creates the archetypal image, which in nature is distributed among numerous separate individuals.

So the artist surpasses nature. He extracts her archetypal essence, and this is what the true artist renders. By penetrating into the creative depths of nature, he creates something real and achieves a certain release for himself.

So it is with all the arts except music. All the other arts have to work through images and produce only pictures of the Will. But musical sound is a direct expression of the Will itself. The composer listens to the pulse-beat of the Will, and renders it in the sequence of musical sounds. Music is thus intimately related to the working of the Will in nature, to “things in themselves”; it penetrates into the elemental archetypal being of the cosmos and reflects the feeling of it; that is why music is so deeply satisfying.

Schopenhauer was no occultist, but in these matters he had an instinctive apprehension of the truth.

Why does music speak so intimately to the heart, and so widely, and why is its influence so powerful, even in early childhood? For answers to these questions we must turn to the realm where the true models for music are to be found.

When a composer is at work, he has nothing to copy from; he has to draw his music from out of his own soul. Whence he derives it we shall find out if we turn our attention to the worlds which are not perceptible to the ordinary senses.

Human beings are so made that it is possible for them to release in themselves faculties which are normally asleep; in the same way that someone born blind may be given sight by an operation, so can a man's inner eyes be opened, enabling him to gain knowledge of higher worlds. When a man develops these slumbering faculties through concentration, meditation and so on, he advances step by step. First of all he experiences a special configuration of his dream life. His dreams take on a much more orderly character; on waking, he feels as though he were rising from out of the waves of an ocean in which he had been submerged, a world of flowing light and colour. He knows that he has experienced something; that he has seen an ocean of which he had no previous knowledge. Increasingly his dream-experiences gain in clarity. He remembers that in this world of light and colour there were things and beings which differed from anything physical in being permeable, so that one can pass right through them without meeting any resistance. He comes to know beings whose element, whose bodies, the colours are. Gradually he extends his consciousness over this world, and on waking he remembers that he has been active within it.

The next step occurs when he—as it were—carries this world back with him into waking life. Then he sees the astral bodies of other men and of much else, and he experiences a world which is much more real than the physical one—a world which in relation to the physical world appears as a densification, a crystallisation, from out of the astral world.

Now it is also possible to transform into a conscious condition the unconscious state of dreamless sleep. The disciple who attains to this stage learns to extend his consciousness over those parts of the night which are not filled with dreams, but are normally spent in complete unconsciousness. He then finds himself conscious in a world of which previously he knew nothing, a world which is not intrinsically one of light and colour; it first announces itself as a world of musical sound. The disciple acquires the capacity to hear spiritually; he hears sequences and combinations of sounds which are not audible to the physical ear.

This world is called the devachanic world (Deva=spirit, chan=home). One must not think that when a man enters this world and hears its tones resounding, he loses the world of light and colours. The world of tones is shot through with light and colours, but they belong to the astral world. The essential element of the devachanic world is the endlessly flowing and changing ocean of musical tones. When continuous consciousness extends to this world, its tones can be brought over, and it is then possible to hear also the ground-tones of the physical world. For every physical thing has its ground-note in the devachanic world, and in every countenance devachanic ground-notes are figured forth. It was on this account that Paracelsus said: “The kingdoms of nature are the letters of the alphabet, and Man is the word formed from them.”

Whenever anyone falls asleep, his astral body goes out from his physical body; his soul then lives in the devachanic world. Its harmonies make an impression on his soul; they vibrate through it in waves of living sound, so that every morning he wakes from the music of the spheres, and out of this realm of harmony he passes into the everyday world. Just as the human soul has a sojourn in Devachan between incarnations, so we can say that during the night the soul rejoices in flowing tones of music: they are the very element out of which it is itself woven and they are its true home.

The composer translates into physical sounds the rhythms and harmonies which at night imprint themselves on his astral body. Unconsciously he takes his model from the spiritual world. He has in himself the harmonies which he translates into physical terms. That is the secret connection between the music which resounds in the physical world and the hearing of spiritual music during the night. But the relation of physical music to this spiritual music is like that of a shadow to the object which casts it. So the music of instruments and voices in the physical world is like a shadow, a true shadow, of the far higher music of Devachan. The primal image, the archetype, of music is in Devachan; and having understood this, we can now examine the effect of music on human beings.

Man has his physical body, and an etheric model for it, the ether-body. Connected with his ether-body is the sentient body, which is a step towards the astral. Inwardly bound up with him, as though membered into him, is the Sentient Soul. Just as a sword and its scabbard form a single whole, so do the Sentient Soul and the sentient body. Man has also the Intellectual Soul, and as a still higher member the Spiritual Soul, which is linked with the Spirit-self, or Manas. In completely dreamless sleep the higher members, and so also the Sentient Soul, are in the devachanic world. This is not like living in the physical realm, where everything we see and hear is outside ourselves. The beings of Devachan interpenetrate us, and we are within everything that exists there. In occult schools, accordingly, this devachanic-astral realm is called the world of interpenetrability. Man is played through by its music.

When he returns from this devachanic world, his Sentient Soul, his Intellectual Soul and his Spiritual Soul are permeated with its rhythms; he carries them down into his denser bodies. He is thus able to work from out of his Intellectual Soul and his Sentient Soul on to his ether-body, and to carry the rhythms into it. As a seal stamps itself on the wax, so the astral body imprints the devachanic rhythms on the ether-body, until the ether-body vibrates in harmony with them. Ether-body and astral body bear witness in their own being to the spiritual tones and rhythms. The ether-body is lower than the astral body, but in activity it is superior.

From out of his Ego man works on his bodies in so far as he transmutes the astral body into Manas, the ether-body into Buddhi, the physical body into Atma. Since the astral body is the most tenuous, the transmutation of it calls for the least strength. Man can work on his astral body with forces drawn from the astral world. But to work on his etheric body he has to call on forces from the devachanic world, and for working on his physical body he needs forces from the higher devachanic world. During the night he draws from the world of flowing tones the strength to carry them over into his sentient body and his etheric body. Although on waking in the morning he is not conscious of having absorbed this music of the night, yet on listening to music he has an inkling that these impressions of the spiritual world are within him.

When a man listens to music, the seer can observe how the rhythms and colours flow into and lay hold of the firmer substance of the ether-body, causing it to vibrate in tune with them, and from the harmonious response of the ether-body comes the pleasure that is felt. The more strongly the astral body resounds, the more strongly do its tones echo in the ether-body, overcoming the ether-body's own natural rhythms, and this gives feelings of pleasure both to a listener and to a composer. In certain cases the harmonies of the astral body penetrate to some extent into the sentient body, and a conflict then arises between the sentient body and the ether-body. If the tones set up in the sentient body are so strong that they master the tones of the ether-body, the result is cheerful music in a major key. A minor key indicates that the ether-body has prevailed over the sentient body; and the painful feeling that ensues gives rise to the most serious melodies.

So, when someone lives in the experience of music, he is living in the image of his spiritual home. It naturally elevates the soul to feel this intimate relationship to its primal ground, and that is why the simplest souls are so receptive to music. A man then feels himself truly at home, and whenever he is lifted up through music he says to himself: “Yes, you come from other worlds, and in music you can experience your native place.” It was an intuitive knowledge of this that led Schopenhauer to assign to music a central place among the arts, and to say that the composer discerns with his spiritual ear the pulse-beat of the Will.

In music, man feels the echo of the inmost life of things, a life related to his own. Because feelings are the most inward part of the soul, and because they are related to the spiritual world and are indwelt by musical sound—that is why man, when he listens to music, lives in the pleasure of feeling himself in harmony with its tones, and in touch with the true home of his spirit.

This is the 9th of 12 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities from 1906 to 1923. The series of lectures is entitled: The Essence of Music and the Experience of Tone. Another name of this lecture is: Human Expression through Tone and Word.

I have already pointed out in recent lectures how certain functions or activities of the human being, which emerge in early childhood, are in reality a metamorphosis of activities which belong to man between death and a new birth, i.e. in his pre-earthly life. At birth the child is not yet fully adapted to the earthly gravitation, the earthly conditions of equilibrium. We see the child slowly and gradually adapt himself to these earthly conditions as he learns to stand and walk. Thus the adaptation of the body to the position of equilibrium for earthly life is a faculty which man does not bring with him. He must acquire it during his earthly life.

Now we know that the physical body of man in all its form is the result of a mighty spiritual activity—an activity which man performs in unison with Beings of the Higher Worlds between death and a new birth. Yet that which man forms and creates in this activity—we may call it in a sense the spiritual germ of his future physical earthly body—is not so formed as already to contain the faculty of upright gait and posture. This faculty is only incorporated in man's nature when, after his birth, he gradually finds his way into the conditions of equilibrium, into the forces of earthly existence. For in the pre-earthly life, balance or equilibrium is not the same as it is on earth, where it signifies the power to walk and stand. In the pre-earthly life, balance and equilibrium signify the relation man has to the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so forth—to the Beings of the Hierarchies—a relation manifold and differentiated according as one feels oneself drawn more towards one Being or more towards another. This constitutes the state of equilibrium in the spiritual worlds. And this, man loses in a certain sense when he descends on to the earth. In the mother's womb he is neither in the conditions of equilibrium of his spiritual existence, nor is he yet in the conditions of equilibrium of his earthly life. He has left the former and has not yet entered into the latter.

It is similar in the case of speech. The language which we speak here on earth is, of course, essentially adapted to earthly conditions. In the first place it is an expression of our earthly thoughts. These earthly thoughts contain earthly information and earthly knowledge; and to all this our speech or language is adapted during our life on earth. But in the pre-earthly life as I have already explained, man has a very different language—one which does not go from within outwards, which does not mainly follow the out-breathing process, but the spiritual in-breathing or inspiration (which we observe to correspond to breathing in the pre-earthly life). Thus in pre-earthly existence, man's language is a living with the cosmic Logos; it is a living within the cosmic Word—the cosmic language from out of which all things of the world are made.

This too we lose when we descend on to the earth. We lose the life within the cosmic language, and acquire here on earth the language which serves us in the first place to express our thoughts—our earthly thoughts. This earthly language serves our mutual understanding—understanding as between human beings, all of whom are living on the earth.

And so it is with our thoughts themselves—our earthly thinking. Here on earth, our thinking is gradually adapted to the earthly conditions. In pre-earthly existence on the other hand, our thought is a living within the creative thoughts of the Cosmos.

Walking, Speaking and Thinking:—let us now consider, of these three, the middle member—human speech. We may indeed say that in speech there lies a most essential element of all earthly culture and civilisation. By speech, human beings come together here on earth, and one man finds the way to another. Bridging the gulf that lies between, soul meets with soul through speech. We feel that we have in speech something essential to our nature here on earth. And indeed our speech is the earthly reflection of our life in the Logos, in the cosmic Word. Thus it is particularly interesting to understand the connection of what man attains by great efforts here on earth, as speech and language, with the metamorphosis of speech and language yonder in the pre-earthly life. Indeed, when we study this relationship, we are led to perceive how the human being is inwardly constructed and organised out of the very element of spoken sound and music. And it is a happy coincidence at the present moment that in the cosmological studies we have pursued for some weeks, I can to-day insert the chapter on the expression of the human being through the words of speech and the sounds of song. It is our great pleasure in these days to be having so excellent a performance of song, here in our Goetheanum building.¹ Allow me therefore to-day, if I may say so, to express my personal gratitude for this happy artistic event in our midst, by telling you a little of the connection between the speech and song of man here on earth, and his life in that element which corresponds to the Sound in speech and song, in the spiritual world.

If we study the human organism as it stands before us here on earth, we know that it is through and through an image of the spiritual. Everything here—not only what man bears in himself, but also what surrounds him in external nature—is an image of the spiritual. Now when man expresses himself in speech or in song, he is really manifesting his whole nature—body, soul and spirit—not only outwardly but inwardly. In all that he brings forth by way of sound—whether the articulate sounds of speech or the musical notes of song—the full human being is in fact contained. How deeply and fully he is contained, we only begin to see when we understand more in detail what the human being is in that he speaks or sings.

Let us take our start from speech. In the historic evolution of mankind, speech, as we know, proceeded from something which originally was song. The farther we go back into pre-historic ages, the more does speech become recitative and eventually song. In distant ages of human evolution upon earth, the expression of the human being through sound was not really differentiated into song and speech, but these two were one. What is so often referred to as the primeval language of man was such that we might as well speak of it as a primeval song.

But we will now study speech in its present condition, where it has become very far removed from the pure element of song, and is steeped in the prosaic and intellectual quality. If we take speech as we have it to-day, we find in it two essential elements—consonant and vowel, All that we bring forth in speech is composed of a consonantal and of a vowel element. Now, the consonantal element is in reality entirely based upon the finer plastic structure of our body. Whether we pronounce a B or a P, an L or an M, in each case it rests upon the fact that something or other in our body has a certain plastic form. Nor is this confined by any means to the organs of speech and song alone. These organs only represent the highest culmination of what is here meant. For when the human being brings forth a musical note in song or an articulate sound in speech, his whole body really takes part in the process. The process that goes on in the organ of speech or song is but the final culmination of something that is taking place through the whole human being. Our human body therefore, as to its plastic form and structure, may really be conceived as follows. We take all the consonants there are in any language. They are always variations of twelve primary consonants, and indeed in the Finnish language you still find these twelve preserved very nearly in their pure, original nature; eleven are quite distinct, only the twelfth has grown a little indistinct, but it, too, is still present. Now, these twelve original consonants when rightly understood (and each of them can at the same time be conceived as a form), these twelve consonants taken together really represent the entire plastic structure of the human body. We may say therefore, without speaking figuratively in the least:—the human being is plastically expressed by the twelve primeval consonants.

What then is this human body? From the point of view—the musical point of view—we are now taking, the human body is nothing else than a great musical instrument. Even the external musical instruments—the violin or any other instrument of music—even these you can best understand by somehow perceiving in their form and shape a consonant or consonants. You must see them, as it were, built up out of the consonants. When we refer to the consonant element in speech, there must always be something in our feeling reminiscent of musical instruments; and the totality, the harmony of all consonants, represents the plastic sculpture of the human body.

And the vowel element—in this we have the soul which plays upon the instrument. The soul provides the vowel nature. Thus when you embody in speech the consonant and vowel elements, you have in every manifestation of speech or of song a self-expression of the human being. The soul of the human being plays in vowels upon the consonants of the musical instrument—the human body.

Now if, as I said, we are considering the speech that forms a part of present-day civilisation, we find that our soul, whenever it brings forth vowel sounds, makes use to a very great extent of the brain, the system of head and nerves. In earlier ages of human evolution, this was not the case to the same degree.

Let us consider for a minute the system of head and nerves. The whole structure of the head is permeated by forces which run along the nerve-strands. Now the activity which the nerve-strands here develop is entered and permeated by another activity, namely that which comes about through our breathing-in the air. The air which we breathe in passes through the spinal canal right up into the head, and the impact of the breathing beats in unison with the movements that are executed along the nerve-strands. Pressing upward to the head through the spinal canal, the current of the breath is perpetually meeting with the activity of the nerves in the head. We have not a separate nervous activity, and a separate breathing activity; we have in the head a harmony and mutual resonance of breathing activity and nervous activity. Now the man of to-day, having grown prosaic in his ordinary life, sets more store by the nerve forces than by the breathing impulses. He makes more use of his nervous system when he speaks; he permeates with nerve, if we might put it so, the instrument which through its consonantal nature shapes and forms the vowel currents.

In earlier ages of human evolution, this was not the case. Man lived not so much in his nervous system; he lived in the breathing system. Hence the primeval language was more like song. Now when the man of to-day sings, he takes what he does in speech—where he permeates it with the nervous activity of the nervous system—and restores it to the current of the breath. He consciously calls into activity this second stream—the breathing. It is the continuation of the breathing into the head which is directly called into activity when, as in song, the uttering of the vowel is added to the bringing forth of the note. But here in song man does not leave the element of breath; he takes back his now prosaic language into the poetic and artistic nature of the rhythmic breathing process. The poet of to-day still strives to maintain the rhythm of the breath itself in the way he shapes and moulds the language of his poems. And he who writes for song takes it all back again into the breathing process (including the breathing process of the head). Thus we may say, the very process which man must undergo here on earth, in that he adapts his language to earthly conditions, is reversed in a certain sense when we pass from speech to song. Song is indeed a. real recollection—though by earthly means—of that which we experienced in the pre-earthly life. For in our rhythmic system we are far nearer to the spiritual world than in our thinking system. And it is of course the thinking system which takes hold of speech when speech becomes prosaic.

When we utter the vowel sounds, we press what is living in our soul down into the body; and the body, by adding the consonantal element, does but provide the musical instrument for our soul to use. You will certainly have the feeling that in every vowel there is something of the soul, immediate and living. The vowel can be taken by itself. The consonant on the other hand is perpetually longing for the vowel, tending towards it. The plastic instrument of the body is in fact a dead thing until the vowel nature—the soul—strikes its chords.

You can see this in detailed examples. Take for instance, in certain dialects of Middle Europe, the word mir as in the phrase Es geht mir gut. When I was a little boy, I simply could not conceive that the word should be written as it is. I always wrote it mia; for in the r the longing towards the a is quite inherent. Thus when we perceive the human organism as the harmony of all consonants, we find in it everywhere the longing for the vowel nature, that is to say for the soul. Now we are driven to ask, what is the origin of all these things?

This human body, in the whole arrangement of its plastic structure here on earth, has to adapt itself to the earthly conditions. It is shaped as it is, because the earthly position of equilibrium and the whole system of the earthly forces would not allow it to be otherwise. And yet all the time it is shaped out of the spiritual world. This matter can be understood only by deeper spiritual-scientific research. The soul-nature, manifesting itself through the vowels, strikes upon the consonantal nature, which is plastically shaped and formed in accordance with earthly conditions.

If we lift ourselves into the spiritual world, in the way I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, we first attain Imagination or Imaginative Cognition, as I have often told you. Now when we reach this point, we find that we have lost the consonants. We still possess the vowels, but the consonants—to begin with at any rate—are lost. In the Imaginative condition, we have in effect lost our physical body—i.e. we have lost the consonants. In the Imaginative world, the consonants no longer appeal to us. To describe what we have in that world adequately in spoken words, our words would have to consist, to begin with, of vowels only.

We have lost the instrument, and we enter a pure world of sound, where the vowels are indeed coloured and shaded in manifold variety, but all the consonants of earth are in effect dissolved away in the vowels.

You will therefore find that in those languages which were not yet so far removed from the primeval, the things of the super-sensible world were named in words consisting of vowels only. The word Jahve for example did not contain our present form of J or V. It consisted only of vowels, and was half-scanned, half-sung. We enter here into a vowel-language which it is only natural to sing. And when we reach from Imaginative to Inspired Cognition—when therefore we receive the direct manifestations of the spiritual world—then all the consonants we have on earth are changed into something quite different. The consonants, as such, we lose. But in place of it, a new thing comes forth in the spiritual perception which comes to us in Inspiration. And this new thing we find to be none other than the spiritual counterparts of the consonants.

But the spiritual counterparts of the consonants are not there between the vowels; they live in them. In your speech here on earth you have the consonants and vowels side by side. You lose the consonants as you ascend into the spiritual world. You live your way into a vowel world of song. To put it truly one must say, “It sings,” for you yourself no longer sing. The World itself becomes cosmic song. But all this vowel world is variedly coloured or shaded in a spiritual sense. In effect, there is something living in the vowels—namely the spiritual counterparts of the consonants.

Here on earth we have the vowel sound A for example, and—if you will the note C sharp in a certain octave. But when we reach the spiritual world, we do not have one A, or one C sharp in a given octave, but countless ones differing in inner quality. For it is another thing, whether a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi speaks A to one, or a Being of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, or some other Being. Outwardly the manifestation is the same, but it is filled in each case with a different inner soul.

We may say therefore:—Here on earth we have our body. The vowel sound strikes into it. Yonder in the spiritual world we have the vowel sound; and the soul strikes into it, and lives in it, so that the sound becomes the body for the soul. You are immersed in cosmic music, cosmic song; you are within the creative sound—within the creative Word.

Let us now consider sound as it is on earth, including spoken sound. Sound has its earthly life in the element of air. It is, however, but a childish conception of Physics to believe that the peculiar forms in the air are the reality of sound. It is really childish. Imagine, for a moment, you have a piece of ground, and on it stands a man. The ground is most certainly not the man, yet the ground must be there for the man to stand on. Without it, the man himself could not be there. It will not therefore occur to you to seek to understand the man by examining the soil beneath his feet.

In the same way the air must be there for the sound to have a basis of support. Just as man stands on the soil—only in a rather more complicated way the sound has its “soil,” its necessary basis or resistance in the air. For the sound itself, the air signifies no more than does the soil for the man who stands on it. The sound presses forward to the air, and the air gives it the possibility to stand. But the sound itself is spiritual. Just as the man is different from the earthly soil on which he stands, so, is the sound different from the air upon which it stands—in which it finds its support though of course in a more complicated way, in a manifold and varied way.

Through the fact that we on earth can only speak and sing by means of the air, we have in the airy forming of the sound the earthly image of a thing of soul and spirit. The soul-and-spirit of sound belongs to the super-sensible world, and that which dwells here in the air is fundamentally the body of the sound. We need not therefore be surprised if we find the sound again in the spiritual world, though shorn of that which comes from the earthly—the earthly consonant-articulation. The vowel only is carried over there. The sound as such in its spiritual content goes with us when we rise into the spiritual world, only there it becomes filled with soul. Instead of being shaped and moulded outwardly by the nature of the consonants, the sound is inwardly ensouled.

Now all this runs parallel with man's entry into the spiritual world in the widest sense. Think for a moment, my dear friends, man passes through the gate of death. The consonants he soon leaves behind, but the vowels—and especially the manifold intonations of the vowels—these he experiences all the more strongly, only with this difference. He no longer feels the sound proceeding from his own larynx, but he feels that there is singing all around him, and that in every sound of the song, he himself is living. It is so in the very first days after man passes through the gate of death. He is dwelling in a musical element, which is at the same time an element of speech; and this musical element reveals ever more and more as it becomes filled with living soul from the spiritual world.

Now, as I have told you, man's going forth into the Universe after he has passed through the gate of death is at the same time a passing from the earthly world into the world of the stars.

When we describe such a thing as this, we seem to be speaking in images, but our images none the less are reality. Imagine here the Earth. Around it are the planets, then the heavens of the fixed stars, conceived from time immemorial—and rightly so—as the Animal Circle or Zodiac. Man standing on the Earth sees the planets and the fixed stars in their shadowed radiance. He sees them from the Earth—or, shall we say, with due respect to earthly man, he sees them “from in front?” (The Old Testament, as you know, expressed it differently.) After death, when man goes farther and farther from the earth, he gradually comes to see the planets as well as the fixed stars “from behind.” But there he does not see these points of light or surfaces of light which are seen from the earth. Rather does he see the spiritual—the corresponding spiritual Beings. On all sides it is a world of spiritual Beings. Wherever he looks back, whether it be towards Saturn, Sun or Moon, or towards Aries, Taurus and the other constellations, he sees from yonder side the spiritual Beings.

But this seeing is at the same time a hearing; and when he says:—Man sees from the other side—or from behind—Moon, Venus, Aries, Taurus and so forth, we might equally well express it thus:—Man hears the Beings, who have their dwelling in these heavenly bodies, resounding forth into the cosmic spaces.

Try to imagine it in its totality. (It really looks as though we were speaking figuratively, but we are not, it is absolutely real.) Imagine yourself out there in the Cosmos—the planetary world farther from you now, the Zodiac with its twelve constellations nearer. From all the heavenly bodies it is singing, speaking as it sings to you, singing as it speaks; and all your perception is a listening to the speaking song, the singing speech of the World. You look out in the direction of Aries, and as you do so, receive the impression of a consonant soul-nature. Behind Aries maybe, is Saturn, a vowel element of soul. And in this vowel element as it radiates out into the cosmic space from Saturn—in it there dwells the soul-and-spirit Consonant:—Aries, or in another instance, Taurus. Thus you have the planetary sphere singing to you in vowels—singing forth into the cosmic spaces; and the fixed stars permeate the song of the planetary sphere with soul from the consonants. Picture it to yourselves as vividly as you can:—the sphere of the fixed stars at rest, and behind it the wandering planets. Whenever a planet in its course passes a constellation of the fixed stars, there bursts forth not a single note, but a whole world of sound. Then as the planet passes on from Aries to Taurus, a different world of sound rings forth. But behind it there follows, let us say, another planet:—Mars. Mars passing through the constellation of Taurus, causes a different world of sounds to ring forth once more. Thus you have in the heavens of the fixed stars, or the Zodiac, a wondrous cosmic instrument of music, while from behind it our planetary Gods are playing upon this instrument.

We may truly say, my dear friends, when man down here on earth takes back his speech (which is now formed for his earthly needs, just as his walking is transformed, for earthly needs, from his spiritual power of orientation in the Cosmos)—when therefore man takes speech back again into the element of song, he really inclines himself to that cosmic pre-earthly existence from out of which he is born for earthly life. And indeed, all Art comes before man in this sense. It is as though, whenever he expresses himself in Art, he were to say, “’Tis human destiny—and rightly so that man as he begins his earthly course of life is placed into the midst of earthly conditions and must adapt himself to these. But in Art he goes back again a little step, leaves the earthly life to take its course around him, and retreating for a moment approaches once more the world of Soul and Spirit—the pre-earthly life from which he has come forth.”

We do not understand Art, my dear friends, unless we feel in it the longing to experience the Spiritual—though it be but manifested, to begin with, in a world of beautiful semblance. Our creative fancy, whereby we develop all artistic things, is at bottom nothing else than the power of clairvoyance in an earthly form. We are tempted to say:—As sound dwells on earth in the element of air, so it is with the nature of the soul itself. That which is truly spiritual in the pre-earthly life has its earthly dwelling in the image of the spiritual. For when man speaks, he makes use of his whole body. The consonant nature becomes in him the plastic sculpture of the human frame, and the Soul makes use of the current of the breath which does not enter into solid form, to play upon this plastic instrument of music and now, in a twofold way we can turn once more to the Divine, what we thus are as human beings speaking upon earth.

Take the consonantal human frame. Suppose we loosen it as it were from the solid form wherein the earthly forces—gravity and the like—or the chemical forces in the foodstuffs have enchained it. Suppose we liberate the consonant nature that permeates the human being for so we may now describe it. When we place a lung on the dissection table we find chemical substances in it, which we can investigate by chemical methods. But this is not the lung. What is the lung? It is a consonant, spoken forth out of the Cosmos, which has taken plastic form. The heart, if we lay it on the dissection table, consists of cells which we can investigate chemically and find the substances composing it. But this is not the heart. The heart again is a consonant—another consonant, spoken forth out of the Cosmos. And if we conceive the whole twelve consonants, cosmically spoken and resounding forth, we have in all essentials the human bodily frame.

Thus as we look to the consonants, if we have the necessary clairvoyant power of imagination to see them in their real connection, there arises before us the human body in its plastic shape. If then we take the consonants out of the human being, we have the Art of Sculpture. If on the other hand we take the breath, which the soul uses to play upon the bodily instrument in song—if we take the vowel nature out of the human being, there arises the musical art, the Art of Song.

Once more:—Take the Consonant-nature out of the human being, and there arises Form, which you must mould in plastic art. Take the Vowel-nature out of the human being, and there arises Song—Music, which you must sing. Man as he stands before us here on earth proceeds out of the two Cosmic Arts—a Cosmic Art of Sculpture from the one side, and a cosmic Art of Song or Music from the other. Two kinds of spiritual Beings join their activity together. The one provides the instrument, the other plays upon it; the one forms and moulds the instrument, the other plays upon it.

Can we wonder that in olden time, when things like these were felt, it was said of the greatest of all artists, Orpheus, that his command over the soul was such that he was able, not only to use the ready-moulded human body as an instrument, but to cast even amorphous matter into plastic forms—forms which correspond to the notes of his music.

My dear friends! You will understand that when we describe such things as these we must depart a little in our use of words from what is usual in this prosaic age. Nevertheless what I have said is not intended in a figurative or symbolic but in a most real sense. These things are indeed such as I have described them, albeit to describe them we must sometimes bring our language into greater flow and movement than is customary in its use to-day.

• 1. Song-Recital by Frau Werbeck-Svärdstrom and her sisters.

One of the great men whose busts stand before you here, the German philosopher Hegel, summarized his conviction of the essence of human development in the words: this development is a progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom. And with this he wanted to imply that the development of humanity is not a repetition, a succession of the same facts, the same events, but a constant and continuous progress; that from epoch to epoch humanity rises to ever higher and higher levels.

Those who look at human evolution from a spiritual point of view will find a deep truth in Hegel's saying. This is not to say that there are not also temporary epochs of decline within the ascending course of human development; but it means that the great development of our race is viewed from a small point of view if one does not see the continuing ascent on a large scale in the face of temporary epochs of decline. Only those who are unable to see into the depths of the process of development have the idea, which is so frequently encountered today, when we look further back in time or even look ahead into the future, as if everything, man himself in his form or the natural kingdoms around him, were still roughly similar to what they are today. Even when we speak of development, the spirit, which lives only on the physical plane, usually has no conception of the tremendous differences that exist between the individual epochs of the human spirit and advancing culture. It often seems grotesque to the spirit when the great differences between the nature kingdoms in the past epochs are described to it or when one prophetically points to the future epochs.

Only when we observe the differentiated development of humanity does it present us with the configuration of the higher worlds on the physical plane. Only he recognizes his epoch who knows where he stands in the development of humanity. We have to look around a little to see where we stand – which level our present human development corresponds to. What is called occult wisdom teaches us that on a descending path of development, what we call the spirit in the German language is not the other parts of the human being. It is the spirit that has descended the furthest onto the physical plane in our epoch. Since the last third of the 19th century, it has been, as it were, on the way up again, and anyone who recognizes the configuration can only express it by saying that within this epoch the deepest entanglement of spirit with matter has been the characteristic; now it is striving to ascend again. And all who strive spiritually strive to escape from this entanglement.

For a long time such an important crossroads of human development has been in preparation. If one examines occultly how long this has been in preparation for what emerged as an important turning point in the spiritual development of humanity in the 19th century, one comes back to the time when the human spirit descended from those insights that were still more or less born of the astral plane, and one comes to a special mission in the evolution of humanity for the last four to five centuries. We can pinpoint the most important point at which human evolution moved down from the astral to the physical plane and spiritual knowledge passed into the material realm as the time when the old Ptolemaic worldview, which is not nonsense but a projection of astral knowledge onto the physical plane, was brought down to the physical plane by Copernicus. This realization then penetrated more and more into the later stages of development, until in the 19th century it was taken even lower, when people even wanted to grasp the spirit materially. Those who understand the theosophical movement in the right sense do not criticize what has brought humanity so low. That would not be an active theosophical life. The active theosophical life rather asks: How do we get out of the bonds of the physical plan? — and it tries to recognize what purpose this descent into the physical plan served.

We look back to Egyptian wisdom, to the wonderful Chaldean-Babylonian wisdom and ask ourselves: What is the difference between what the Egyptian priest, the servant of Hermes, saw when he looked up at the starry sky, or what the Chaldean astronomer saw in the stars, and what today's science sees? One does not get a proper idea of what was going on in those wise men when they looked up at the vault of heaven through materialistic science, but one does get it through an analogy when one looks at a human being.

We do not look at a person just by looking at the physiognomy of his face. When we see the tears rolling down, we do not just observe how they move downward under the force of gravity – in fact, if an angel were to come from heaven today, we would first calculate its rate of fall – no, through the rolling tears we see the suffering and pain of his soul. And when he smiles, we see in his smiling countenance what lives in his mind as joy. We know that original elementary sensations take place in man.

This seeing through from the material to the spiritual-soul content of the soul is what the Hermes servants meant when they said: “Down below, everything is like up above!” No material thing that is not the outer expression of a spiritual-soul! Just as ice is only water in a different form, so all matter is only spirit in a different form. If someone came and showed us a piece of ice and we said, “This is condensed water,” but he denied it, we would say to him, “You are naive, you are wrong, this ice is only condensed water. It is just something else, new, when we look at the form. So matter is just the transformed, condensed spirit. But it is not enough just to know that; we must absorb all knowledge into our soul. And spiritual life demands that everything that lives in our soul comes into activity; it is not enough what lives in our soul as ordinary thoughts, feelings, and will impulses. But if we awaken an inner life in us, then we can feel how the Egyptian Hermes servant or the Chaldean astronomer looked up at the starry sky: Mars, Venus, the Moon or Mercury, all were only the expression of the spirit living in the star. In times of spiritual life, one did not describe what today's astronomer understands by the stars, but by the name Mercury, for example, the old wise man, who lived in the spiritual life, imagined the soul, the spirit that lives through Mercury, just as the soul lives in your body. And so he taught everyone who listened to his word. Now imagine vividly how a person looks out into space and sees the stars. It is not an abstract but an intimate spiritual life that connects him to the world. It is spirit that he saw, and in the spiritual realm he himself floated and felt that he was a part of the world, just as a finger is only a part of my hand. If you separate his being from the universal spirituality, it dies and no longer exists, like the finger if you cut it off. Compare this with what today's astronomer sees. For him, physical globes fly around. He lacks the living feeling [for their spiritual essence]. But this living feeling is not so easy to achieve. Perhaps he is a spiritualist in theory; but it is more difficult to be a spiritualist of the whole soul, of the whole life, than to be a spiritualist in mere theoretical terms. Now man lives in a purely physical environment; he no longer finds the living harmony between the divine and the physical. But it is right and of great importance that it came to this.

Let us compare the achievements of people on the physical plane with the high spiritual wisdom of the priests. In ancient times, primitive culture prevailed. When we see the endless labor and effort that has gone into making every single object around us a spiritual creature of the last four centuries, let us not forget that this is thanks to the human spirit of the last centuries. But even that could not be there if the spirit had not descended to the physical plane. Thus, each epoch has its task. And because this was particularly the case for the last epoch of world history, those sources from which spiritual life always flows had to send the spirit down to the last epoch of humanity, to those who wanted to receive it in devotional spiritual work.

If we go back four or five centuries before the descent [of the spirit on the physical plane], and then another two centuries for the preparation, we find a current that, despite the descent, has ensured that the spirit can find its way back; to give the spirit, which necessarily had to descend to the physical plane, means to rise again. This current is called the Rosicrucian current. And just as in ancient times people had to be led up to the eternal, so it is that today man must seek the way to the modern, to the Rosicrucian initiation. It is not to be asserted here that there are different truths in the course of human development. Truth is one, like the sun that illuminates the whole of the physical orbit of the earth; but the paths to truth are different. Imagine, for a moment, comparing the point of view you would have attained with the summit of a mountain; at the top, one would have an unobstructed view in all directions, however one came up. But would you not call it foolish if someone were standing down below on the left side of the mountain and could find a way up on the left side of the mountain, and then would go around the mountain to find a way up on the other side that is not on the side where he is standing? So it is with the evolution of humanity. The starting points of the civilizations are like the paths on the mountain; the different peoples have to move up the different paths. The truth - spiritual realization - is one and the same. Only those who believe that the same thing is repeated in different races can claim that the paths of initiation were the same. But just as the human body that is born fifteen centuries from now is different from the human body that is born today, so must the treatment for the student who wants to go up the path be different. And in certain periods, there must be a renewal of methods, an adaptation to the peoples - to what man has become - even if the structural conditions elude the ordinary eye. But occult physiology and anatomy know that the structural conditions of the physical brain had to change if man was to conquer the physical plane. The physical structures are only the lower facts of what is spiritual above. And so today there is a Rose Cross initiation.

Among the various types of initiation, we need only mention the three most prominent ones. People know what is meant when the Yoga path, the Christian Gnostic path and the Rosicrucian path are mentioned. You all know the Yoga path from literature. The Christian-Gnostic path is the one taught in Christian esotericism - in the early days when Christianity was spreading - by Dionysius Arcopagita. Scholarship speaks of him as a pseudo-Dionysius, who is said to have lived in the 6th century and written all the great books. Christian tradition dates this back to the time of the Apostle Paul. Scholarship only asks: When were these scrolls written?, but Christian esotericism knows that this Dionysius Areopagita was a disciple of the Apostle Paul and was specially commissioned by his master to found the esoteric school of Christianity. For countless people, this Christian esotericism has become truth. Today it is hard to imagine the sources from which some of the words of a Christian teacher came to us. This source was the Christian Initiation. To the materialistically-minded, this Christian Initiation appears to be a figment of the imagination. But for people at that time, it was direct and immediate life. We distinguish seven stages in it, which everyone who wanted to achieve the Christian Initiation had to go through. I will only mention the seven names for them:

the washing of the feet
the scourging
the crowning with thorns
the crucifixion
the mystical death
the burial and resurrection
the ascension of the soul.

These are the seven true stages that had to be gone through in the Lehtrstätten, where the Christian initiation was at home. At least two of these stations, the first and the fourth, I will characterize for you to understand.

When the Christian disciple had reached the point where what is called morality in ordinary life had been purified and raised to a higher level, when one could take it for granted that he would no longer stray from this higher morality, then he was received by his master of the Christian initiation, and he should now experience something within himself that I can only describe to you in the form of a dialogue, although it never took place in a dialogue.

After the student had been disciplined in this way, he was told by the teacher:

Take a look at the plant world. It grows out of the mineral kingdom. If it were not for the mineral kingdom, the plant could not flourish, even though it is at a higher level. If the plant could think, it would have to say: You may be lower in the hierarchy of the natural kingdoms than I am, but I could not be without you. In humility I bow down before you!” And then the disciple was led to recognize this humility in all the kingdoms of nature. The animal would have to bow down humbly to the plant and man in turn to the animal and say: Without you I could not be! And man, who stands on a higher level, would have to bow down in humility before those who are not yet so far; for no one can stand higher without the others. When man understands this ladder, he looks down with humility on those below. In this way the disciple learned to understand what it means in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John that the Highest, although the twelve are lower than He, bows down in humility before them and washes their feet. Those who have been educated in this way [to higher morals] in the sense of esoteric Christianity, only then understand the inner meaning of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John is a book of initiation about the methods of initiation, the apocalypse about the content of initiation.

When the student had progressed so far that this humility had become second nature to him, the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John became truth for his soul. Then the teacher could lead him to experience very specific feelings. The student could feel and recognize that he now had the opportunity to ascend to a higher level. He felt - and this was a common feeling of all who had received the Christian initiation - as if his feet were standing in the water, as if the waters of the spirit were lapping at him. And the inner symptom that arose as an image each time was that the disciple, when he was ready, had the image before him, from within, through an inner power, which is presented in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is not just an external-historical, but a spiritual image that anyone can have: on the astral plane, he sees the image of the washing of the feet spread out before him.

Just to make ourselves understood, I will also mention the fourth stage - the crucifixion. When the third stage was over, it was made clear to the disciple that he no longer had to count his body as part of himself. He had to feel his body as an object, as something outside of himself. The ordinary person thinks that his body is his ego. But anyone who wants to reach the fourth stage of Christian initiation must be able to make his body no more precious to him than any chair or table around him. The ordinary person says: I enter through the door. But it is natural for the initiate to say: I carry my body to the door. Then two more symptoms arise: the arbitrary production of the so-called blood sample is the symptomatic expression of the fourth stage of initiation. Exactly at the points of his body called the stigmata, he is able to produce redness of the skin through the inner power of his spirituality. The stigmata appear on the palms of the hands, on the feet and on the right side of the chest. This is accompanied by the inner symptom that the disciple on the astral plane sees himself as on the cross.

One does not speak of the dangers of this development. What matters is the degree of inner development, and then one no longer speaks of dangers in it. But anyone who wants to do this without the advice of a teacher is certainly in danger. But he who patiently and humbly surrenders himself to the leadership will, only by undergoing his martyrdom, be all the more a useful member of human evolution. However, he should not take this upon himself until he feels the obligation within.

Christian initiation was also the foundation and source of the outer Christian life. This Christian initiation had to be passed over into the somewhat different form of the Rose Cross initiation about two hundred years before the descent of the Spirit upon the material plane.

The Rose Cross initiation is not an un-Christian one. It is a further development of the Christian initiation. But the one who receives it does not step out of the physical environment, as the purely Christian initiation demands - at least for a time. Whoever wants to live as a worthy member of human evolution today must take part in the work on the physical plane. It would be sinful to withdraw from the physical world. We must only understand it and be equal to it. If the Christian initiation had retained its earlier form, man would have risen high spiritually and soul-wise, but would have remained weak on the physical plane. Think of the conquest of the physical plane, of the great inventions, the art of printing and so on. What is flooding in from the other planes... [gap in the transcript]. For this, a completely different inner configuration is required. This requires the ability to develop other strong impulses within oneself in order to channel what comes from material development in the right way. The Rose Cross initiation is one that enables people to use all the means of modern culture. It teaches the spirit to grasp in matter, in that man recognizes the connection of even the most material with the spiritual, so that he can let the spiritual flow out into the material.

The Rose Cross initiation is born out of the necessity of the time. It also has seven levels.

The first is what is broadly called study; the second, the acquisition of imaginative knowledge; the third, the acquisition of occult writing; the fourth, the production of the philosopher's stone - that is the technical word for it -; the fifth, the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm; the sixth, the absorption in the macrocosm; the seventh, beatitude. You must not imagine that each pupil has to pass through these stages in succession, so to speak; but the teacher must select from each chapter that which is suitable for each pupil according to his individuality. First each pupil must study, but then the material must often be organized in quite different ways. And now we will discuss it in detail.

Study in the sense of the Rosicrucians is not what is called study in ordinary life. In the sense of the Rosicrucians it is what should really be called: living in pure thought. What this means is not at all easy to grasp at the outset. Hegel, on the other hand, spent his whole life trying to teach the Germans what it means to live in pure thought. And ten years after his death, what Hegel contributed to the Germans' deepening had been completely forgotten. Today we have not yet reached the point where Hegel would be understood again. And yet his works would be a good means of showing what it means to live in pure, sensuality-free thought. The more recent philosophers, for example Eduard von Hartmann, deny altogether that we can form a thought that is not influenced by sensuality. They swore that nothing is in the intellect that was not in the senses. What is not of the senses is not real. If these words were true, there would be no mathematics. The Gnostics called the life of the spirit a “mathesis,” not because they imagined it to be mathematics, but because on the higher planes there is pure thinking and knowing, as there is in mathematics, in terms of forms, a thinking free of sensuality. This pure thinking does not proceed from objects, but flows from thought to thought. For those who want to immerse themselves in a completely sensuality-free thinking, I tried to write a book like my “Philosophy of Freedom”. It is not a personal work. It has come into being like an organism: it is a thought organism, and a guide to what is called study in the Rosicrucian sense. Certainly, many do not go through something like that. For most people who cannot undergo something like this, the simple Theosophical teaching is enough. It is sensual thought; no one can hear or see it. If you study Theosophy, it corresponds to the first stage of the Rosicrucian training. Theosophy is itself Rosicrucian study if you pursue it in the right way. There is no need to lose yourself in philosophical heights. The humblest soul can immerse itself in it.

Imaginative knowledge is the second step in the Rose Cross initiation. It is achieved when a person learns to transform thought into image. This is a real fact. A man who knew about Rosicrucianism once uttered the words, “All that is transitory is but a parable!” Then one comes away from the physical plane. I would like to show you how this can be achieved by means of two examples. Take the three Logoi. Everything that has been mentioned so far as a study relates solely and exclusively to the physical plane. Only imaginative knowledge lifts us higher. If you describe the three logos schematically, if you speak of projections, then one can form an idea for the physical mind, even if you say that the second logo vibrates differently from the first. But all this is only for the consciousness of the mind. We cannot take with us to the higher planes anything that relates to three-dimensional space, but only that which is not conceived spatially. A “tone or color quality is indeed built into the space, but it is not spatial. The astral space is a flowing sea of color and light. There you will encounter on the astral plane what you have perceived here as a color quality and a tone quality. What is physical here in color and tone, you lift up to the higher planes; only we must purify and cleanse it in order to lift it up. Therefore, the teacher says: Take away the sensual quality for everything you want to see directly; imagine how a color stands out. Then that is the method for developing the imagination. And anyone who wants to achieve this level confronts the outside world in such a way that these isolated images present themselves in such a way that when one speaks, for example, of the three Logoi, one no longer perceives them as quantity but as quality. Then he feels the third Logos as something that resounds through the world – he feels it as sound; the second, insofar as it appears as an astral projection, as flooding light; and the first Logos as the aroma of the world, as an aroma flying through the world, purified to the most perfect purity. This is how the Rosicrucians felt everywhere. These are images, imaginations, not descriptions, for these come from the physical plane.

Another image, which presents us with a more mundane phenomenon, has been preserved in a wonderful myth, the myth of the Holy Grail. This is also an experience for the Rosicrucian disciple, which he perceives as a real fact of his inner soul life. The Master says to the disciple: “Take a look at the plant; it lives with the root in the ground, sends the stem upwards and has its calyx - that which produces a plant again - turned towards the sun. Even the more recent materialistic scholarship has again pointed out that if we compare the plant with the human being, we must compare the root with the head. The plant is, as it were, a human being turned upside down. Evolution consists in the image being reversed: what the plant opens up chastely before the world, is directed downwards in the human being. What the root is in the plant, striving towards the center of the earth, is directed upwards in the human being. In the human being, the head reaches out into the space of the sun. Between the two, on the inside, is the animal world, whose backbone is directed horizontally. Now the pupil was told: Imagine the plant, the animal and the human being and you have the world cross. The cross was the image of the evolution of the world beings up to the human being. The plant only produces when it is touched by the sunbeam, which was called the “holy lance of love”. When it is touched by this, it fulfills its task. Now imagine the human being with the Kama that has seized him; the lower organs must be purified and cleansed and must appear again at a higher level, so that in the course of evolution this chalice opens. When man has transformed himself, when he has purified this chalice, which the plant has at a primitive level, then he will have it in his hand again, that he will be touched by the holy lance of love – then he will have the purification of man in his hand – not only astral or etheric, but even physical. Thus evolution is imaginatively presented. Those who live in this way will have the astral plane revealed to them.

The third is the attainment of occult writing. It is not a writing like our present-day abstract writing. One appropriates the harmony of the qualities. The teacher says to the disciple: “If you ascend higher, until you attain knowledge of occult writing, you will hear what was called the harmony of the spheres in the Pythagorean school. This is a reality for the initiate, not a mere allegory. What today's science has to offer when it speaks of number systems is often as far removed from the harmony of the spheres as if one wanted to describe a symphony as a wave motion in the air. The occult disciple learns to hear the sounds in the spiritual world. Goethe also knew about this when he said: “The sun resounds in the ancient manner in the brother spheres of song.” And in another place: “The new day is born sounding for spiritual ears.” What happens, what is audible to spiritual, not physical ears, are the events of the spiritual plan, are the harmonies of the spheres. And the signs of occult writing are real cosmic forces, and he who knows them feels the stream of cosmic forces in his organism down to the physical organism. I will give you only one example: four numbers. When I tell you, they are somewhat abstract; but if you were to perceive the music spiritually, you would perceive the relationship of the four lower human limbs. These numbers are: 1, 3, 7, 12. This is how the four lower limbs of human nature sound together harmoniously in the spiritual world. This is the secret of Pythagorean number theory: that it can be transformed into spiritual music.

The fourth is the creation of the philosopher's stone. Modern scholarship has turned it into a fairy tale. But in a way it is right, because if it were really as science imagines it, it would be a childish thing. But it is the highest goal to which man aspires. At the end of the eighteenth century, some of the Rosicrucian secrets were revealed. We find something there that we could say: People have heard something ringing there. We find a remarkable passage in a German newspaper! It says about the philosopher's stone: It exists. If you can recognize it in its full value, you possess the secret of immortality. Actually, the vast majority of people know it. Many have it in their hands every day. The man who wrote this had no idea what it was about, but he had received a message that contained something true. We need to consider nothing other than the process that maintains human beings cosmically in this present epoch: the breathing process. We breathe in and out. We breathe in the oxygen of the air and give back to the surrounding world the carbonic acid, a poisonous gas in which we could not live. The plant absorbs it continually, retains the coal from the carbonic acid and builds up its own body from it. But it gives the oxygen back to animals and humans. Thus, plant, animal and human form a whole, as far as we look at the breathing process. Today, humans need plants. The corpse of the plant as black coal, when you dig it out of the earth, or as a transparent diamond, is something we have within us; but we cannot use it. We have to give it to the plants as air for life. The plant builds its body out of carbonic acid itself. It can do something that man cannot yet do today, but will be able to do later. Imagine this process: the plant taking in carbonic acid and emitting oxygen – transferred to the inside of the human being... [gap in the text] Thus, by merging with the plant world and taking it into human nature, we build up within ourselves a pure, chaste body, as the plant does today. Man is on the way to becoming a being who can consciously carry this out; and then he will be able to develop within himself the chalice of the Holy Grail. The breathing process is not a closed one; it is in the process of becoming more perfect and of performing within man that which today takes place outside of man, and of transforming the human substance, which is permeated by Kama, into pure, chaste substance. This is real alchemy. Then man will have mastered alchemy, by means of which he will also learn to transform the cosmos. The symbol for this is the Holy Grail. We must not reject the lofty ideal because it is still millions of years away from us, but must be attained according to the principle: constant dripping wears away the stone. Thus, he who rhythmizes the breathing process will gradually achieve his goal. The philosopher's stone is coal, it is the substance for building the human body in the future. This process of transformation is alchemy in the Rosicrucian sense. Of course, the intimate instructions are given only from teacher to student.

The fifth, the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm, is the learning of the correspondence of what we have within ourselves with the outer macrocosm. Paracelsus once said: “Let us look at the animals, plants and minerals - everything is in some way also in the human body. Man is like a confluence of everything that is also in nature outside. Nature is, as it were, the dismembered human being. Nature is like the letters, but the human being is the word that is composed of these letters. When this realization dawns on the consciousness, the student sees how the eye was formed from the light. The eye is formed by the light. Our organism emerged from another that did not yet have eyes; but the light brought forth the eye. This state of consciousness has long since ceased to exist. Man today knows nothing more about it, but the seer on the astral plane sees it. There you get to know again what is weaving within the cosmos as in your own nature. Then you get to know the cosmos through your individual limbs: from the eye the light, from the ears the sound, and the other as it can only be given from the teacher to the disciple.

When a person has come so far that he has learned the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, then he can ascend to the sixth: to merging with the macrocosm. Then you have a relationship of friendship with every thing in nature. There is then something like a loving relationship with every being in nature, something like what remains in the love between man and woman. The sunflower appears different, the violet different, the lion and the tiger different, this and that different. The whole cosmos appears as differentiated as love between man and woman. Our inner being flows from the inside out, and this is connected with a transformation of the heart: the etheric and astral bodies transform the heart so that it becomes an arbitrary muscle. Here, the occult teaching, if it perfects itself even more, will spread light. Today, the heart is a crux for physiologists. It is an involuntary muscle, but in terms of its striation it is an arbitrary muscle; for it is transversely striated. All voluntary muscles are transversely striated, while the involuntary muscles are longitudinally striated. The heart is transversely striated because it is on the way to becoming an arbitrary muscle. Today it is endowed with the potential to become one. If in the future man is able to create from the spirituality of the cosmos, he will be able to move the heart as he is able to move the hand today. And so I could give you a hundred and a hundred examples where occult science sheds light on what physical science cannot unravel.

When man gradually attains this personal, intimate relationship with the whole of his environment, when he no longer has to use the physical powers of the brain, then, the teacher says, he can only understand what the Rosicrucian calls divinity, where the independence of man is preserved, but the highest is felt.

I have only been able to sketch out a few ideas today; but the Rosicrucian training has much to give here. Much can also be objected to; one can point out the dangers that can arise in the process. Only one thing can be pointed out: if a person does not strive towards the ideal out of egoism, but feels integrated, if he does not feel the urge for development as a desire but as a duty, if he wants to be a servant of evolution, if he purifies everything that needs to be purified, then there is no danger at all. And the Rosicrucian training in particular will also bring about a moral purification. The disciple must have the intention of merging his soul completely in the pure thought, for the pure thought is a mighty moral purification. Then he is prepared for the six steps.

All striving for occult development must proceed under the principle of conquest, which Goethe also expressed in one place. Only when we have conquered ourselves may we develop higher. This must become our fundamental ideal, for conquest is the fundamental ideal of the Rosicrucians:

From the fetters that bind all beings,
The man who overcomes himself is free!

Yesterday I spoke to you about initiation in the sense of the Rosicrucian spiritual world current, about the stages of knowledge, of feeling, of will impulses, of activities that a person has to undergo if they want to move up the path of knowledge and towards higher levels of humanity. Today let us try to deal with a chapter of this Rosicrucian theosophy ourselves. Not that this Rosicrucian wisdom is anything but the common spiritual wisdom of all peoples and times, as must be emphasized again and again. It is only adapted to our modern way of thinking, to the modern temporal need. It is born out of the realization that our epoch needs a special way of speaking in order to proclaim the eternal truths of all times, so that they can live themselves into the very configuration of today's humanity in Europe and America.

It is perhaps a very distant chapter that is chosen here, yet it is one of the most essential. For nothing shows us man's origin and goal as much as the realization of this chapter and at the same time points us to the forces that we are to unfold in ourselves in order to become co-workers in the service of human evolution. We cannot look at the great evolution of the cosmos any other way than by starting with the human being and his or her essence. And I will say nothing other than what is a common theosophical and Rosicrucian wisdom, what anyone would say who speaks from these sources. There is no contradiction. Many already know what I would like to say here again.

We distinguish seven members of human nature. This morning we heard that one could also take another number as a basis: three times three. It does not matter that I will combine the three middle members into one name today, and if you summarize these three members under what I will call the fourth today, then the explanations will be completely consistent.

We divide the human being in such a way that we say that the human being first has his physical body; it is what hands can touch and eyes can see, what the human being has in common with all of nature and what is subject to physical and chemical laws. The second is the so-called etheric or life body. It is that which the chemical and physical forces and substances call to life and which leaves the connection of physical and chemical substances in death. Occultism says: The human physical body is such a combination of substances and forces that it cannot exist as a physical body by itself; only by having an etheric body inserted into it and as long as it is inserted, it is protected from the disintegration of physical substances and forces. In the moment when the etheric body leaves the physical forces, death occurs, the physical body is a corpse. Therefore, it is also said that the etheric body is what protects us from death at every moment. In every moment, there is a great struggle in the etheric body against that which would otherwise cause our chemical substances to disintegrate. The third link is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, feelings and emotions, which we call the astral body. It is the link of the human being that man has in common with animals, just as he has the ether body in common with the plant and animal world and the mineral body with the whole outer world. The name astral body has been in use since the earliest times. There is no more appropriate name for this part of the human being than astral body. And there is perhaps no better definition of why this body is called the astral body than the one given by the great theosophist Paracelsus. Just as the etheric body leaves the physical body at death, so the astral body leaves the etheric body some time after death. But the astral body also leaves the physical and etheric bodies every night. Then it is outside of us. Where is it then?

Paracelsus rightly asks: Where is it, and what does it do during the night? Does it rest, does it have a task? Yes, it has a task. Although those who do not have clairvoyant powers cannot see into the activity of the astral body during the night. But everyone feels the consequences of this activity. They all go to bed tired in the evening. The fatigue is an expression of disharmony in the composition of our physical and etheric bodies. It must arise if the astral body does not have the power to bring harmony into the other two, the physical and etheric bodies. And as man is today, such disharmony must necessarily arise during the waking hours of the day, were our physical and etheric bodies merely under the control of the astral body - how the forces are to be joined together - then there would always be harmony in our etheric and physical bodies. But as it is, not only does the astral body live in the physical body, but at the level of consciousness that humanity has reached on the Earth, the whole environment of physical, sensually perceptible objects has an effect on the human being. Impressions from the eye and ear and the other senses flow into it from the outside. During the waking hours, disharmony will inevitably arise in every person who has not yet reached a certain higher level of spiritual development. If this astral body could never dwell in any other place than in our physical and etheric bodies, it would itself become disordered. Then its power currents would not remain as they should be if a real etheric and physical body is to be formed. During the day, the inner harmony of the astral body is disturbed, and the expression of this disorder is fatigue. The moment you feel tired, the inner disharmony is there. Where is the astral body during the night?

Paracelsus rightly said: When the lines of force that connect it to the physical body during the day begin to loosen, it then comes into contact with the entire harmonious system of forces that flows through the starry sky. At the moment when a person falls asleep, he rests in the harmony of the spheres, and from there he brings the forces to balance what has been used during the day. Thus, the astral body rests during the night in the world of the stars; that is its true home. And when it returns, it brings with it the powers of the stars to help remove the substances that cause fatigue. That is why sleep is a good doctor, because order and harmony can then be restored when the astral body rests again for some time in the world that contains the laws for the starry sky, and these are the laws for the spiritual world in general. If a person does not sleep, their health will be undermined because the astral body has not rested in the starry world for a while. That is why the astral body has been given this name. In the past, names were not given that did not correspond to the essence of the matter. And before we correct occult names and designations, we must first think about the name, why it was given. Today, when a comet or a minor planet is discovered, one opens a mythology encyclopedia and gives the star a name. The principle of naming in spiritual times was to let the essence of the thing itself resonate in a name: it sounded in the name of the connection with the world.

In the fourth aspect of his being, man has something that makes him the crowning of earthly creation of planetary existence. Follow me for a short time in a subtle observation. In the whole range of the German language, there is a name - and in other languages it is similar - that is fundamentally different from all other names. Each of you can say “table” to the table, “picture” to the picture, and so on. But there is one name which we cannot use in the same sense, and that is the name I. None of them can say “I” to another. Each one is a “you” to every other, and you are a “you” to everyone else. If this name is to describe ourselves, no sound in the external world can embody it; it must resound from within ourselves. This has been felt at all times by those religions that had an impulse from the secret teaching. In the secret teaching, therefore, one says the name for the being, and in the Hebrew secret teaching, the unpronounceable name of God, the name of Yahweh, is nothing other than the name for the ego. In truth, the name of Yahweh is the name for that which begins to hold a monologue in the soul - to live in its self. It was felt that in those worldviews and religions that were built on spiritual foundations, one said: In the I, in the innermost part of the soul, God begins to speak. It is a beginning, but it must be made, and this I - this single central point - is what makes up the most essential distinguishing feature of man from all the beings that surround us on this planet. Sensible people have always felt this. Jean Paul tells us how, as a very young child, he stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and he knew exactly how he first felt: you are a self-being! And he adds that there is no possibility of error and that others have added something to this memory. Because at that time, says Jean Paul, I looked into the hidden holy of holies of my inner being; at that time I knew that I was immortal because I had found the connection with God.

If we now go outwards from the I, we come to the point where we can consider the mutual relationships of the human being. Human evolution consists in the I working on the three bodies, within which it appears like the core of a fruit in its shell. And how does this I work?

If we want to understand this, we must remember primitive peoples. Take a people who today stands at a lower level of culture. You see that this people is ruled by its feelings and instincts, by drives and passions, much like the animal: they devour each other. Now compare this savage with the members of a more highly developed culture, with a Francis of Assisi. What is the difference between the two forms of development?

If we want to answer this question, we must be aware that the human being – through the many incarnations through which he develops – does his work from his I: first on the astral body, then on the etheric body and then also on the physical body. This is human development: this emanation of the I into the three bodies. The savage follows all the instincts and passions that live in him. The cultured man says to himself, “I must not follow certain instincts”; he denies himself certain instincts and passions. The still higher idealist not only denies himself, but out of himself generates ideals that add something new to what the instincts of the astral body constitute at a primitive level of culture. Thus, in the clairvoyant view, we see the astral body as consisting of two parts: what was originally in it and then what the ego itself has made of it. If you look at a highly developed idealist, this part [it is drawn] is larger than in others due to the work of the ego, and in a person like Francis of Assisi you can see how little is left of what the person called his own when he embarked on his first incarnation. In Theosophy, this practically transformed part of the human astral body, over which man has gained control, is called the German word “Geistselbst”, which is otherwise referred to in Theosophical literature as “Manas”; it is a transformed part of the astral body.

But the human being also works on his etheric body from his I. What does it mean to work on the etheric body? Let us make this clear with an example. You can do this in your own development. Remember what you knew as a seven-year-old child in terms of concepts and ideas, and what you know today, what you have learned and changed in your imaginative life. You will find a great deal. But now compare what you have learned with what has changed in other things that are also in you, in temperament, memory, certain basic characteristics of human nature. If you were hot-tempered as an eight-year-old child, this hot temper will still show through at times. If your temperament was melancholy, then perhaps this coloring will remain throughout your life. So that we can say comparatively: what a person actually learns moves forward like the minute hand of a clock; but what a person's basic inclinations are, that moves forward more slowly, like the hour hand. And as slowly as the hour hand of a clock, the etheric body transforms. The etheric body is denser than the astral body; therefore, the work of the ego on the etheric body is essentially more difficult than the work on the astral body. And only when the ego not only works on its intellectual ideas but begins to transform its temperament, then this is accompanied by a transformation of its etheric body. For many, this is only possible during the transition from one incarnation to another. But that is precisely the essence of occult training: everything you can learn is only preparation for occult training, and you have done more if you have tried to get rid of any basic mood, for example, if you have transformed your melancholy temperament into a harmonious one. The moment we begin to change not only our feelings and impulses but our fundamental nature, we begin to work on the etheric body. The part of the human etheric body that has been reshaped by the ego in this way is in turn a new link in human nature. Today, very few people can consciously bring about this transformation of the etheric body, but only those who are in occult training. For example, one of the laws of the Pythagorean school was that the astral body must first be completely purified before work on the etheric body could begin. But one must distinguish between conscious and unconscious schooling of the etheric body. The part that is permeated by the work of the ego is called the “life spirit” in the German language; it is the same in its fundamental essence as what is called “buddhi” in theosophical literature.

The third and most significant thing is when the human being not only begins to become master over the forces of his etheric body, but when he begins to work down into the physical body. It might seem as though the work of the I on the physical body is the basest; but it is in fact the highest. And the work on the physical body is more difficult than the work on the etheric body. When a person consciously begins to work on mastering the forces that work in the physical body through the I, then something else occurs to him. What works in the physical body are the same forces that work in the cosmos. When a person learns to control the forces of his blood and his breathing, he learns the magic of the cosmos. Then what he can do flows out of his physical body and into the universe, and that is a real, true work that can only begin when a person has reached a certain level of work on the etheric body. And because we begin with the regulation of our neighbor, with the regulation of breathing, the name breathing is also taken from 'Atma'. The more a person transforms in his inner physical nature, the more there is of the 'spirit man', of 'Atma'; there is a part of spirit matter in him that has been transformed.

This is not an ascetic escape from the physical world; rather, we have the task of entering the physical world in order to transform it into a spiritual one. That is the great law of redemption. This physical body is a part of the spiritual body that has become what it has become so that we could reach our present stage of development. We now have the task of spiritualizing this physical body again, of redeeming it. This principle lies behind the word redemption. There you have the mutual relationship of the seven members of human nature, as one must have them if one wants to utilize them in practical theosophical work.

Now let us consider the evolution of man. A materialist, who, being acquainted only with the physical body, has only an abstract idea of the evolution of man. But he who realizes how complicated man is, also sees how complicated the evolution of man is. Which of these four members is the oldest and most perfect? Some may be surprised to hear that the oldest and most perfect link in the human being is the physical one; it is the one that took the longest time to develop. The etheric body is younger, and the astral body is even younger. The baby is the I. It is only unfair to call the physical body an imperfect part of the human being. Just consider, for example, the structure of the thigh bone: a wonderful work of art. The beams are laid with such wisdom that no human engineering could achieve it, and they are laid in such a way that the upper body is supported with the least expenditure of energy. Let us now move from this limb to the construction of the human heart. Anyone who delves into what our physiologists teach us about the heart and also about the other organs knows that these limbs are so wisely constructed that no human wisdom can even penetrate these physical forms. The physical body would be good for all people. But now let us look at the astral body, which it does throughout life. Through the activity of its astral body, man continually introduces heart poisons to the physical body, for example to the heart; but the heart is so wisely constructed that it can withstand the attacks of the astral body for quite some time. Only in the future will the astral body be found just as wise as the physical body is today. The physical body is the oldest part of the human nature, which required the longest time to evolve. The parts of the human nature are, however, connected with the whole environment. Just as a single finger can only exist if it is a part of the whole hand, so man is only conceivable in connection with the whole cosmos. If you lift him a few miles above the earth, then he will experience the same fate as the finger if you cut it off. And just because man can walk around on the earth, this dependence is not admitted.

Look back at times long past! And when you look ahead to future times, you see that the shape of its limbs is constantly changing. But they can only change if everything around the person changes. Just because man, despite his advanced science, looks back over such a short span of time, he believes that things have always been as they are. But anyone who looks further knows that our planet must change from form to form if we ourselves want to change. But it is not enough just for the changes that the earth itself is undergoing to happen, but in a certain respect man was already there before the earth could be called “earth” in the cosmos. As man progresses in the cosmos, so do the planets or the beings that inhabit them. Our planet is the reincarnation of another planetary state, and we can trace three preceding incarnations of our Earth and look forward to three subsequent ones. What we call planetary evolution is nothing more than an analogy to our human evolution. The three preceding planetary states through which our Earth had to pass are called in Rosicrucian terms Saturn, Sun, Moon, so that we have to imagine: the Earth was, before it became Earth, Moon, and before it became Moon, it was Sun, and before the Sun it was Saturn; and the later states, which we are looking at, are called Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. What does it mean that the Earth has passed through these states?

We are today in the fourth incarnation of our own planet, and this is intimately connected with human evolution. On the first planetary form - that is, on Saturn - the first structures of the human physical body were already present. At that time, however, the human physical body was such during the entire Saturn development that no independent etheric body was yet incorporated into it. Through the stages of the sun and moon, down to the stage of the earth, this physical body became more and more perfect, so that we can say: the physical human body today stands on the fourth stage of its development, it stands today at the point of the earth's development. It was only in the second incarnation of our earth that an independent ether body was incorporated into this physical body. The physical body became more perfect, as it were, through the working of an etheric body within it. Then the third reincarnation of the earth — the moon — led to the incorporation of the astral body into the two others, so that the inhabitant of the moon, the ancestor of today's earth man, consisted of three bodies — the physical, the etheric and the astral body. And the meaning of evolution on Earth is this: to integrate the I into these three members, the worker, who then begins to transform what has come to him from the past. Thus we see that the physical body is older than the others, and the I is only at the first stage of its development. One can even know from the configuration of the physical body what comes from the state of Saturn in us. The highest part of our physical body is the sensory organs, and the germ of our sensory organs was laid on Saturn. And so limb by limb was built up, becoming more and more perfect in stages with the other limbs of human nature.

What is called Saturn and Sun here is not the present-day Sun and Saturn, but rather denotes phases of development. Nevertheless, what our Earth has gone through in its development is related to present-day Saturn. Present-day Saturn is to the Earth as a boy is to an old man. The same conditions that Saturn is going through today are the same conditions that our Earth went through in the past. This is why in real occultism we do not speak of Saturn, the Sun and so on, but of a Saturn, a Sun and so on. Our Earth is an older Saturn.

Now we must still be clear about the meaning of this whole development. If we look back to that Saturn development, where man was still without etheric body, astral body and I - insofar as they were independent beings -, we get the best difference of those ancient conditions from today's by referring to the “consciousness”. A state of consciousness is connected with every state of development. There are seven states of consciousness. The present human being is in the fourth; no being can have this state that cannot say “I” to itself. Therefore, the human being developed the form of consciousness that he now has only on earth. The purpose of evolution on Earth is to develop the waking consciousness. On the earlier planetary conditions, there were only imperfect states of consciousness for humans. On Saturn, the human ancestor in his primitive form had a consciousness like that of minerals, or rather: the human physical ancestor is that consciousness. We can hardly find words for it easily; we can only hint at it. This consciousness is a very, very dim, deep trance-like, sleepy consciousness, dull and dusky, but which in a way had an advantage: it encompasses a much larger scope, is much more universal; a mineral consciousness knows of the whole solar system.

Then this consciousness was narrowed down to that of the plant. But it is now a somewhat brighter consciousness than that of the mineral. Man was in this consciousness when the earth was in the sun. The third form of consciousness is pictorial consciousness, also called primary psychic consciousness. It differs from the present one in that it works in images, but in such a way that it conveys the psychic of the other. Imagine a being - and the human ancestor on the moon was like that - that does not yet have sensory consciousness and can cover objects with colors when it wakes up: you have a last remnant of such consciousness in the dream world. The dream world is not the astral consciousness. The present dream consciousness is to the moon consciousness what some atrophied limb is to the form it was in when it still had its tasks in the human being; for example, certain muscles that could move the ears have lost their purpose in the human being. The present-day world of dreams has remained as a vestige of the astral pictorial consciousness of the moon; that is why it also works in the same way as the astral imaginative consciousness works. Imagine someone dreaming that he is catching a tree frog. He sees it jump and grabs it. Then the sleeper wakes up and sees that he had the corner of the bed cover in his hand. Or another dream that really happened. A farmer's wife dreams that she is going to church. She listens devoutly. Then the pastor moves his arms violently and, lo and behold, he gets wings. It was not too strange for the pious farmer's wife that a pastor who preaches from heaven occasionally gets wings too. But what happens? The pastor begins to crow loudly in the pulpit. At the same moment, the farmer's wife wakes up and outside in the yard, the cock crows.

What has happened here, where a whole dramatic action is taking place? In the symbolic image, something is expressed that you would have perceived as an external object in the waking day consciousness. Something is formed symbolically that is not present in this way. But if you retain the symbol in form – think that people use it to have perceptions of the real psychic world, then you have what I am talking about now. A symbolic consciousness that is true and real was the consciousness of the moon. Imagine a human being without our present-day object-consciousness. He approached another being. He does not see the limited form in this being, but a color formation appears before him. When there is sympathy, he sees a very definite color, and likewise when there is antipathy. This is something other than color today: it is the expression of sympathy or antipathy for the other being. And someone who has moon consciousness does what corresponds to moon consciousness: he bases his actions on the symbols. If he perceives a certain color, he knows that something hostile is happening, and he will withdraw.

A later stage of development is that which develops under the influence of the ego, where consciousness no longer perceives the psychic phenomenon, but where what has arisen as a coloration is superimposed over the objects. The colors that you see spread over the objects today are the old colors that once arose as psychic phenomena.

If modern man had, in addition to today's consciousness, that of the moon, so that he fully perceives the psychic world as well as the physical, he would have expanded the present consciousness into the imaginative one. A higher form would be if he had added to this the consciousness that plants have today and that humans had dimly and dully during their solar incarnation. And the highest form would be where man would also have the consciousness that the mineral has today, which in turn would enable him to merge into the universal cosmos. This last consciousness hovers before us as the ideal of man, and it is called spiritual consciousness.

The purpose of planetary evolution is therefore that states of consciousness succeed one another; but for this to happen, the planetary arena must also change completely each time. However, we only understand the complete evolution if we know that within each planetary state, seven stages must be traversed. Thus Saturn, Sun, Moon and now Earth had to cover seven stages. These are called “rounds” in Theosophy, “realms” in Christian esotericism. Each of the planets that the Earth passes through has seven smaller cycles; for each consciousness, if it is to ascend, has degrees, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. They are also called states of life. Each of these realms or states of life, however, must in turn pass through seven different states of revelation or seven states of form: arupa, rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, spiritual (archetypal).

Thus we have 7 times 7 times 7 = 343 states; they describe the 343 planetary incarnations in their entirety. The development of one state of consciousness encompasses 49 of these states. So you can see how we can glimpse into an enormous cosmic development.

When man still lived on the sun and had only developed his etheric and physical bodies, he was still a completely different being. One could not call him a plant, but in a certain figurative sense one could say that he was then in the plant existence. In relation to his position on earth, he was turned around: what today projects freely into the ether, the head, was then directed towards the center of the earth. The development of consciousness is simultaneously linked with the reversal of the entire human form. This is why the sun man is also called a man directed towards the center of the earth, and in the same sense the man of the moon age is called an orbiting man. If one had drawn a tangent to the moon's surface... [gap in the transcript]. And the earth man is the reverse of the sun man.

Thus everything moves forward. When we look back at lunar evolution, we must realize that what we call affects today could only develop on the moon as an astral impact. But at that time the I had not yet developed. Because the ego did not develop until the earth, the moon man did not yet feel pain as his individual pain; it was the pain of the moon. This physical-etheric-astral moon ancestor was not independent. Unindividual passions, affects and pains arose from this. For example, it was so on the moon — one may express it today, even if so few believe it — that at certain seasons of the year the whole world, all living beings, began to scream, to utter sounds, surrounded by an astral body; this was connected with a certain development in animal life. A vestige of this can still be seen in the mating call in the sexual life of certain animals, where cries are associated with it at certain times.

Now the law of evolution is such that in later states certain earlier ones are always repeated. Thus the earth had to go through the repetition of the Saturn, Sun and Moon existence. Now the earth is in its most essential existence. You can get an idea of what was called the sun here if you stir all the beings that are on the sun, moon and earth today into a pulp; all of this once existed on the sun. During the solar age, the sun, moon and earth were one body. Then the sun had developed into the moon's existence and only then were the sun and moon divided. And during the repetition on earth, first the sun and then the moon separated again, and the actual becoming-ego of the human being is linked to the separation of the moon. The moon contains the forces that prevent the other parts of the human being from becoming the carrier of an ego. I can only suggest that the point in time that occurred for our earth's development in the ancient Lemurian period could only occur because first the sun broke away and then the moon. When the earth had become independent, it could only then bring forth the human form from which today's human being has developed.

Thus, human evolution is most intimately connected with cosmic evolution. If you look back to the ancient Atlantean times, the predecessor of our present time, when man lived on Atlantis – which science has at least already discovered for the animal world – you have the human ancestor who does not yet possess the same consciousness as the human being of today, who can calculate and manufacture industrial objects. But another faculty was highly developed. The Atlantean man had an excellent memory, of which one can no longer really imagine today. Something else was connected with this. You would find that physically, too, this old Atlantis differs quite considerably from the configuration of the earth today. What we call air and water today was not yet there. All the air was filled with a fine water vapor. The water was still dissolved. That is why the old German saga has preserved the name 'Nifelheim'. It means that people in those days lived in a kind of water-laden air, and only in such an air could the image consciousness of man at that time live. The myths and legends of Germanic mythology arose out of this consciousness. Anyone who really knows the people knows that they do not create poetry as today's scholarship claims. The myths and legends were the remnants of an ancient ethereal pictorial consciousness, the expression of an ancient, dim clairvoyance, and people have only forgotten their origin after they have advanced to today's bright day consciousness.

So you can see how the development of mankind is tied to the cosmos. On a round earth, where the air is saturated with water, man perceives the world quite differently. For the Atlanteans, the sound of the wind was a language they understood. There were no commandments or laws in those days. There were still times when, if man wanted to know how he should behave, he went out and listened to the spring as it trickled: that told him something. And when he went out to listen, he listened to a fundamental and underlying tone that was present like a musical keynote that the Atlantean understood. It is a simple, multi-syllabic syllable; it lived in the entire environment of the Atlantean; it went through everything, and the Atlantean said to himself: “In this fundamental tone, the god speaks to me.” And when he wanted to address his prayer to his God, it was in this fundamental tone. The wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans had to change into our own in order for man to progress. But in the process of development we will again have to gain the consciousness of the Atlanteans, in addition to our own. Sometimes we have to make the sacrifice that the old must lie dormant for a time.

Thus the evolution of man is connected with the evolution of the cosmos. Just think how far man has strayed from the sources of wisdom that lie in the world itself! How far he has strayed from direct contact with nature! But what we have lost we shall regain in what we have conquered. This consciousness that we have arises from the consciousness of the individual, concrete facts that in the Rosicrucian method were designated as the “wisdom of the world”. It permeates the whole life of man. If we imbibe it, we feel what the teacher wanted, to whom the name “Rosenkreutz” is linked, who, as a leading individuality, guides and directs the spiritual movement through the centuries.

It seems far-removed when we consider the human being in the context of the whole world; but if it penetrates our hearts, it becomes a force within us that will bless us if we want to work on the transformation and transformation of the cosmos. One has the duty to integrate oneself into the cosmos. Just as a single stone does not seek to dispense itself from the house, so man must not dispense himself from the Cosmos. One must recognize that it must be one's duty to serve within the great evolution of the world. Then that which is eternal in us will integrate itself into the world existence. There will be a reflection of it in our most everyday life, so that man can express this wisdom in every movement of his hand. Then the Cosmos will truly partake of the human being, for everything is in the process of transformation. Everything must be transformed again through beings who are placed in the movement of the world. If we work in this way, we will feel vividly how true it is. And truth will be the impulse for our actions. Thus a beautiful saying of a highly inspired poet will be fulfilled:

Time is a blooming meadow,
Nature is one great living being,
And everything is fruit, and everything is seed!

I would like to say a few words about the color in which we have held our meetings here. There is good reason for this being red. When we see red on the outside, it forms its counter-image on the inside, because the eye has the tendency to create the greenish-blue from within when it sees red in front of it: this is the inner activity of the eye. With children, a great deal depends on how the body responds to external impressions. I refer here to what I said about the color red when we were discussing education. The eye responds to a red environment with a tendency towards green-blue activity, and this inner work is calming. Therefore, the color red in the environment has a calming effect on excited children. If you remember that later stages of human development always lead back to the childhood stage at a higher level, you will understand why the color was chosen for a place – which, even if it is not a place of initiation, should remind us of it through its symbols – that triggers the color in the child's body that is directed towards the sacred. It is not without reason that the Bible says: Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Our inner being must become as pure as the ether of the cosmos, which meets us in blue. The education for this is expressed in the red color of our environment. If red surrounds us externally, the contrary color lives within us. This explains the red in all esoteric cult sites, while exoteric sites, where the secret teachings are spoken of externally and in symbols, are blue. The Rosicrucian worldview expresses the esoteric in the color red. If the room is fully furnished in the sense of the Rosicrucian worldview, then blue arches should still rise above.

What do the two columns mean to the Rosicrucians? If one wants to explain these two columns standing here before us, one must start from the so-called Golden Legend. This says:

When Seth, the son of Adam – who had taken the place of Abel – was ready, he was allowed to gain an insight into Paradise, allowed to pass the angel with the sword whirling in the fire, into the place from which man had been expelled. There Seth saw something very special. He saw how the two trees, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, entwined each other. Seth got three seeds from these two entwined trees, took them with him and put them in the mouth of his father Adam when he had died. A mighty tree then grew out of Adam's grave. This tree appeared to some who had psychic senses, as if it were glowing with fire, and this fire coiled itself for him who could see into the letters B, the first letters of two words that I am not authorized to pronounce here, but the meaning of which is: “I am who was, I am who is, I am who will be.” This tree divided into three limbs. Seth took wood from it, and it was used in many ways in the evolution of the world. A staff was made from it; the magic wand of Moses, legend says. It was the same wood that was used to form the beams of Solomon's Temple. They remained there as long as people understood the ancient secrets. Then the wood was thrown into a pond in which the lame and the blind were healed at certain times. After it had been taken out again, it formed the bridge over which the Redeemer passed as he made his way to the cross. And finally, so the legend goes, the cross itself, on which the Redeemer hung, was made from the wood of this tree, which had grown out of Adam's mouth after the seeds of the entwined trees of life and knowledge had been placed in his mouth.

This legend has a deep symbolic meaning. Remember the process, the transformation that the disciple must think of when he goes through the fourth stage of the Rosicrucian training: the production of the philosopher's stone. We remember that it has to do with a certain treatment of our red blood. Let us think of the significance of this red blood, not only because Goethe's saying, “Blood is a very special fluid,” points us to it, but because occultism has taught it at all times. The way this red blood appears is a result of breathing oxygen. We can only touch on this briefly. When we are now referred to such an important moment in the legend and in the Bible, to the re-entry of Seth into Paradise, we must remember what caused man to be driven out of Paradise. He was driven out of Paradise, man's ancient state in the bosom of the higher spiritual world, by the following, which is already hinted at in the Bible as the physical process that goes hand in hand with the descent. Those who want to understand the Bible must learn to take it literally. It says: “God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” This breathing in of the breath was a process that is here expressed figuratively and that extended over millions of years. What does it mean?

In the development of mankind, in the formation of the physical body, there were times when there were no lungs in the human body, so that oxygen could not yet be inhaled. There were times when man more or less floated in liquid elements, when he had an organ, a kind of swim bladder, from which the lungs later developed. This swim bladder of the past has been transformed into the lungs, and we can follow the process of transformation. When we do this, it shows itself as the process that the Bible expresses with the image: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” It was only with this breathing of the breath that the production of red blood became possible. Thus the descent of man is connected with the production of the red blood tree in his inner being.

Imagine that the human being stands before you and you can only follow the trickling of the red blood: you would have before you a living red tree. Of this the Christian esoteric says: It is the tree of knowledge. Man has usurped it, he has enjoyed the red blood tree. The erection of the red blood tree, which is the true tree of knowledge: that is sin. And God drove man out of paradise so that he would not also enjoy the tree of life. We have another tree in us, which you can imagine in the same way as the other. But it has red-blue blood. This blood is the stuff of death. The red-blue tree was implanted in man at the same time as the other. When man rested in the bosom of the Godhead, the Godhead in him was able to interweave what his life and his knowledge meant. And in the future lies the point in time when man, through his expanded consciousness will be able to transform the blue blood into the red blood; then he will have within himself the source for the blue blood tree to be a tree of life. Today it is a tree of death. In this image, there is both a retrospective and a prospective view! You see that in man a red blood tree and a red-blue blood tree are entwined. The red blood is the expression of the I, it is the lower part of the knowledge of the I. The blue blood is the expression of death. As a punishment, the blue blood tree was added to the red tree of knowledge as the tree of death. In the distant future, this tree of death will be transformed into the tree of life, just as it was originally a tree of life. When you imagine man as he stands before you, his whole life is based on the interaction of these two trees.

The fact that Seth was allowed to enter Paradise again means that he was an initiate and was allowed to look back on the divine-spiritual state where the two trees were intertwined. And he put three seeds of the entwined trees into Adam's mouth, from which a tree divided into three arose. This means: the tree that grows out of man, Manas, Buddhi, Atma, these three parts that make up the upper part of man, are found in him by nature. The legend thus indicates how the trinity of the divine is already present in the human disposition, even in Adam, how it grows out of him and how it is initially seen only by the initiate. Man must go his course of development. All the things that have taken place in the development of mankind and that lead to initiation are further expressed to us by the legend.

From the realization that the threefold tree rests within us, the tree of the eternal, which expresses itself in the words: “I am that was - I am that is - I am that will be!” we gain the power that moves us forward and gives us the magic wand. Hence Moses' wand. Hence the wood of the tree growing out of the seed is taken to build the temple of wisdom. Hence the cross is hewn out of it, that sign of initiation which signifies the overcoming of the lower limbs in man by the three higher ones.

Thus this legend shows how the initiate looks forward to a future state where the tree of knowledge - the red blood tree - and the tree of life - the blue-red blood tree - will be entwined, where they will intertwine in man himself. Now, the one who wants to develop inscribes in his heart what the two columns – the red column on the one hand, suggesting the red blood column; the blue-red, suggesting the blue blood column – want to tell us. Today, both are separate. Therefore, in the hall, the red column stands on the left and the blue-red column on the right. They want to challenge us to overcome the present state of humanity, to direct our path to the point where, through our expanded consciousness, they will intertwine in a way that is called: J-B. The red column is designated J, the blue-red column B.

The sayings on the pillars will help you to visualize the connection between the individual pillars. The words on the red pillar are:

In pure thought you will find
The Self that can sustain itself.

Transform your thoughts into images,
And you will experience creative wisdom.

Those who meditate on this will, through the power of their thoughts, instill in their red blood column the power that leads to the goal: the wisdom column.

The power needed for the life column is instilled when one devotes oneself to the thought that stands on the other, the blue column:

When you condense feeling into light,
You reveal the forming power.

You objectify the will into being,
Thus you create in the world's being.

Some words relate to knowledge, others to life. The formative power first “reveals” itself in the sense of the first saying; it only becomes “magical” in the sense of the second saying. The transition from mere cognitive power to magical action lies in the transition from the power of the saying on the first column to that of the saying on the second.

Thus you see how what these symbols, the two pillars, mean, is directly related to the ideals and goals of the Rosicrucian student. In some esoteric societies, these two pillars are also erected. The esotericist will always associate the meaning that has been attached to them.

The seven images that adorn the hall are symbolic expressions of very specific ancient wisdoms. They represent the so-called seven seals of ancient and ever-new wisdom. The Apocalypse of John also talks about it, and this apocalypse is also a kind of interpretation of an occult sign language. Those who study it will recognize these very seals in the visions of the writer of the Apocalypse.

Every letter, every color of the images means something. If we look at things in the right way and sense the context, then very specific feelings are triggered that can become the creators of inner strength. The point is that we are not dealing here with leather allegories, but with a living expression of what anyone [initiate] can experience as real facts on the astral plane.

The first picture is the man with the fire sword in his mouth. This sword – and this one move is crucial – is connected with a secret of development. Speech has always been compared to the sword. But this is not just a poetic image. In occultism, everything is to be taken literally. One must only understand it.

There is a certain mysterious connection between what lives in our language, what expresses itself through our larynx in our words, and today's lower human drives of reproduction. The human form is undergoing transformation. Some can already see on the astral plane today what will be physically available in the future. In such a picture, the seer sees a state that man will one day reach, as in the first of the seven. This picture is an astral one today. It expresses a state of evolution of the physical human body in the future.

If we want to imagine this state, we have to think of it in this way: through his present, lower reproductive power, man exercises a production in the involuntary and unconscious. Through the reproductive instinct he can bring forth forms filled with matter. Now there is another power in man that does not yet enable him to produce lasting forms: that is the power of his speech. By speaking here, I also produce something. If you follow what is happening in this room while I speak, you can follow oscillating air waves. These are nothing other than words set in motion: movement. In the distant past, such words set in motion were also what is expressed today in the reproductive life. What is condensed today was, when it was still spirit, a word set in motion. What man today can only do out of his word as movement will later become truly reproductive power. Imagine you were able to freeze my words in a moment, so that the solidified air waves would fall down. You would find a special form for each word: a different one for “and” than for “God” ; a shell shape, for all I care. When I say “God”, other forms would be there than when I say “and”. Occultism shows us that everything around us in the form of physical objects has really come into being in this way. The spirit of the Logos resounded into space and matter took shape; the rest is a process of solidification. What is around us today are formed words, condensed divine word. The forces within us are condensed divine forces. What was once created through the word is now being transformed into natural forms. Thus, in the course of evolution, the human larynx will become a reptile-reproducing organ. We will not only be able to create movements, but the larynx will become the true reproductive organ. What is language today will become the creator of its own kind. The larynx is the future organ of reproduction, elevated to spirituality; hence, in man, the parallel in sexual development and laryngeal development can already be seen. The transformation of the voice at sexual maturity points to the creative power that will one day develop from the human voice. The true power of reproduction will arise from speech, the conscious power of human beings to bring forth. And just as you know that we give the name fire spirits to the spirits who were our ancestors because they were related to fire as we are to air, so we will develop from an air spirit to a fire spirit again as we ascend. Not only will the one power flow from the larynx, but also the power of the fire spirits.

You can see this expressed in the first picture, in the fiery sword of the one who represents the eternal essence of man that continues through all incarnations. This eternal element in man is at the same time the divine creator. It is true that what passes through our incarnations as our eternal essence is of the same nature as that which created the sevenfold planetary series. Therefore, the man in his right hand holds the symbols of the seven planets.

The second picture shows the so-called apocalyptic animals: the lion, eagle, bull and human. We get an idea of them when we remember that the animal today does not have an ego soul like we do. The animal does not have its ego soul on the physical plane; the individual animal relates to the ego of a group like a limb of the human being relates to the whole ego. Therefore, we speak of group souls in animals, and if you investigate these group souls, you will find them on the astral plane. Now everyone will realize that man, in his evolution, has also gone through conditions where that which was on the physical plane did not yet have the I-soul. Man also went through conditions where he had a group soul. At the same time — which is called the Lemurian Age — that the soul descended into physical corporeality, the group soul transformed into the individual soul. In the distant future, man will again rise to the state of the group soul, only consciously, in a higher sense. The symbol for that higher group soul is the second picture. The unity in the distant future is represented by the outer forms of those group souls that humanity had in the past. These group souls, from which the human individual soul has emerged and to which it will return, are divided into four typical groups. These are four real astral groups. One is characterized by the group soul as it is still embodied today in rudiments of the soul of Taurus; the other as it develops in the soul of Leo; the third as in the soul of the bird; but the soul that elevated man, allowed him to enter into individuality, is called the human being. Man emerged from these four group souls and into them he will return. The group soul that is the most advanced, which is already individualized on the astral plane as a human soul, we see in the middle of the symbol. It is the Christ-soul, symbolized by the lamb. It complements the four other group souls.

Then you see here in the rainbow, which surrounds the whole in the seven colors, the creative world principle in a second form. It is the sevenfold creative principle that effectively underlay the inner, human path of evolution when man was still at that stage. And regarding the numbers I to XII, which can be read like the numbers on a clock on the colors of the rainbow, we must remember that the earth, moon and sun were once one body.

This unity is connected with conditions as shown here. This form of cosmic order was necessary for man to be a group soul. Our present time division is connected with the position of the world bodies. In that very distant past, when there was not yet an earth revolving around the sun, all time relationships must have been different. In those days there was no day and hour. The sun itself made its way, and there was a great cosmic clock face. This represented the places the sun passed through. The hour hand on our clocks passes the clock twice a day; so in that ancient cosmic calendar, the sun did not pass through the zodiac once, but twice, through a period of brightness and darkness. This double passage, this double passing through these stations, is called passing by the elder brothers of the cosmic order. They are the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. Hence a kind of world clock is arranged.

If we look at the distant future, you will see cosmic, future states expressed in the sixth picture, where man will have risen again in his outer form; we see that the earth and sun will be united and what is eliminated will be eliminated as a moon body. Remember that Goethe calls the highest thing the soul can strive for the eternal feminine. What overcomes the unusable substances in human nature is called feminine. When the earth has united with the sun, then man himself will be the sun-woman; man will have created the union. The unusable substance is represented as the moon, which is trampled underfoot. What must come out when the earth becomes the sun again is represented by the dragon. It will be overcome when the earth becomes the sun again.

The third image shows an open book, surrounded by bowls and angels blowing trumpets, surrounded by flowing light and colors.

The trumpeting angels express the harmony of the spheres. When one ascends from the astral plane to the devachan plane, one experiences the floating world of light and color of the astral plane being permeated by the harmony of the spheres. That which can be seen within the astral plane as floating light and color begins to resound, revealing itself as an expression of the essence of the mental plane. The Pythagorean school called this harmony the music of the spheres. Goethe also speaks of it when he says: “The sun sounds according to ancient ways...” and “The new day is already born sounding for spiritual ears!”

The bowls signify the so-called bowls of wrath, that is to say that the human being will have attained the spirit when he has overcome and transformed what is called wrath. All that is wrathful must be cast out; therefore the bowls of wrath are poured out.

The book is not intended to imply anything other than that man himself, in his development, if we know how to solve his secrets correctly, represents an image of the eternal evolution of the world. When he recognizes this, that man is an image of the evolution of the world, then he can read himself, he has become a book to himself. Then the moment will arrive of which it says in the Apocalypse that John must devour the book. This is explained in more detail in the next seal.

The two columns of the fourth picture represent the devouring red and blue blood tree. The cloud is the present-day air, which the larynx only controls. From this, the productive power of man, which creates into the solid, will arise in the future. Above the two blood columns, the initiated human being who has devoured the book will emerge. And man generates within himself the power that will transform the earth into the sun. This power is characterized in the face that is born out of the sun. When man has reached this stage, his vision is a vision into the astral world. This is indicated to you in the rainbow above the face of the sun. This rainbow indicates the power that man will have acquired when he himself becomes a cosmic creator being.

In the fifth picture we have a being that conquers the dragon. This is the future human being who will have completely subdued what is called the lower self. This is connected with cosmic conditions that arise when what is called Kama is trampled underfoot.

The state that will occur when this has happened is symbolized in the Holy Grail of the narrated image. The transparent cube below represents a transparent diamond cube made of pure carbon. When man has progressed to the point where he uses carbon itself to build his body - without the help of plants - he will create the cube. This cube of crystallized pure carbon is the best indication of the future state of man. Man will have progressed so far that he will not only recognize the three dimensions, but also the oncoming contra-dimensions: hence the three other dimensions meet the three in the mirror image. These counter-dimensions represent what man will one day achieve when he has overcome the physical in spirit. The serpents signify the upward development to the higher. This is indicated in the seal in violet-bluish coils as a luminous image. This luminous image of the serpent signifies the devoted nature of knowledge. Only this devoted nature can grasp the world spiral in the Caduceus, which will then be fiery, which winds itself out of pure knowledge. Then it transforms into the downward-pointing pure chalice. The chalice of the plant is today directed upwards, pure and chaste; in man it is the other way round. But the human chalice will again be chaste and will turn downwards - that is why the Grail is represented here as a chalice turned downwards. The pure man, the man who has become innocent, is represented by the dove. The rainbow indicates the sevenfold creative man.

Thus the entire evolution of humanity is indicated in the seven seals. Contemplation of such images is intended to evoke the feelings that we must gain and that themselves represent effective evolutionary moments.

The program book is inscribed with the signature of the Rosicrucian school: E.D.N. I.C.M. P.S.S.R. This means:

Ex deo nascimur
In Christo morimur
Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The seven seals express the secrets of initiation; in the seven pillars, they are expressed in planetary terms. These pillars support the heavens, that is to say, all evolution. The capitals have their own specific meaning in all their individual features. If you feel vividly how the upper part slopes towards the lower, feelings are triggered in you that give an account of the currents in the respective states of these world bodies. The motifs of the first column have simple inclinations and curvatures. Contemplation of them evokes a feeling of the currents that permeated the Earth when it was embodied in its first state, which is called the Saturn state. That is why this is the Saturn pillar.

When you feel the progression of the motifs when looking at the second column – the lower part is structured like the ovary of a plant, and from above it is structured in such a way that it can become a calyx – feelings are triggered in you that correspond to the currents that flowed through the earth when it was in the sun state. That is why we speak here of the sun column. And so it is with the consideration of the third, fourth and further pillars. When one passes from one to the other, different currents of feeling develop again and again.

The first half of the evolution of the earth has its special peculiarity from the influence of Mars. Now, in the second half, it is under the influence of the power that the occultist sees emanating from Mercury. The evolution of the earth is therefore divided into the two halves of Mars and Mercury. If we now omit the volcanic state as a kind of octave of the Saturn state, the following series of states in the evolution of the earth emerges: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus.

In the Mercury column, the Saturn motif is interwoven with the Mercury motif. The snake staff emerges organically from what has gone before. It develops further. And as we delve into the motifs of the other capitals, we sense the earth currents that arise from further development. In the last one, we have the goblet shape again.

The secret of the seven planetary states of our earth has been incorporated into the names of the seven days of the week. They are: Saturday, Samedi, Samstag; Sunday; Monday, Monday; Martian Day: Mardi or Ziu, Tuesday; Mercury Day: Mercredi (Wednesday is a profane name); Jupiter Day: Jeudi, Thor, Donar, Thursday; Venus Day: Vendredi, Freya, Friday. The names of the days of the week are deeply symbolic. In their succession, we see something by which the initiates wanted to say: Remember that you have been placed in the living evolution of time. This is how the highest teaches us to understand the very nearest, that which is in our immediate surroundings.

The idea of the evolution of humanity was to be hinted at in the pillars. It is expressed as it has always been expressed in occult symbolism. The sites of occultism were symbolically structured and designed. One should see what lives in the soul in form, in image, in color. What lives in the soul should shine out to us from the outside, then one has worked in the sense of world evolution. Above all, it is our task to think selflessly about this great evolution. It will be fulfilled when we allow the inner life to flow into the outer life completely.