The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would like today to consider briefly something in connection with the subject dealt with last week and also earlier, something that can lead on to the further development of our studies. In experiencing the world around us, we see, in the world and also in ourselves, many things as being abnormal, perhaps even diseased, and indeed, this is quite justified from one point of view; but when we perceive something as abnormal or diseased in an absolute sense, we have not yet understood the world. Indeed, we often block the path to an understanding of the world if we simply remain with such evaluations of existence as healthy and ill, right and wrong, true and false, good and evil, etc. For what appears as diseased or abnormal from one point of view is from another point of view fully justified within the whole of world relationships. I will give you a concrete case, so that you may see what I mean.

The appearance of so-called hallucinations, or visions, is looked upon quite rightly as something diseased. Hallucinations, pictures that appear before human consciousness and that do not reveal a corresponding reality upon closer, critical examination—such hallucinations, such visions, are something diseased if we consider them from the standpoint of human life as it unfolds between birth, or conception, and death. When we describe hallucinations as something abnormal, however, as something that certainly does not belong to the normal course of life between birth and death, we have in no way grasped the inherent nature of hallucination.

Let us now set aside all such judgments regarding hallucination. Let us consider how it appears when we observe someone during a hallucination. The hallucination appears as a picture that is bound up with the whole subjective life, with the inner life, in a more intensive way than the usual outer perception, which is transmitted through the senses. Hallucination is experienced inwardly far more intensely than sense perception. Sense perception can be penetrated at the same time by sharp, critical thoughts, but one who is under the influence of hallucinations does not permeate them with sharp, critical thoughts. He lives in a hovering, weaving picture element.

What is this element in which man lives when he is suffering from hallucinations? You see, we cannot understand this if we know only what enters ordinary human consciousness between birth and death. In this consciousness the content of hallucination enters as something that is unjustified under all circumstances. Hallucination must be seen from an entirely different point of view; then we can approach its essence. This point of view is found when in the course of development leading to a higher vision man learns to know the living and weaving that are active between death and a new birth, particularly the living and weaving of his own being, when this life is but a few decades from his approaching birth, or conception. If, therefore, we attain the capacity enabling us to live into what is experienced quite normally when a human being is nearing birth or conception, we live into the true form of what appears in life between birth and death in an abnormal way as hallucination.

Just as here in the life between birth and death we are surrounded by the world of colors, by the world that we feel with every breath of air, etc.—in short, by the world we picture to be the one we experience between birth and death—so our own soul-spiritual being lives, between death and a new birth, in an element that is altogether identical with what can appear in us as hallucination. We are born, as it were, out of the element of hallucination, particularly in our bodily nature. What appears as hallucination hovers and breathes through the world that lies at the foundation of our present one; in being born, we rise out of this element, which can then appear abnormally to the soul in the world of hallucinations. What are hallucinations, then, within everyday consciousness?

When the human being has passed through the experiences of the life between death and a new birth and has entered into physical, sensory existence through conception and birth, certain spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, with whom we are already acquainted, have had an intuition, and the result of this intuition is the physical body. We may say, therefore, that certain beings have intuitions; the result of these intuitions is the human physical body, which can only come into existence by being permeated by the soul, rising out of the element of hallucination. What takes place, however, when hallucinations appear in a diseased way within ordinary consciousness? I can only make this clear in a pictorial way, but this is natural enough since hallucinations are themselves pictures. It is self-evident that in this case we can reach no result by using abstract concepts—we must explain it in a pictorial way.

Think of the following: as I have recently explained to you, the human physical body actually consists of solid substance only to the slightest extent necessary to preserve the solid contours. The largest proportion is watery; it also consists of the element of air, and so forth. This human physical body has a certain consistency, it has a certain natural density. If, now, this natural density is changed into an unnatural one, if it is interfered with—picture, symbolically, that the elasticity of this physical body were to be decreased—then the original hallucinatory element out of which it is born would be pressed out, just as water is pressed out of a sponge. The appearance of this hallucinatory nature is due only to the fact that the original element out of which the body arises, out of which it is formed, is pressed out of the physical body. The illness that expresses itself in a hallucinatory life of consciousness always points to something unhealthy in the physical body, which presses its own substance spiritually, as it were, out of itself.

This leads us to the fact that, in a certain sense, our thinking is indeed what materialists state it to be. Our physical body is, in reality, an image of what “pre-existed” before birth, or conception, in the spiritual worlds. It is an image. And thinking that arises in ordinary consciousness—that thinking which is the pride of modern man—is not unjustly described by materialists as something entirely bound up with the physical body. It is simply the case that this thinking, which has served modern man particularly since the birth of the modern scientific way of thinking, since the fifteenth century—this thinking perishes as such with the physical body, it ceases when the physical body ceases to exist. What you often find in the Roman Catholic philosophy of today—the philosophy current today, not the one of the earlier centuries—according to which the abstract, intellectual activity of the soul survives death, this is incorrect, it is not true. This thinking, which is characteristic of the soul life of the present, is thoroughly bound up with the physical body. The part that survives the physical body can only be perceived when we reach the next higher stage of cognition, in Imaginative cognition, in pictorial mental images, and so forth.

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You might argue that in this case a person who has no capacity for forming pictorial mental images would not have immortality. The question cannot be posed in this way, however, for it means nothing at all to say that a person does not have pictorial mental images. You can say that in your everyday consciousness you do not have pictorial mental images, that you do not bring them into your everyday consciousness, but pictorial mental images, imaginations, are constantly forming themselves within us; it is just that they are used in the organic processes of life. They become the forces out of which man continuously builds up his organism anew. Our materialistic philosophy and our materialistic natural science believe that during sleep man rebuilds his worn-out organs out of something unspecified—out of what does not seem to concern modern science very much. This is not what takes place, however; rather, it is precisely during our waking life—even when we do not go beyond the everyday intellectual consciousness—that we are constantly forming imaginations; we digest these imaginations, as it were, by means of the soul element and build up the body out of them. These imaginations are not perceived as separate entities by our ordinary consciousness, because they are building up the body. The evolution to a higher vision is based upon the fact that we partially withdraw, as far as the outer world is concerned, this work from the physical body, and that we bring to consciousness what otherwise boils and seethes in the depths of this physical body. For this reason spiritual science should accompany this higher vision; otherwise such a vision could not continue for very long, since it would undermine the health of the organism. The imaginative activity is thus very present in the ordinary life of the soul, but between birth and death it is digested and absorbed by the body. We thus may say that here, too, an unconscious activity takes place during ordinary life, but that if it is brought to consciousness it reveals itself as hallucination. Hallucination consists entirely of something that is an ordered, elementary activity in existence. It must not, however, appear in our consciousness at the wrong time. Hallucination in its ordinary manifestation must remain, as it were, more in the unconscious realms of our existence.

When the-body presses out, as it were, its primal substance, it comes to the point of incorporating this pressed-out primal substance into ordinary consciousness, and then hallucinations appear. Hallucinating means nothing other than that the body sends up into consciousness what should really be used within the body for digestion, growth, etc.

This is also connected with what I have so often explained in relation to the illusions that people have in connection with certain mystics. They fear that we will strip the mystic of his holiness if we point out his foundation. Take, for instance, hallucinations that have a beautiful and poetic character such as those described by Mechtild of Magdeburg or St. Theresa. They are indeed beautiful, but what are they, in reality?

If we can see beyond the surface of such things, we shall find that they are hallucinations that have been pressed out of the organs of the body; they are its primal substance. If we wish to describe what is truly there when these most beautiful, mystical poems well up into consciousness, we must sometimes describe, in the case of Mechtild of Magdeburg or St. Theresa, processes very much akin to those of digestion.

We should not say that this takes away the aroma from some of the historical manifestations of mysticism. The great sensual delight that many people feel when they think of mysticism, or when they wish to experience mysticism themselves, can be guided back onto the right path, as it were. Many mystical experiences, however, are nothing but an inner sensual delight, which can indeed rise into consciousness as something poetic and beautiful. What is destroyed by knowledge, however, is only a prejudice, an illusion. He who is really willing to penetrate into the innermost recesses of the human being must participate in the experience that shows him, rather than the beautiful descriptions of the mystic, the conformations of his organs—liver, lungs, etc.—as they are formed out of the cosmos, out of the hallucination of the cosmos. Fundamentally, mysticism does not thereby lose its aroma, but rather a higher knowledge reveals itself if we can describe how the liver forms itself out of the hallucinating cosmos, how, in a certain sense, it is formed out of what appears condensed within itself as metamorphosed spirit, as metamorphosed hallucination. In this way, we look into the bodily nature and see the connection of this bodily nature with the whole cosmos.

Now, however, the very clever people will come—we must always consider these clever people when we present the truth, for they raise their objections whenever we try to do so—these very clever people will say: what is this you are telling us, that the human body is formed out of the universe! Why, we know very well that the human being is born out of the mother's body. We know what it looks like as an embryo, and so on! A thoroughly false conception lies at the basis of such objections, but we will bring them to mind once more, although similar things have already been contemplated on other occasions.

If we regard the various forms of outer nature—let us remain at first in the mineral world—we find the most manifold forms. We speak of them as crystal forms. We also find other forms in nature, however, and we find that a certain configuration, an inner configuration, arises when, let us say, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur are combined. We know that when carbon and oxygen combine and form carbon dioxide, a gas of a certain density arises. When carbon combines with nitrogen, cyanuric acid arises, and so on. Substances are formed that a chemist can always trace; they do not always appear in an outer crystallization, but they have an inner configuration. In modern times—this inner configuration has even been designated by means of the well-known structural formulae in chemistry.

Something has always been taken for granted in this, namely that the molecules, as they are called, become more and more complicated the more we ascend from mineral, inorganic substance to organic substance. We say that the organic molecule, the cellular molecule, consists of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. It is said that they are connected in some way but in a very complicated way. One of the ideals of natural science is to discover how these individual atoms in the complicated organic molecules are connected. Nevertheless, science admits that it will still be some time before we shall discover how one atom is connected with another within organic substance, within the living molecule. The mystery here, however, is this, that the more organic a substance is, the less one atom will be chemically connected with another, for the substances are whirled about chaotically, and even ordinary protein molecules, for instance in the nerve substance or blood substance, are in reality inwardly amorphous forms; they are not complicated molecules but inorganic matter inwardly torn asunder, inorganic matter that has rid itself of the crystallization forces, the forces that hold molecules together and connect the atoms with one another. This is already the case in the ordinary molecules of the organs, and it is most of all the case in the embryonic molecules, in the protein of the germ.

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If I draw the organism here (see drawing), and here the germ—and therefore the beginning of the embryo—the germ is the most chaotic of all as far as the conglomeration of material substance is concerned. This germ is something that has emancipated itself from all forces of crystallization, from all chemical forces of the mineral kingdom, and so on. Absolute chaos has arisen in this one spot, which is held together only by the rest of the organism. Because of the fact that here this chaotic protein has appeared, there is the possibility for the forces of the entire universe to act upon this protein, so that this protein is in fact a copy of the forces of the entire universe. Precisely those forces that then become formative forces for the etheric body and for the astral body are present in the female egg cell, without fertilization yet having taken place. Through fertilization, this formation also acquires the physical body and the I, the sheath of the I, and therefore that which constitutes the formation of the I. This arises through fertilization, and this here (see drawing) is a pure cosmic picture, is a picture from the cosmos, because the protein emancipates itself from all earthly forces and thus can be determined by what is extraterrestrial. In the female egg cell, earthly substance is in fact subject to cosmic forces. The cosmic forces create their own image in the female egg cell. This is even true to the extent that in certain formations of the egg, in the case of certain classes of animals—birds, for instance—something very important can be seen in the form of the egg itself. This cannot be perceived of, of course, in the higher animals or in the human being, but in the formation of the hen's egg, you can find this image of the cosmos. The egg is nothing other than a true image of the cosmos. The cosmic forces work on this protein, which has emancipated itself from the earthly. The egg is absolutely a copy of the cosmos, and philosophers should not speculate on the three dimensions of space, for if we only rightly knew where and how to look, we could find presented everywhere clarification of the riddles of the world. The hen's egg is a simple, visible proof of the fact that one axis of the world is longer than the other two. The borders of the hen's egg, the eggshell, are a true picture of our space. It will indeed be necessary—this is a digression for mathematicians—for our mathematicians to study the relationships between Lubatscheffski's geometry, for instance, or Riemann's definition of space, and the hen's egg, the formation of the hen's egg. A great deal can be learned through this. Problems must really be tackled concretely.

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You see, by placing before our souls this determinable protein, we discover the influence of the cosmos upon it, and we can also describe in detail how the cosmos acts upon it. Indeed, it is true that we cannot as yet go very far in this direction, for if human beings were able to see how such things can be extended, such a science would be misused in the most terrible way, particularly in the present time, when the moral level of the civilized population of the earth is extraordinarily low.

We have observed to some extent how our body comes to form mental images: it presses out of itself the hallucinatory world out of which it originated. We carry about with us not only the body but also the soul element. We will be able to observe this better if we leave out of consideration for the moment the soul element and look instead at the spiritual element. You see, my dear friends, just as here between birth and death we look at ourselves from outside and say that we carry a body, so we have a spiritual existence between death and a new birth. This corresponds to an inner perception, but between death and a new birth we speak—if I may express myself in this way—of our spiritual element in just the same way as we speak here in our physical life of our body. Here we are accustomed to speak of the spiritual as being the actual primal foundation of everything, but this is actually an illusory way of expressing it. We should speak of the spiritual as that which belongs to us between death and a new birth. Just as between birth and death we possess a body, just as here we are embodied, so between death and a new birth we are “enspirited.” This spiritual, however, does not cease when we take up the body that is formed out of the hallucination of the world; it continues to be active.

Imagine the moment of conception—or any other moment between conception and birth. The precise moment does not matter so much; imagine any moment in which the human being is descending from the spiritual into physical existence. You will have to say that from this moment onward, physical existence incorporates itself into the soul-spiritual element of the human being. The soul-spiritual undergoes, as it were, a metamorphosis toward the physical. The force, however, that was ours between death and a new birth does not cease at the moment when we enter physical, sensory existence; it continues to be active, but in quite a peculiar way. I would like to illustrate this schematically (see drawing).

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Consider the force that has been active within you in the spiritual world since your last death and that works until what I shall call birth, your present birth. The forces of the physical and etheric bodies and so on continue to be active, followed by a new death. This force that we possess until birth persists, however—and yet we might say that it does not persist, for its actual essence has been poured into the bodily nature, spiritualizing it. What persists of this force continues at the same time in the same direction, only as pictures; it has merely a picture-existence, so that between birth and death we carry livingly in us the picture of what we possessed between death and a new birth. This picture is the force of our intellect. Between birth and death, our intellect is not a reality at all but is the picture of our existence between death and a new birth.

This knowledge not only solves the riddles of cognition but also the riddles of civilization. The entire configuration of our modern civilization, which is based upon the intellect, becomes evident if we know that it is a civilization of pictures, a civilization that has not been created by any form of reality but by a picture—although created by a picture of the spiritual reality. We have an abstract spiritual civilization. Materialism is an abstract spiritual civilization. One thinks the most finely spun thoughts if one denies the thoughts and becomes a materialist. Materialistic thoughts are really quite perspicacious, but of course they come into error, for the picture of a world, not a world itself, produces our civilization.

You see, my dear friends, this is a difficult conception, but let us make an effort to understand it. You find it easy to conceive pictures in space. If you stand before a mirror, you ascribe no reality to your reflection in the mirror; you ascribe reality to your own self, not to the picture. What thus occurs here in space also actually takes place in time. What you experience as your intellect is a reflected image, with its mirroring surface turned back to your former existence. In yourselves, in your bodily nature, you have a mirroring surface, but this mirror is active in time, and it reflects the picture of life before birth. The perceptions of existence are continually cast into this intellectual image: the sense perceptions. It mingles therein with sense perceptions, and for this reason we do not perceive that this is actually a reflection. We live in the present. If by means of the exercises I have described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, we succeed in throwing out sense perceptions and living into this picture existence, then we really come to our life before birth, pre-existent life. Pre-existence then is a fact. The picture of pre-existence is indeed within us; we must only penetrate to it. Then we will succeed in perceiving this pre-existence.

Basically every human being is able, if he does not succumb to other phenomena, to fall into a healthy sleep when he shuts out sense perceptions. This is the case with most human beings. They shut out sense perceptions, but then thinking is also no longer there. If sense perceptions can really be shut out, however, while at the same time thinking remains alive, then we no longer look into the world of space but back into the time through which we lived between our last death and this birth. This is seen at first very unclearly, but one knows that the world into which one then looks is the world between death and this most recent birth. In order to reach the truth, a true insight, we must not fall asleep when sense perceptions are suppressed. Our thinking must remain just as alive as is the case with the help of the sense perceptions or when permeated by sense perceptions.

If we look through our own being toward pre-existent life, however, and then naturally continue our training, the concrete configurations also appear in the spiritual world. Then a spiritual environment rises up around us, and the very opposite takes place of what takes place in the physical world: we do not press out of our body its hallucinations; instead we pull ourselves out of our body and place ourselves into our pre-existent life, our life before birth, where we are filled with spiritual reality. We dive into the world in which hallucinations surge. And in perceiving its realities, we do not perceive hallucinations but imaginations. Thus we perceive imaginations when we rise to spiritual vision.

It is of course absurd, and even indecent, I might say, when someone who wishes to be a scientist today continually comes forward with the following objection to anthroposophy: anthroposophy probably offers merely hallucinations; it cannot be distinguished from hallucinations. Yet if these people were only to study more closely the entire method of investigation applied in spiritual science, they would find that exactly here a very sharp and precise boundary is made between hallucination and Imagination.

What lies between the two? I have already drawn your attention to the fact that between birth and death we assume a bodily garment, and between death and a new birth a spiritual garment. The soul element is the mediator between the two. The spiritual is brought into physical existence through the life of the soul. What we experience in physical life is, in its turn, brought into the spiritual through the soul element when we die. The soul element is the mediator between body and spirit.

If the body conceptualizes as body, it conceives hallucinations; that is, it brings hallucinations into consciousness. If the spirit conceptualizes as spirit, then it has imaginations; if the soul, which is the mediator between the two, begins to conceptualize, that is, if the soul conceptualizes as soul, then neither will the unjustified hallucinations pressed out of the body arise, nor will the soul penetrate to spiritual realities. Instead it will reach an undefined intermediary stage; these are fantasies. Picture the body; between birth and death it is not an instrument for conceptualizing. If between birth and death it conceptualizes nevertheless, it does so in an unjustified and abnormal way, and hallucinations thus arise. If the spirit conceptualizes in really rising out of the body to realities, then it has imaginations. The soul forms the mediator between hallucinations and imaginations in faintly outlined fantasies.

If the body conceptualizes as body, hallucinations arise.
If the soul conceptualizes as soul, fantasies arise.
If the spirit conceptualizes as spirit, imaginations arise.

In describing these processes, we are describing real processes. In intellectual thinking we have only the pictures of the soul's pre-existent life—the pictures, therefore, of a life that is permeated through and through with imaginations, a life that arises out of the hallucinatory element. Our intellectual life is not real, however. We ourselves are not real in our thinking, but we develop ourselves to a picture in that we think. Otherwise we could not be free. Man's freedom is based on the fact that our thinking is not real if it does not become pure thinking. A mirror image cannot be a causa. If you have before you a mirror image—something that is merely an image, and if you act in accordance with this image, this is not the determining element. If your thinking is a reality, then there is no freedom. If your thinking is a picture, then your life between birth and death is a schooling in freedom, because no causes reside in thinking. A life that is a life in freedom must be one devoid of causes.

The life in fantasies is not entirely free, but it is real, real as a life of conceptions (Vorstellungsleben). The free life that is in us is not a real life as far as thinking is concerned, but when we have pure thinking and out of this pure thinking develop the will toward free deeds, we grasp reality by a corner. Where we ourselves endow the picture with reality out of our own substance, free action is possible.

This is what I wished to present, in a purely philosophical way, in 1893 in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, in order to have a foundation for further studies.

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In the short lecture before the eurythmy performance this morning, I pointed out how modern man’s relation to the celebration of the festivals has gotten ever deeper into materialism. Of course, in order to see this a much deeper view of materialism must be taken. The most threatening symptom is not that man is infected by materialism but he is infected by the superficiality of our time, and this is far more dangerous.

This superficiality exists not only in relation to the spiritual views of the world, but also in relation to materialism itself. One usually only pays attention to its most superficial phenomena. In this regard I pointed out this afternoon, for example how, in olden times people were still receptive to the moods which could be experienced in the course of the year and which came to be expressed in the festival celebrations. These moods were embodied in the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John’s festival and the Michael festival—these were embodied in ritual-like celebrations in which these moods were embedded, and they took hold of man as he consciously experienced the course of the year.

Thereby something was given to the soul which today is only given to man’s body. We all still participate in the course of the day. When the sun sends its golden rays announcing the dawn we eat our breakfast. When it is at its highest point and pours out its warmth and light with special love over mankind, we eat lunch, and so on through midday, snack, and supper. In those daily festival events, we accompany the course of the sun through the day by co-experiencing in our souls the fiery trip of the sun around the world. We participate in this fiery ride around the world by overcoming the craving for food with the contentment of feeling satiated. And so the mood for the physical organism exists in a very decided and definite way at different times of the day. We can call breakfast, snack, dinner, snack, supper, the festivals of the day. The human physical organism accompanies what takes place between earth and cosmos.

In a similar way the course of the year was experienced intensively in the soul in olden times through instinctive clairvoyance. Actually, certain things played from one sphere over into the other. You need but remember what has been left as remnants of these festivals: Easter eggs, stuffed geese, etc. The lower bodily region plays into the soul region which ought also to experience the course of the year. Well, the easiest way to stimulate interest in the course of the year in our materialistic time would be by making available—I do not want to say “Easter eggs”,—but “stuffed turkeys.”

But this is not the way it was meant in olden times with regard to festival moods. They were attuned, rather, to soul-hunger and soul satisfaction. The soul of man needed something different at Christmas, Easter, St. John’s, and Michaelmas time. And one can really compare the content of the celebration to a kind of satisfying the hunger of the soul at different seasons.

So as we look at the daily path of the sun, we can say that it is related to what serves the needs of the body; as we look at the yearly course of the sun, we can say that it is related to what serves the needs of the soul.

If festivals are to become alive again, it would have to happen out of a much more conscious condition, out of an awakening of the soul as it is striven for in anthroposophical endeavors. We cannot just base a renewal of the Festivals on old history; we would have to rediscover them through a new knowledge, a new world-conception, out of our own soul-being. But, besides the body and soul, we also differentiate the human spirit.

However, for modern man it is already difficult enough to have a clear picture when someone speaks of the soul. Everything becomes a sort of indefinite fog. Already in the nineteenth century when they began to speak of psychology, they began to speak of a soul-science without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great language critic, found that we really do not know anything about the soul, we only experience something indefinite, certain thoughts and feelings, but really nothing of a soul reality. We ought not, therefore, to use in the future the world “soul” but “dis-soul” (Geseel). Mauthner advises, that in the future, when a poet intends to write a real work he ought not to say: “Sing immortal Soul, the sinful man’s redemption,” but rather, “Sing immortal What-cha-macall-it, the sinful men’s redemption”—if in the future it still would make sense to speak of something like that.

Today we can really say that modern man knows nothing more of the connection of his soul with the sun’s yearly course. He became a materialist in this region, also. He sticks to the festivals of the body which follow the daily course of the sun. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional habits but no longer experienced. Yet we have, besides a body, also a soul, and yes, also a spirit.

Let us now take into consideration the historical epochs. Those epochs, which reach far beyond the course of the year, encompassing centuries, are co-experienced by the human spirit, if it experiences them at all. In olden times they were most certainly experienced. He who knows how to enter, carried by the spirit, into the way the course of time was followed in the past knows how it was said: at this or that time some personality appeared out of the heights of the world and revealed the spirit again. And this spirit entered as the sunlight enters the physical. If such an epoch then entered its twilight phase, something new appeared.

Historical epochs are related to the evolution of the human spirit, as the course of the sun through the year is related to the soul evolution. Of course, wherever such metamorphoses, such changes in spirit evolution occur, it must happen through fully conscious cognition. Today, one would like to ignore such metamorphoses completely. One is outwardly touched by the effects, but one does not wish to consider seriously those changes emanating from the spirit which are nevertheless expressed in the outer events.

It would be helpful to pay attention to a certain direction of thinking and feeling appearing in children and young people, which was unknown to earlier generations, and which, when looked at properly in the course of the development of humanity, can really be compared to the course of the year. Therefore it would be good to listen to what the different ages proclaim as a need, to listen to the way in which a new age arises and how human beings demand something different from what might have been demanded in ages gone by. But just for this contemporary man has a very inadequate organ.

When we approach the festival mood in the right way out of a contemporary consciousness, the great relationships of life can again fill our souls. When we, for example, let something like the St. John’s mood really enter our soul, then we try to gain for our soul what will be met by the cosmos.

Certainly, the great world connections have become a matter of indifference for modern mankind. There is no heart for getting to know the great world relations. It is quite evident how the spirit of littleness, narrowness, I would like to say, the spirit of the microscope, the spirit of atomizing appears, which, when mentioned in the way I do, seems paradoxical.

I would like to point to something definite in relation to the St. John’s mood which, however, seems quite far-fetched. What is more obvious (even if one has not developed an organ for the course of the year) than the impression of growing plants, growing trees: when spring comes, things sprout, grow, everything goes from leaf to blossom. All this growing makes the impression as though the cosmos, with its sun forces, calls upon the earth to open itself to the cosmos, and this happens at St. John’s time.

Then begins a retreat of the sprouting, and we approach the time when the earth collects the growing forces into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How obvious it is that from the received impressions one gets the picture that the snow-cover belongs to winter, when the being of the plants crawls, so to speak, into the earth; that it belongs to summer for the plants to grow towards the cosmos. What is more natural than to get this idea—although in a deeper sense the opposite is correct—that the plants sleep in winter and wake in summer.

I do not wish to speak now about the correctness of this sleeping and waking. I wish to speak only of the impression one receives, which leads to the thought that summer belongs to growing vegetation, and winter to the withdrawal of growth. In any case, a kind of world-feeling develops in which one is engaged in relating to the warming, bright force of the sun when seeing this force again in the greening, blossoming plant-cover of earth, and immersing into the feeling of being an earthly hermit with regard to the cosmos when the plant cover is replaced with snow in winter. In short, by so feeling, one tears oneself free with one’s consciousness from earth existence. One places oneself in a larger relation to the universe.

Now comes modern research—and what I am saying now is in no way critical, on the contrary—now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders whenever great cosmic connections are referred to. Why should one feel elevated to divine radiating warming forces of the sun when the trees are shooting, becoming green, when earth covers itself with a cover of plants? Why should one have to sense a cosmic relation on seeing this plant cover? It is disturbing. One cannot bring such sentiments into harmony with a materialistic consciousness. Plant is plant. It seems like stubborness of the plant to blossom only in spring, or to be ready in summer to bear fruit. How does this actually work? One is supposed to be concerned not only with the plant but with the whole world? If one is to feel, to know, one is supposed to be concerned with the whole world, not only with the plant? That doesn’t sit right. Is one not already making an effort to avoid dealing with substances existing in powder or crystal forms, but rather just to deal with atomic structures, atomic cores, with electromagnetic fields, etc.? One tries to deal with something enclosed, not with something that points in so many directions. In the case of the plant is one supposed to admit that a sensing is needed that reaches to the whole cosmos? It is really awful if one cannot narrow one’s view to a singular object! One is used to, when using the microscope, to have everything limited to a narrow view. Everything takes place in the small enclosure. It must be possible to look at a plant by itself, not in connection to the whole cosmos!

And look, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century the scientists succeeded to an extraordinary degree in this region. It was known, of course, from some plants in hothouses, greenhouses, that the mere summer and winter aspects of the plant could be overcome. But on the whole, not enough could be discovered about the plant needing a certain winter rest. Discussions about tropical plants occurred. The researcher, who did not want to know about plants being connected with the cosmos, maintained that the tropical plant grows throughout the year. The others, more conservative, said: one thinks this because plants have their winter rest at different times, some only for eight days. This being so, makes it imperceptible when a certain species is dormant. Long detailed discussions concerning tropical plants took place. In short, one became aware of a tremendous discomfort concerning the relation of plants to the cosmos.

But the most interesting and grandiose experiments in this direction were made exactly at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when one succeeded in driving the stubborness out of the plants in the case of a great number of not only annuals, but also trees, which are much stronger: to drive out the cosmic stubborness from the plant. It was possible to do this in plants known as annuals by creating certain conditions. In the case of most of the trees growing in the temperate zone, conditions could be established which caused them to remain green all year round, to give up their winter sleep. This then provided the basis for certain materialistic explanations. In this way really magnificent accomplishments were achieved.

It was discovered that the cosmic element could be driven out of trees if they were brought into enclosed spaces, given enough nourishing minerals, making it possible that plants in winter-time, when the soil is poor in minerals, can find this nourishment. If enough moisture, warmth, and light is supplied, the trees will grow. However, one tree in Central Europe was defiant: the Blood Beech. It was approached from all sides to give up its independence and subjected to isolation in a prison. It was provided with everything necessary, but remained stubborn, and demanded nevertheless its winter rest. But it was the only one that still resisted.

And now we must record that in the twentieth century, in 1914, the beginning of the war, another great historical event occurred: the immense, mighty accomplishment of the most capable researcher, Klebs, who was able to compel the Blood Beech to give up its independence. He simply was able to bring it into an enclosed space, provide the necessary nutrients, warmth and light, which could be measured, and the Blood Beech submitted to the demands of research.

I am not mentioning this phenomenon in order to criticize it, for who can help but wonder at this most diligent scientific labor. Besides, it would be silly to try to disprove the facts. They exist and are there. It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, but something quite different.

Why should it not be possible if somewhere on neutral ground the necessary condition for hair-growing existed, to grow hair outside the human or animal realms? Why not? One need only bring about the conditions. I know many would rather have hair growing on their heads than in some culture, but we can imagine it to be possible. Then it would no longer be necessary to bring anything that happens on earth together with what happens in the cosmos.

With all due respect to research, one must look deeper. Aside from what I said recently about the being of the elements, I would like to say something more today. One must be clear that, for example, the following is the case: we know that once earth and sun were one body. Of course this is long ago, during the Saturn and Sun periods. Then there was also a short repetition of those periods during the Earth period. But something remains behind which still belongs there. And this we bring forth again today. And we bring it forth from the repetitious condition on earth not only by heating our rooms with coal, but we bring it forth by using electricity. For, what remains from those times after Old Saturn and Old Sun, when the sun and earth were one, that provided the basis for what we have today on earth as electricity. We have in electricity a force which is sun-force, long connected with the earth, a hidden sun-force in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn Blood Beech, when approached forcefully enough, be induced to use not the sun that radiates from the cosmos, but to use the sun force retained within the earth, the Old Sun force, electricity?

Looking in this way we become aware of the necessity of deeper knowledge. As long as man could believe that the sun force comes only from the cosmos, man arrived at the perception of the relationship of the plant world to the cosmos. Today, when from a materialistic point of view, one would like to separate from the cosmos what so easily can be seen as cosmic effect, one must, if one looks at the seeming independence of the plant, have a science which recalls that cosmic relation between earth and sun which once existed, but in a different form. By being narrowed on the one hand by the microscope, we simply need a much wider expansion on the other hand, and especially the details show how much we need an expanded view.

The problem is not a dilettantic anthroposophical opposition to progress in research. But since progress in research necessarily leads through one’s own nature, it can bring us to the often mentioned “night-crawler view” and prevent that wide view of the great cosmic historic connections between earth and sun, which enables us to be conscious not only of the present sun, but also of the Sun of long past conditions. Everywhere we need the polarity, the counter-pole: not opposition to research, but the spiritual counterpole is what is needed. This is the position we need to take. And I would like to say it is also the mood of St. John’s time. When we inscribe clearly into our sentiment that we now have to live in a world-historic St. John’s mood, we carry our gaze into cosmic distances. That is what we need in spiritual cognition. Nothing is gained by mere talking about spirit; what is important is real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What we bring forth by pointing to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions, etc., has a tremendous supporting force regarding historic cognition.

When our attention is called to such brilliant results of materialistic science as those discovered by Klebs, that even the stubborn Blood Beech can be compelled to grow with electric light, this will lead us, without spiritual science, to the point where we will shatter everything into pieces and have a very narrow view. The Blood Beech will stand before us, growing in electric light, and we will know nothing except what this very narrow picture tells us.

With spiritual science, however, we can say something else: Klebs took the sunlight from the Blood Beech. He then had to give her electric light, which is actually ancient sun light. Our view is not narrow, but greatly enlarged. So, those who do not want to know of the soul experience will say glibly that one day is just like the next. There is breakfast, snack, dinner, snack, supper,—it is even nice when at Christmas time we get a nice cake—but basically every day is a repetition of the previous day. In fact material man sees only the day. But what about cosmic connections? Let us free ourselves of such a world view. Let us become clear that the stubborn Blood Beech no longer needs the sun. If we imprison her and give her enough electricity, she will grow without the sun. No! She will in fact not grow without the sun. But we need to seek the sun in the right way when we do something like that. And we must be clear that it is different when the Blood Beech grows in the sunlight or when ahrimanic sunlight, originating from long-past, is forced upon her. And we recall what has often been mentioned as the two polarities of Lucifer and Ahriman.

With an adequately wide view of these things we will not admire our brilliance at having overcome the stubbornness of the beech, but go much further. We will progress on to the sap of the beech, and investigate its effect on the human organism, investigate both the beech we permitted to be stubborn and the one which we treated with electric light, and we might discover something very special about the healing forces of one as opposed to the other. But we must do this by considering the spiritual!

But of what concern is this to people today? One has an admirable interest in research. One sits in the classroom, is an experimental psychologist, writes down all kinds of words which must be remembered, examines memory, experiments with children, and arrives at most interesting information. Once the interest is awakened, everything is interesting, depending on the subjective point of view. Why should it not be possible that a stamp collection is more interesting than a botanical collection? Since this is so, why not also in other realms? Why should the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented with, be not interesting? But the question everywhere is, whether or not there are higher responsibilities, and whether it is really justified to experiment with children at a certain age. The question arises: what is one ruining? And the greater question: what damage is done to the teachers, when instead of asking of them a living, heartfelt relation, one asks of them an experimental interest out of the results of experimental psychology. So everything depends, in such research, on whether or not one has the right relation to the sense world, and also to the supersensible world.

Now certain people who emphasize the necessary objectivity of research will assert that there are some who find it immoral when Klebs takes the stubbornness out of the Blood Beech. This would not occur to me. I wouldn’t dream of it. Everything that is done ought to be done, but one must have a counterweight for it. In the time when one emancipates oneself with regard to the growing beech tree from the cosmos, one must on the other hand, in a civilization which does such things, also have a sense for how the spiritual progress of man takes place. One must have a sense for the epochs of time, like ours. I do not want to limit research, but one must feel the necessity of a counter measure. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times spiritual impulses want to reveal themselves. When on the one hand materialism takes over and great achievements result, then those who are interested in such achievements should also be interested in the achievements of research about the spiritual worlds.

This lies in the inner nature of Christianity. A true view of Christianity sees, after the Mystery of Golgotha, the continuing of the Christ being in the earth, in the Christ force, the Christ impulse. And this means that when autumn comes, when everything dries up, when the growing and sprouting in nature ceases, ceases for the senses, then one can see the growing and sprouting of the spirit which accompanies man during the winter time.

But in the same way one must learn to sense how, although justifiable, the view for detail is narrowed in a certain way, the view for the totality for the great whole is narrowed. With regard to Christianity this is the St. John’s mood. We must sense with understanding that the St. John’s festival mood is the starting point for that occurrence which lies in the words: He must increase, I must decrease.

This means that the impressions upon man of everything that is accomplished by empirical research must decline. As the sense details are ever more enhanced, the impression of the spirit must be more and more intensified. And the sun of the spirit must shine more and more into the human heart, the more the impressions of the sense world decline.

The St. John’s mood must be experienced as the entrance into spirit impulses and as exit from the sense impulses. In the St. John’s mood we must learn to sense wherein something weaves and wafts like a soft wind, wafts the spiritually demonic out of the sensible into the spiritual, and from the spiritual into the sensible. And through the St. John’s mood we must learn to form our spirit light so that it does not stick like tar to the solid contour of ideas, but finds itself in weaving, living ideas. We must learn to notice the lighting up of the sensual, the dimming of the sensual, the lighting up of the spiritual in the dimming sensual. We must learn to experience the symbol of the June bug: the lighting up has its meaning as does the dimming of the light.

The lightning bug lights up, dims down, but by dimming down it leaves behind in us the living life and weaving of the spirit in the twilight evening, in the dusk. And when we see in nature everywhere the little waves as in the symbolic lighting up and dimming of the lightning bug, we will find the right St. John’s mood if it is experienced with clear, bright, full consciousness. And this St. John’s mood is necessary, for we must in this way pass through our time if we do not want to fall into the abyss, pass through in such a way that the spirit becomes glowingly alive and that we learn to follow it.

The St. John’s mood:—towards the future of the earth and mankind! No longer the old mood which understands only the growing and sprouting on the outside, which is pleased when it can imprison this growing and sprouting under electric light what otherwise was thriving in the sunlight. Rather we must learn to recognize the lighting up of the spirit so that the electric light becomes less important than it is today, so that the St. John’s gaze becomes sharpened for that old sunlight which will appear when we open ourselves to the great spiritual horizon, not only to the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light of the great horizon to shine in the right way, then all the trivialities of our time will appear in this light, then we will go forward and upward; but if we cannot make this decision we will go backward and downward.

Today everything revolves around human freedom, human will. Everything revolves around the independent decision of either going forward or backward, upward or downward.

We have often looked back to the views of earlier times, and we want to do so again today, in a certain sense, with the aim of gaining some insights into the history of humanity and human development. When we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times we refer to in our terminology as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was completely different from the way we look at things today, even if we take a period of time that is very far removed from our own. When we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. People saw nature in such a way that they still perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual parts of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that initially surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been unthinkable for a person of those older times to speak of nature as we do. For they would have felt as we would feel if we were sitting in front of a collection of corpses — the image is somewhat grotesque, but it corresponds quite well to the facts — and then said that we were among human beings. What presents itself to human beings today as nature would have been perceived by people thousands of years before our era as nothing more than the corpse of nature. For they perceived spiritual and soul elements in everything that surrounded them.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a soul nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times, when it needed something other than having the spiritual world presented to it in images, after nature had been deprived of its soul for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian period had taken in the breath, held it back in his own body, so to speak, in order to feel in this breathing: The divine impulse of the I lives within you. As yoga students, people experienced God within themselves through the breathing process. Later times came. People no longer experienced the divine impulse within themselves in the breathing process. But they had learned to think, and they said: Through the breath, the soul entered into human beings. The ancient yoga students experienced this. Later humans said: And God breathed the living breath into humans, and they became souls. — The older yoga students experienced this, later humans said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew times, people already experienced in a certain abstract sense what they had previously experienced concretely. But people did not look at it in ancient Hebrew times, they looked at it in ancient Greek times. One thing always takes place in one part of the world, another in another part. People no longer experienced God within themselves as the old yoga student did, but instead they experienced the existence of God in human beings in images. And this experience of the existence of God in human beings was very much present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the mystery of Golgotha. But in return, the image was now discarded. The image became a mere image, just as the process of breathing was now only described in thought. The entire human soul state became different.

Man saw the outer world as dead, and for him it was elementary, natural, that he saw the outer world as dead. He saw it de-deified. He saw himself as the outer world, as the physical outer world, de-deified. But he had the consolation that once, in this de-deified world, the real God had come down, Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection had passed into the whole of earthly evolution as the Christ impulse. And so human beings were now able to develop a certain view in the following way. They could say to themselves: I see the world, but it is a corpse. Of course, they did not say this to themselves, for it remained in the unconscious; human beings do not know that they see the world as a corpse. But gradually the image of the corpse on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus, formed in their view. And when one looks at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then one has nature. One has the image of nature, that nature in which man is crucified. And if one looks at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then one has what was seen in ancient times in the whole of nature. Certainly, in a multiplicity, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all kinds of other beings of the earthly hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and animated. Now, however, people felt the urge, through the intellectualism that was already sprouting, to summarize what was scattered in nature. They summarized it in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus they see everything that they have lost in outer nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, conquered death, and now every human soul can participate in His essence. One has lost the ability to see the divine-spiritual in the surroundings of nature. One has gained the ability to find this divine-spiritual in Christ again in view of the mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

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In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

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In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

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What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.

Spiritual Connections between the Culture-streams of Ancient and Modern Times

If we ask ourselves what spiritual science should be for men, then presumably, out of all sorts of reactions and feelings that we have developed in the course of our work in this field, we will place the following answer before our souls: Spiritual science should be for us a path to the higher development of our humanity, of all that is human in us.

Thus we set up a life-aim, which in a certain way is self-understood for every thinking and feeling person, a life-aim that includes the achieving of the highest ideals and also includes the unfolding of the deepest and most significant forces in our souls. The best men in all ages have asked themselves how man can rightly bring to expression what lies within him, and to this question the most diverse answers have been given. Perhaps none can be found that is terser or more telling than the answer Goethe gave out of a deep conviction in his Geheimnisse:

“From the power that binds all beings
That man frees himself who overcomes himself.”

Deep meaning lies in these words, for they show us clearly and pregnantly what lies at the heart of all evolution. This is that man develops his inner feeling through rising above himself. Thereby we lift ourselves, so to speak, above ourselves. The soul that overcomes itself finds the path that leads beyond itself to the highest treasures of humanity. This lofty goal of spiritual research should be borne in mind when we undertake to treat such a theme as the one that is to occupy us here. It will lead us beyond the ordinary horizons of life to sublime things. We will have to survey wide reaches of time if we take as our subject an epoch stretching from ancient Egypt down to our own day. We will have to pass millennia in review, and what we gain therefrom will really be something connected with the deepest concerns of our souls, something that grips our innermost soul-life. Only apparently does the man who strives toward the heights of life remove himself from his immediate surroundings; just through this he comes to an understanding of his daily concerns. Man must get away from the troubles of the day, from what his routine brings to him, and look up to the great events of the history of the world and its peoples. Then for the first time he finds what is most sacred for his soul. It may seem strange to suggest that connections, intimate connections, should be sought for between our own time and ancient Egypt, when the mighty pyramids and the Sphinx appeared. It can at first seem remarkable that one should understand his own time better by directing his gaze so far back. But just for this purpose we are going to look backward over much wider and more comprehensive epochs. This will bring the result we seek: The possibility of transcending ourselves.

To one who has already carefully studied the ideas of spiritual science, it will not seem strange that one should look for a connection between widely separated periods of time. It is one of our basic convictions that the human soul continually returns, that the experiences between birth and death occur repeatedly for us. The doctrine of reincarnation has become ever more familiar to us. When we reflect on this we may ask: Since these souls that dwell in us today have often been here before, is it possible that they were also present in ancient Egypt during Egyptian cultural epoch, that the same souls are in us which at that time looked up at the gigantic pyramids and the enigmatic Sphinxes?

The answer to this question is, Yes. Our souls have beheld the old cultural monuments that they see again today. The same souls that lived then have gone through later periods and have appeared again in our own time. We know that no life remains without fruit; we know that what the soul has gone through in the way of experiences remains within it and appears in later incarnations as powers, temperament, capacities, and dispositions. Thus the way we look on nature today, the way we take up what our times bring forth, the way we view the world, all this was prepared in ancient Egypt, in the land of the pyramids. We were then prepared in such a way that we now look at the physical world as we do. Just how these widely separated periods link themselves together is what we will now explore.

If we want to grasp the deeper meaning of these lectures, we must go a long way back in earthly evolution, We know that our earth has often changed. Before ancient Egypt there were still other cultures. By means of occult research we can see much further back into the gray primeval times of human evolution, and we come to times when the earth appeared quite other than it is today. Things were entirely different in ancient Asia and Africa. If we look back clairvoyantly into primeval times, we come to a point where a tremendous catastrophe, caused by water-forces, took place on our earth and fundamentally altered its face. If we go still further back, we reach a time when the earth had an entirely different physiognomy, when what now forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and America, was above water, was land. We come to a time when our souls lived in entirely different bodies than today; we reach ancient Atlantis, of which our external science can as yet say little.

The regions of Atlantis were destroyed through colossal deluges. Human bodies had different forms at that time, but the souls that live in us today lived also in the ancient Atlanteans. Those were our souls. Then the water-catastrophe caused a movement of the Atlantean peoples, a great migration from west to east. We ourselves were these peoples. Toward the end of Atlantis all was in movement. We wandered from the west toward the east, through Ireland, Scotland, Holland, France, and Spain. Thus the peoples moved eastward and populated Europe, Asia, and the northern parts of Africa.

It must not be imagined that those who, in the last great migration, wandered out of the west into the regions that have gradually developed into Asia, Europe, and Africa, did not encounter other peoples. Almost all of Europe, the northern parts of Africa, and large parts of Asia were already inhabited at that time. These areas were not peopled from the west only; they had already been settled earlier, so that this migration found a strange population already established. We may assume that when quieter times set in, special cultural relations arose. There was, for instance, in the neighborhood of Ireland, a region where, before the catastrophe that now lies thousands of years behind us, there lived the most advanced portions of the entire population of the earth. These portions then migrated, under the special guidance of great individualities, through Europe to a region of central Asia, and from that point cultural colonies were sent out to the most diverse places. One such colony of the post-Atlantean time was sent from this group of people into India, finding a population that had been seated there from primeval times and had its own culture. Paying due heed to what was already present, these colonists founded the first post-Atlantean culture. This was many thousand years ago, and external documents tell us scarcely anything about it. What appears in these documents is much later. In those great compendiums of Wisdom called the Vedas, we have only the final echoes of a very early Indian culture that was directed by super-earthly beings and was founded by the Holy Rishis. It was a culture of a unique kind, and we today can form only a feeble idea of it because the Vedas are only a reflection of that primeval holy Indian culture.

After this culture there followed another, the second cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean time. Out of this the wisdom of Zarathustra flowed and the Persian culture arose. Long did the Indian culture endure, long also the Persian, reaching a culmination in Zarathustra.

Then arose, under the influence of colonists who were sent into the land of the Nile, the culture that is comprised under the four names, Chaldean-Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian. This third post-Atlantean culture arose in Asia Minor and northern Africa, and reached its summit, on the one side, in the wonderful Chaldean star-lore and, on the other, in the Egyptian culture.

Then comes a fourth age, developing in the south of Europe, the age of the Greco-Roman culture, which dawns with the songs of Homer and goes on to produce the Greek sculptures and the art of poetry that appears in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Rome also belonged to this period. The epoch begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in 747 B. C., and lasts until the fourteenth or fifteenth century A. D. After that we have the fifth period, in which we ourselves live, and this in turn will be followed by the sixth and seventh periods.

In the seventh period, ancient India will appear in a new form. We shall see that there is a remarkable law that enables us to understand the working of wonderful forces through the various epochs and the relationships of the epochs to each other. If we begin by looking at the first period, that of the Indian culture, we will find that this first culture later recrudesces in a new form in the seventh period. Ancient India will then appear in a new form. Mysterious forces are at work here. And the second period, which we have called the Persian, will appear again in the sixth period. After our own culture perishes, we will see the Zarathustra religion revive in the culture of the sixth period. And in the course of these lectures we will see how, in our own fifth period, there takes place a sort of reawakening of the third period, the Egyptian. The fourth period stands in the middle; it is peculiar to itself, and neither earlier nor later does it have a parallel.

To make this mysterious law somewhat clearer, we should add the following. We know that India has something that strikes our humanitarian consciousness as strange. This is the division into definite castes, into priests, warriors, merchants, and laborer. This strict segregation is foreign to our modern views. In the first post-Atlantean culture it was not strange, it was entirely natural; in those times it could not be otherwise than that the souls of men should be divided into four grades according to their capacities. No harshness was felt in it for men were distributed by their leaders, who had such authority that what they prescribed was accepted without question. It was felt that the leaders, the seven Holy Rishis who had received their instruction from divine beings in Atlantis, could see where each man should be placed. Thus such a classification of men was something altogether natural. An entirely different grouping will appear in the seventh period. The division in the first period was effected by authority, but in the seventh period men will group themselves according to objective points of view. Something similar is seen among the ants; they form a state which, in its wonderful structure as well as in its capacity to perform a relatively prodigious amount of work, is not rivaled by any human state. Yet there we have just what seems to be alien to us, the caste system; for each ant has its particular task.

Whatever we may think of this today, men will see that the salvation of humanity lies in division into objective groups, and they will even be able to combine division of labor with equality of rights. Human society will appear as a wonderful harmony. This is something we can see in the annals of the future. Thus ancient India will appear again; and in a similar way certain traits of the third period will appear again in the fifth.

Glancing at the immediate implications of our theme, we see a large domain. We see the gigantic pyramids, the enigmatic Sphinx. The souls that belonged to the ancient Indians were also incarnated in Egypt and are again incarnated today. If we follow our general line of thought into detail, we will discover two phenomena that show us how, in superearthly connections, there are mysterious threads between the Egyptian culture and that of today. We have observed the law of repetition in the different periods of time, but it will seem far more significant if we follow it in spiritual regions. We are all familiar with a painting of great importance that has surely passed before all our souls at least once. I mean Raphael's famous painting of the Sistine Madonna, which by a chain of circumstances has come to be located among us in central Germany. In this picture, which is available in countless reproductions, we have learned to admire the wonderful purity poured out over the whole form. We have all felt something in the countenance of the mother, in the singular way the form floats in the air, perhaps also in the deep expression of the child's eyes. Then, if we see the cloud-forms round about from which numerous little angel-heads appear, we have a still deeper feeling, a feeling that makes the whole picture more comprehensible to us. I know it seems daring when I say that if one gazes deeply and earnestly on this child in the arms of the mother and on the clouds in the background forming themselves into a number of little angel-heads, then he has the feeling that this child was not born in the natural way, but that it is one of those that float round about in the clouds. This Jesus child itself is such a cloud-form, only become a little denser, as though one of the little angels had flown out of the clouds onto the arm of the Madonna. That would be a healthy feeling. If we make this feeling live within us, then our view will expand and free itself from certain narrow conceptions about the natural connections of life. Just out of such a picture our narrow vision can be expanded to see that what must happen in a certain way according to modern laws could at one time have been different. We will discern that there was once a form of reproduction other than the sexual one. In short, we will perceive deep connections between what is human and the spiritual forces in this picture. This is what lies in it.

If we allow our gaze to wander back from this Madonna into the Egyptian time, we are met by something similar, by an equally sublime picture. The Egyptian had Isis, the figure connected with the words: I am what was, what is, and what will be. No mortal has yet raised my veil.

A deep mystery, heavily veiled, manifests itself in the figure of Isis, the lovable goddess who, in the spiritual consciousness of the ancient Egyptian, was present with the Horus child as our Madonna is present today with the Jesus child. In the fact that this Isis is presented to us as something bearing the eternal within it, we are again reminded of our feeling in contemplating the Madonna. We must see deep mysteries in Isis, mysteries that are grounded in the spiritual. The Madonna is a remembrance of Isis: the Isis appears again in the Madonna. This is one of the connections that I spoke of. We must learn to recognize with our feelings the deep mysteries that show a superearthly connection between ancient Egypt and our modern culture.

Still another connection can be brought before you today. We recall how the Egyptian handled the dead; we remember the mummies, and how the Egyptian concerned himself that the outer physical form should be preserved for a long time. We know that he filled his tombs with such mummies, in which he had preserved the outer form, and that as mementos of the past physical life he gave to the deceased certain utensils and possessions suited to the needs of physical life. Thus what the person had had in the physical was to be retained. In this way the Egyptian bound the dead to the physical plane. This custom developed more and more and is a special earmark of the old Egyptian culture. Such a thing is not without consequences for the soul. Let us remember that our souls were in Egyptian bodies. This is quite correct; our souls were incorporated in these bodies that became mummies. We know that when man, after death, is freed from his physical and etheric bodies, he has a different consciousness; he is by no means unconscious in the astral world. He can look down from the spiritual world, even though today he cannot look up; he can then look down on the physical earth. It is not then indifferent to him whether his body has been preserved as a mummy, has been burned, or has decayed. A definite kind of connection arises through this. We shall see this mysterious connection. Through the fact that in ancient Egypt the bodies were preserved for a long time, the souls experienced something very definite in the period after death. When they looked down they knew—that is my body. They were bound to this physical body. They had the form of their body before them. This body became important to the souls, for the soul is susceptible to impressions after death. The impression made by the mummified body imprinted itself deeply, and the soul was formed in accordance with this impression.

These souls went through incarnations in the Greco-Latin period, and in our own time they are living in us. It was not without effect that they saw their mummified bodies after death, that they were repeatedly led back to these bodies; this is by no means unimportant. They attached their sympathies to these bodies, and the fruit of their looking down upon them appears now, in the fifth period, in the inclination that souls have today to lay great weight upon the outer physical life. All that we describe today as the attachment to matter stems from the fact that the souls at that time, out of the spiritual world, could look upon their own embodiment. Through this man learned to love the physical world; through this it is so often said today that the only important thing is the physical body between birth and death. Such views do not arise out of nothing.

This is not a criticism of the practice of mummifying. We only want to point to certain necessities that are connected with the repeated incarnating of the soul. Without this pondering on the mummies men would not have been equal to developing further. We would by now have lost all interest in the physical world had the Egyptians not had the mummy-cult. It had to be thus if a proper interest in the physical world was to be awakened. That we see the world as we do today is a consequence of the fact that the Egyptians mummified the physical body after death.

This cultural stream was under the influence of initiates, who could see into the future. Not through any whim did men make mummies. Particularly in those days mankind was led by high individualities who prescribed What was right. This was done under authority. In the schools of the initiates it was known that our fifth epoch was connected with the third epoch. These mysterious connections stood at that time before the eyes of the priests, who instituted mummification so that the souls might acquire the disposition to seek spiritual experience in the external physical world.

The world is guided through wisdom; this is a second example of such connections. That men think as they do today is a result of what they experienced in ancient Egypt. Here we glimpse deep mysteries that reveal themselves in the cultural streams. We have barely touched these mysteries, for what has been shown of the Madonna as a remembrance of Isis, together with what we have seen of mummification, gives only a feeble hint of the real spiritual connections. But we will throw more light upon these relationships; we will consider not only what appears outwardly, but also what lies behind the external.

External life runs its course between birth and death. Man lives a much longer life after death, in what we know as kamaloca and the experiences of the spiritual world. The experiences in the super-sensible worlds are no more uniform than the experiences here in the physical world. What did we experience as ancient Egyptians in the other world?

When our eyes looked on the pyramids and the Sphinx, how completely different was the course of our lives, how differently did our souls live between birth and death! That life cannot be compared to the life of the present day; such a comparison would have no meaning, and the experiences between death and a new birth have been far more dissimilar than the experiences of outer life. During the Egyptian epoch the soul experienced something quite different than in the Greek world, or in the time of Charlemagne, or in our own time. Also in the other world, in the spiritual world, evolution takes place, and what the soul experiences today between death and a new birth is something quite different from what the ancient Egyptian experienced when he laid aside his outer form at death. Just as mummification worked on in its peculiar way, causing the mood of the present day, just as this external life repeats itself from the third into the fifth period, so does evolution continue in those mysterious worlds between death and birth. This also we will have to study and here again we will find a mysterious connection. Then we will be able to grasp what lives in us as the fruit of that ancient time. We will be led into deep recesses of the labyrinth of the earth's evolution. But just through this we will recognize the full connection between what the Egyptian built, what the Chaldean thought, and what we today live. We will see what was then achieved flaring up again in what surrounds us, in what interests us in our environment. Physically and spiritually we will obtain clues to this connection. It will also be shown how evolution proceeds, how the fourth period forms a wonderful link between the third and the fifth. Thus our souls will lift themselves to the significant connections of the world, and the fruit will be a deep understanding of what lives in us.

You have just heard about the intimate connection between Christmas and the spiritual nature of things. It is true that this idea should penetrate our spiritual scientific work particularly deeply and warmly when we look at the tree decorated with lights in the dark middle of winter, on a winter night. Of all the symbols that have entered spiritual life from a certain elemental, not superficial, consciousness, the Christmas tree is actually one of the most recent. If we go back about two hundred years in the development of European spiritual life, we find the Christmas tree appearing here and there at most. It is not yet old as a Christmas symbol. With this thought, that the Christmas tree, which arouses the joy and impulse of gratitude in the child's heart, is one of the youngest Christian symbols, we easily combine the other thought that this Christmas tree has become infinitely dear to us in many of its branches, and that we do not want to do without it when we celebrate Christmas in our branches. Truly, this Christmas tree, even though it has only recently been transformed from the subconscious depths of the human heart into a Christian Christmas symbol, is connected with deep feelings and emotions about the nature and meaning of Christmas. In the Middle Ages, it became customary to perform Christmas plays around Christmas, New Year's, and Epiphany. Farmers, who prepared for this for a long time, went around the villages reenacting the birth of Christ. They reenacted the appearance of the three kings, the three magi, before the newborn Christ. But they also reenacted in the so-called Paradise plays what is described in the first book of Moses as the creation of our earthly world, the scene that so powerfully enlightens us, revealing the mysteries of our own soul, the scene at the beginning of the earth, into which the meaningful words resounded: You may eat of every tree in the garden, but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now all that remains as a reminder of the inner connection between the beginning of the creation of the earth and the Christmas festival is that our calendar shows “Adam and Eve” on December 24 and the birth of Christ Jesus on December 25.

And yet, as I said, not out of a thought but out of a feeling, one cannot help but wonder: Did the impulse to erect the ancient world tree, the tree from the middle of paradise, from which no one was supposed to eat, on the birthday of Christ Jesus perhaps arise from the dark depths of the human, Christian heart? The Paradise play was performed. What remained of the memory of Paradise was the tree of Paradise, and the tree of Paradise could be united with the feelings we have about the birth of Christ Jesus.

I do not want to develop theories here; today is not the day for that. Certainly, one can say other things about the reasons for the emergence of the Christmas tree, but out of the feelings that arise in us when we stand next to it, when we let those feelings shine in our souls that connect us to the most childlike feelings of human beings on this holiday, out of this feeling, one wants to speak when looking at the Christmas tree, because one sees in it something like a renewal of the tree of paradise. This Christmas tree does not actually appear to be a pagan symbol, nor does it appear to be a Norse pagan symbol. When our earth is covered with snow, when icicles hang from the eaves of houses and over the trees, and people take refuge from those areas of the earth where, for months on end, the greenery and colorful flowers have delighted the eye and the fruits necessary for human sustenance have been offered, when people have to take refuge from all that, what is outside, at least at first, according to his perception, what is there for him to occupy himself with, what he has to live with throughout the spring and summer, when he has to take refuge in those rooms through which the snow looks in, the icicles look in, and he has to warm them from the inside, then the heathen probably felt something of what what could become of the world if this world were left to itself. The heathen felt the great winter at the end of earthly existence when he was so abandoned by the spirits of nature, by everything he felt as gnomes, undines, and sylphs, when he had to flee into the warmth of the oven, flee from made him feel abandoned by his beloved nature, and when he could only glimpse through a small opening that which was impossible to inhabit. When he was able to experience this abandonment, he felt, in this wintertime, the end of earthly existence spreading out infinitely, flooding everything, drowning everything.

The Christian would have answered him, perhaps not out of theoretical understanding, but out of emotional understanding: You may be right, that is what would have happened to the earth if the tree had been allowed to unfold its power, from which humans unlawfully enjoyed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil through Lucifer's seduction. And when one thinks in this way about the development of the earth with this earthly goal after the desolation and loneliness of winter, after the cold and frost, also in relation to the soul life that would await everything earthly, and when one can connect this to the consequences of Lucifer's seduction, to the effects of the enjoyment of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then one can feel on the other side what the Christian idea actually means.

Before the idea of Christ, the idea of Easter came to the consciousness of people in Christian development, that idea which is so meaningfully recounted in the symbols of Easter, whereby man was freed from all that is in Lucifer's seduction. The grandeur of the Easter idea can shake and fill the soul in springtime with the awakening of nature. But it is different with the Christmas idea, this other side of the Christian idea. In order to understand the Easter idea, one must already have acquired certain knowledge. I would say that even the smallest children understand the Christmas idea intuitively. And what is this Christmas feeling when you explore it in children who are called to the Christmas tree after it has been decorated, the lights lit, and the presents laid out around it? What is this Christmas feeling when the children are led to the Christmas tree, when they receive their gifts, when they are told that the Holy Christ brought them — what is the essence of this?

The children may not know it, but they feel it unconsciously in those depths of the human soul that cannot always be brought to consciousness. What is this essence, when one really explores what actually lives in children — one does not usually do this — but when one explores what lives in children when they are called to the Christmas tree and hear that these gifts have been brought to them by a supernatural being? These are not gifts that they can pick themselves outside by the stream in summer or spring; no, these have come to them from the supernatural world. What is it that lives in children then? I think one can say that when one looks deeply into the hearts of children with those eyes that can be called the eyes of a seer, which one acquires little by little, the most significant, the most intense feeling that lives unconsciously in children's hearts is an infinitely deep gratitude. And when you empathize with them, you sense something like the thought that triggers this feeling of gratitude: Why does this gratitude take such a hold in the hearts and souls of children? Why? — Because, in fact, this heart says again in the deepest subconscious: We human children must be grateful that we have not been abandoned, that a being has inclined itself toward us from the heights of the spirit, that it has wanted to take up residence within human earthly existence; that on that earth, which should have remained dark as a result of the temptation of paradise, which should have grown cold and frozen as the great winter season, entered into this existence preparing for paralysis, the being whom we see entering anew every year into the time that also symbolically indicates to us the end of the earth in the frost of winter, in the darkness, in the gloom of winter. We must be grateful to the world spirit who descended, united himself with the earthly development of human beings, so that we need not fear the coming of the great winter, but may hope that when, through the outer natural course of the earth, the great winter follows in its earthly cosmic frost, there will be that being who approaches us every year in the form of a child and rejuvenates the earth, so that it is not carried away frozen to its further existence in the cosmos. Hence the infinite warmth that emanates from this Christmas festival. And hence, I would say, this peculiarly probative character of the Christmas festival. The Christmas festival has something that proves Christ. One can feel about Christmas that what it wants to represent is true, because as soon as the thought of Christmas is grasped in the soul of a human child, it immediately takes hold of the whole meaning of this child's heart, this childlike soul of the human being, and truly grasps everything childlike in the human being, regardless of whether this childishness manifests itself in childhood or in the latest age. It is precisely people who can feel so deeply, on the one hand, the outer nature with all its spring and summer beauty, who can also feel this peculiar desolation of wintertime, who can feel the solemn mood of the Christmas season, who also feel this proof of the Christmas festival.

A poet who spent his entire life observing nature in minute detail also spoke beautifully about Christmas in one of his poems. The poet who wrote these words said: People say that a thunderstorm is magnificent, that a storm is magnificent, that an earthquake or a volcanic eruption can be magnificent—I think that a ladybug running across a leaf is magnificent, if only one can feel its true nature. This is roughly what the poet Adalbert Stifter said. And from his familiarity with the greatness in the small things of nature, with that which spiritually pervades all of nature, his beautiful Christmas story emerged, which in its basic tone actually weaves and lives the essence of Christmas. The poet leads us into a lonely alpine valley that has a neighboring valley. There are villages in both valleys. As is customary in the Alps—at least in earlier times—the inhabitants of one valley have little contact with those of the other. However, it turns out that a resident of one valley, a cobbler, has married a woman from the other valley. She is regarded as a stranger, even though she was born only a short distance away across the mountains. They have children. The grandparents live in the other alpine valley. The grandfather does not think highly of his son-in-law, so he does not visit the children very often, but the grandmother used to come over more often. However, when the children grew a little older, although they were still small, the grandmother was already old and could no longer visit as often. So the children went to visit her. Once they were sent over, it was on Christmas Eve, to the other Alpine village, in weather that was quite safe. They went there. Being very young children, they had only stood a few times with any awareness in the nightly silence of the Alpine hut in front of the Christmas tree and heard a few words about the mystery of Christ, only a little. Now, while they were still relatively small children, they were sent away. They were to visit their grandmother. One could hope that the weather would remain favorable. They went to their grandmother in the neighboring village. Their grandmother gave them their presents and admonished them to be very careful on their way home. But lo and behold, snow began to fall. They had to cross the mountains to the other valley. They lost their way and could not find it again. They were lost. The boy, who was a little older, took care of the little girl. They even crossed glaciers. They were only able to keep going because they had some coffee with them that their grandmother had given them, which they unwrapped. The boy had once heard that coffee could prevent you from freezing. Yes, they couldn't find their way home. The night grew darker and darker, and they were high up in the middle of ice and snow, so that when the Christmas bells rang out everywhere at midnight, they couldn't even hear them. So they spent Christmas night in this way, while down in the village, of course, not only their parents but the whole village was seized with fear and anxiety. They had gone out to look for the children. But the children were up there in the solitude. They had to wait, keeping warm with everything they knew in their little cleverness, and wait until morning gradually came. As described at the beginning, they had the snow and ice beneath them and the stars above them. Then, as they looked up at the mountains, a wonderful light appeared over the mountains towards morning. The children were found, brought home half frozen, and put to bed. They had missed Christmas Eve, but they received their Christmas presents the next day. First, however, they had to recover from their numbness and were therefore put to bed. The mother—I will not recount all the various scenes that this poet describes in a way that touches the hearts of people so deeply—sits down at the little girl's bedside and asks her to tell her what terrible things the children have experienced. Then the little girl, who, as I said, had only heard a few words about the true meaning of Christmas, said: “Mother, when we were up there and it was so, so cold, and we saw nothing but snow and stars, I looked up at the stars, and do you know, Mother, what I saw when I looked up at the sky? I saw the Holy Christ!”

I said that such poetry has something probative about it, because it testifies to how intimately, even if a person has heard little about the Christian idea, the Christian idea is woven into the human heart in a natural, elementary way. Therefore, it must be deeply rooted in the human heart. It can be understood at every age, even at the most childlike age. The poet Adalbert Stifter spoke the truth. One understands it in such a way that even as a very small child, one can read in the writing of the stars how the Holy Christ speaks. It is truly connected with gratitude towards the fact of the world that a God wanted to descend to earth so that human beings would not be alone in the development of the earth. The divine helper has snatched us from loneliness. The child feels this. And this feeling of gratitude toward the world powers, which can be so deep, is that infinitely warm feeling that glows through the hearts of people during Christmas; it is what makes life during Christmas so warm in the cold of winter in a spiritual way, it is what makes life during Christmas so light in the winter darkness when the sun is at its lowest point.

And we who seek knowledge must seek it in a different way than it has been presented by the tempter. For we do seek knowledge. Yes, we seek spiritual knowledge. The tree of knowledge must be of value to us; it is indeed of value to us, if we feel correctly: the tree of knowledge. But we do not allow it to be handed to us by Luciferic powers. We accept it from Christ, who descended to earth. For this is how it can be accepted by the human heart, the human mind, the human striving for knowledge; this tree of knowledge can be accepted when Christ offers it to us. What Lucifer did not want to give to human beings, Christ gives to human beings. And so the tree of paradise is renewed: it becomes the Christmas tree. What Lucifer gave to human beings as a temptation, Christ gives back to human beings as reconciliation. And so even the most mature thought of the quest for knowledge is linked to the childlike thought of the Christmas tree. Just as a child accepts what it has seen coming from nature and society, accepting it as a holy gift on Christmas Eve, so we think of accepting what is holy and valuable to us, the gift from the tree of knowledge, from Christ, who wanted to unite his impulses with the impulses of the earth.

We will understand how to awaken, precisely in accordance with our worldview, that warm gratitude toward the Christ being who wanted to come to earth to free human beings from the loneliness symbolized by the darkness and cold of winter, while on the other hand symbolizing the spiritual warmth that human beings can share with the spiritual powers in what radiates true warmth from that consciousness which we can allow to penetrate our hearts from our spirit when we understand in the right sense the symbol of the Christmas tree, the renewed tree of knowledge, the tree of knowledge that is given to us by Christ Jesus, when we allow this Christmas symbol, which warms the coldness of the world, to speak to our soul, to our heart.

[This Foreword is not contained in this 1971 translation but is in the German volume so it has been inserted here.]

"At Christmas 1912, the first official gathering of followers of a theosophical spiritual movement took place in Cologne. who were not willing to immerse themselves in a dogmatic Indian movement, but who, taking into account the achievements of the spiritual life of recent times and the radical impact that the Christ event had had on earthly events, could only recognize a spiritual education for the Western world that was appropriate to the state of development of the European people today. They recognized in Rudolf Steiner the spiritual researcher and thinker who was equal to all the demands of modern science, who had grasped the connections between historical events as no one before him, and whose explanations of the human being revealed factual connections that spoke their own language and were not imposed “teachings.” “Anthroposophy” was the name he had always given to his study of the human being. And this name was now chosen by the followers gathered in Cologne who were committed to a science based on spiritual anthropology, which sought to approach the knowledge of the divine by striving to grasp the divine germ in the human being — his ‘I’ ...

When Rudolf Steiner brought to the Theosophical Society what it had been lacking and raised it above its former level, certain impulsive forces were alarmed, forces which had wanted to transform the otherwise declining movement into their tool and now saw their special purposes endangered. For their goal was not the synthesis of Eastern and Western wisdom for the general advancement of humanity, but the galvanization of the dead European spiritual life with pre-Christian wisdom.

Now there was someone who brought new life from the depths of Christian esotericism, the synthesis of Eastern and Western thinking, of past and future wisdom.

This had to be suppressed.

And so a counter-image was created for the longing for Christ that was reawakening in the souls of Europeans. A man of flesh and blood. Still a boy, with the appeal of the exotic, a Hindu who was to be trained for the role of the Messiah. I would like to spare the reader a description of the rest of the Krishnamurti humbug at this point. The advertising machine did everything it could to promote him. With diplomatic skill, entreaties, cunning, and threats, the Theosophical sections were worked on to make them compliant with the new intention. Members in various countries left in droves. The German section protested emphatically as a united whole. This led to their expulsion from the Theosophical Society. The external ties with this society were now also severed. The work for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science continued in the same way in Europe. Several years earlier, Rudolf Steiner had made the complete independence of his work from any theosophical leadership a condition for further external cooperation. Now the anthroposophical association, which also included many foreigners who could not participate in the new phase of the Theosophical Society's development, was transformed into an independent society.

—Marie Steiner

[ 1 ] Today I want to bring forward certain matters which are connected with what was spoken about yesterday and the day before, matters which concern mankind's evolution insofar as this evolution is dependent upon man's relationship with certain spiritual powers during the earth's future.

The day before yesterday we saw how man's inner being appears to spiritual examination. We saw how it is possible, through exact observation of this kind, to gain insight into the fact that within the physical-soul-spiritual being of man something comes together which, in a certain sense, belongs to the external world, insofar as this world consists of etheric forces and beings. Man draws together these forces to form his ether body as he descends to earthly life. We saw also that with this entity, consisting of forces from the external etheric world, there unites the effect of man's earthly deeds, of everything he causes to happen; in short, his karma.

[ 2 ] Yesterday we saw how, during the different epochs of human evolution, man not only sought but actually did, by various methods, gain insight into the spiritual world.

[ 3 ] I have often mentioned that a new stream of spirituality is now ready to pour into man's earthly existence. The present forms a link in mankind's evolution between an era of mainly intellectual development—which began in the first third of the 15th Century and has now practically run its course—and a future devoted to the spiritual. The most important task for mankind in the era of intellectuality was the development of reason through the investigation of external nature and the development of technology.

[ 4 ] In this direction great and impressive results have been accomplished in recent centuries. However, it must be said that the intellect has begun to lose its creativity, though we still live with its heritage. [ 5 ] The most creative period was from the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno right up to the 19th Century. Especially in Western civilization the greatest intellectual achievements have been attained in recent centuries.

[ 6 ] It is obvious, even to an external unbiased observation, that the intellect has lost some of its creative power. In general, mankind has no longer the same enthusiasm for intellectual accomplishments. Yet the practice of centuries continues through a certain cultural inertia. Thoughts run along the old grooves, but the intellect brings nothing new of real importance to the fore. This is particularly noticeable in our young people. Not so long ago it was a real pleasure to listen to a young person who had studied some subject. It may not have applied to everyone but certainly to those who had achieved something; one was eager to hear what they had to say, and it was the same everywhere in Western academic circles. But a change has come about in the last few decades; when a young person, fresh from university, speaks, one is no longer curious about what he will say next. One is not curious because one knows it already; it comes out automatically; it is as if the brain itself has lost its vitality. One gets the feeling that the activity of the intellect has slid down from the head to some deeper region. That human intelligence has become something mechanical which no longer springs from the region of the head must be obvious even to external observation. This situation has come about because intelligence was originally a natural endowment which mankind was predestined to develop predominantly between the 15th and 19th Centuries.

[ 7 ] However, in order to fructify the developed intellect, a stream of spirituality, from higher regions of world existence, now seeks entry into the earthly life of mankind.

Whether this will happen depends upon man opening his heart and soul to what thus seeks entry, through many doors, as it were, into the earthly world from the spiritual world. It will be necessary for man not only to become conscious once more of the spiritual in all nature, but able to perceive it.

[ 8 ] Consider how in the older civilizations, like those described yesterday, mankind in general perceived—in all the kingdoms of nature, in every star, in every moving cloud, in thunder and lightning—spirit and soul. On the background of this general consciousness the Yoga exercises evolved. [ 9 ] As I explained yesterday, the Yogi attempted to penetrate to his own self. Through inner exercises he sought to attain what today is taken for granted because we are born with it: consciousness of the `I', the feeling of selfhood. This the Yogi had first to develop in himself.

[ 10 ] But, my dear friends, it would be a great mistake to compare the ordinary consciousness of self, that we have today, with that of the Yogi. It makes a difference whether something is achieved through one's own human effort or whether one simply has it. When, as was the case with the Yogi, one first had to struggle to attain consciousness of self, then, through the inner effort one was transported into the great universal laws; one participated in world processes. This is not the case when one is simply placed into the sphere of self-consciousness. To belong willy-nilly to a certain level of human evolution is not the same as attaining that level through inner exercises.

[ 11 ] You will realize from what was said yesterday that mankind must gradually acquire knowledge in a different way; he must set his thought processes free from the breathing process. As I explained yesterday, this has the effect that thinking, by no longer being bound up with the subject, is able to unite itself with the rhythm of the external cosmos. We must go with our thinking out of ourselves into the external world, whereas the Yogi crept into his inner being, by hitching together, as it were, the systems of thought and breath. In so doing he identified himself with what his spirit-soul nature was able to experience on the waves of the inner rhythm of breathing. By contrast, we must give ourselves up to the world in order to participate in all the various rhythms which go through the mineral, plant, animal and human worlds right up to the realm of the Hierarchies. We must enter into, and live within , the rhythm of external existence. In this way mankind will again gain insight into that spiritual foundation of nature which external knowledge does not reach.

[ 12 ] The sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology which are pursued nowadays provide mankind with a vast amount of popular information. What they actually do is explain how sense observation, interpreted by the intellect, sees the world. But the time has come when mankind must rediscover what lies behind the knowledge provided by external observation and intellectual interpretation.

[ 13 ] If one has in mind their physical aspect only, when speaking about the four elements of earth, water, air and fire, then it makes no difference whether one uses these terms or prefers the more recent ones of solid, liquid, aeriform bodies and conditions of heat. When they are referred to today all one has in mind is how the physical substances within them are either combined or mixed, or else separated. However, it must be stressed that everything of a solid, earthen nature has as its foundation an elementary spirituality. Today's “enlightened” people may laugh when reminded that older folks used to see gnomes in everything earthy. However, when knowledge is no longer obtained by means of combining abstract, logical thoughts, but by uniting ourselves through our thinking with the world rhythm, then we shall rediscover the elemental beings contained in everything of a solid earthy nature. The outstanding characteristic of these elemental begins, dwelling in solid earth, is cleverness, cunning, slyness, in fact, a one-sidedly developed intellect.

Thus, in the solid earth element live spiritual beings of an elementary kind who are very much more clever than human beings. Even a person of extreme astuteness intellectually is no match for these beings who, as supersensible entities, live in the realm of solid earth. One could say that just as man consists of flesh and blood, so do these beings consist of cleverness, of super cleverness. Another of their peculiarities is that they prefer to live in multitudes. When one is in a position to find out how many of these astute beings a suitable earthy object contains, then one can squeeze them out as if from a sponge—in a spiritual sense, of course—and out they flow in an endless stream. [ 14 ] But counting these gnome-like beings is a difficult task. If one tries to count them as one would cherries or eggs—i.e., one, two, three- one soon notices that they will not be counted that way. When one has reached say three, then there are suddenly a lot more. So counting them as one would on the physical plane is no use; nor is any other form of calculation, for they immediately play tricks on you. Suppose one put two on one side and two on the other in order to say that twice two makes four. One would be wrong, for through their super cunning they would appear as seven or eight, making out that two times two makes eight, or something like that. [ 15 ] Thus, these beings defy being counted. It must be acknowledged that the intellect, developed by man in recent times, is very impressive. But these super-intelligent beings show a mastery over the intellect even where it is merely a question of numbers.

[ 16 ] The elemental beings dwelling in the fluid element—i.e., in water—have particularly developed what is, in man, his life of feeling and sensitivity. In this respect we humans are really backward compared with these beings. We may take pleasure in a red rose or feel enchanted when trees unfold their foliage. But these beings go with the fluid which as sap rises in the rosebush and participate in the redness of the blossoms. In an intimate way they share feelingly in the world processes. We remain outside of things with our sensitivity, whereas they are right inside the process themselves and share in them.

[ 17 ] The elemental beings of air have developed to a high degree what lives in the human will. It is splendid that the analytical chemist discovers the atomic weight of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and that he finds out how hydrogen and oxygen combine into water to be further analyzed or else how chloride of lime is analyzed, and so on. But elemental spiritual beings are active behind all this and it is essential that man should acquire insight into their characteristics. During the period in which man developed the intellect—as already mentioned, this was from the first third of the 15th Century to the end of the 19th Century—these elemental beings were pushed to one side, as it were. While the intellect played a creative part in man's cultural life there was not much they could do; and because the elemental beings dwelling in solids had, in a certain sense, to hold back and leave the intellect to man, they also held back the beings of water and air. But now we live at a time when the intellect has begun to decline within the civilized world; it is falling into decadence. If mankind does not become receptive to what streams towards him from the spiritual world then the result of this dullness on man's part will be—and there are signs already of it happening—that these elemental beings will gather together to form a kind of union and place themselves under the leadership of the supreme intellectual power: Ahriman.

[ 18 ] If it should happen that the elemental beings come under the guidance of Ahriman with the clear intention of opposing human evolution, then mankind would be unable to make further progress. The possibility would arise that the Ahrimanic powers in union with the elemental beings would divert the earth from its intended course. The earth would not continue what is described in my Occult Science—an Outline as the Saturn-Sun-Moon-Earth evolution. The earth can only become what it was originally intended to become if man, in each epoch, tackles his task rightly.

[ 19 ] One can see already how matters stand. Those who have reached a certain age know that formerly one gained insight into another human being's inner thoughts and feelings simply through normal conversation and exchange of ideas. One took it for granted that a person's reason and intellect resided in his head, and what was in the head would be conveyed through the spoken word. There are many people today who no longer take it for granted that reason is located in the head of many of their contemporaries; rather do they assume it to have slid further down. So instead of listening they now analyze. This is just one example from one misunderstood aspect of the whole problem. But I would say that when one starts to psychoanalyze people instead of just letting them talk, then that is, in fact, an admission that reason no longer resides in the head. It is assumed to have slid down into deeper regions of human nature and must be psychoanalyzed to be brought up gain to consciousness. In this age of a declining intellect there are already people who dislike it if one appeals to their intelligence; they prefer to be analyzed. This is because they do not want to participate with the head in what their soul brings to light.

[ 20 ] Nothing is achieved by looking at these things merely from an external point of view. To see clearly what is involved they must be considered—as we have just done—in the wider context of world evolution. Certain aspects of psychoanalysis may do some good. There are conditions which formerly were simply accepted but are no longer tolerated and must be cured. However, as so many cures are needed, physical ones do not suffice, so one resorts to psychological ones. Why this should be so must be seen in a wider context.

[ 21 ] Superficially judged, there is no point in objecting to all the good reasons and beguiling arguments put forward by psychoanalysts, not even from the wider viewpoint of world evolution. People want to avoid seeing things in their wider context, though it would lead them to the recognition that a spiritual stream is seeking to enter our present civilization to replace the declining intellect.

[ 22 ] What we have considered so far amounts to one aspect of what in the future threatens mankind. There is another aspect—just as the lower elements of earth, water and air are inhabited by elemental beings, so are the higher elements of light ether, chemical ether and life ether. However, these beings of the higher elements differ considerably from those of the lower ones. The beings of light, and particularly those of life, do not aim at becoming multitudes. The ones who strive the most to become multitudes are the beings of the earth element. The beings of the etheric element strive rather towards unity. It is difficult to differentiate them from one another; they do not express any individuality and rather strive to amalgamate.

[ 25 ] Certain initiates in ancient times, through whom certain teachings of the Old Testament originated, turned their attention particularly towards the etheric elements. The strong tendency of these elements towards unification created an influence which resulted in the strict Monotheism of Judaism.

[ 26 ] The religion which is based on the worship of Jehovah originated mainly from a spiritual vision of the realm of the ethers. In this realm live spiritual beings who do not strive to separate from one another and become many individuals. Rather do they strive to grow together and disappear into one another; they seek to become a unity.

[ 27 ] If these beings are disregarded by man—i.e., if he does not turn to spiritual knowledge and the insight that what exists up in the sky is not merely the physical sun, but that with the sun's warmth and light ether beings stream down to earth—if man's comprehension stops at the external material aspect, then the possibility exists that these beings will unite with Luciferic powers. In order for the earth to become what it was originally intended to become, man must wake up to the dangers that threaten from both sides—on the one hand, the danger that those beings who dwell in the lower elements will join forces with Ahrimanic powers, and on the other, that the Luciferic powers will unite with those of the higher elements in their striving for unity.

[ 28 ] The significance of spiritual knowledge for man's earthly destiny cannot be emphasized too strongly. Unless man draws near to spiritual reality something completely different from what ought to happen will happen to the earth. No matter how far or how deeply our sophisticated sciences of physics and chemistry investigate the material world around us, the fact remains that what is investigated will all disappear along with earth existence itself. In the last resort, chemistry and physics have no value whatever beyond the earth. When the evolution of the earth comes to an end, all mineral substances will turn to dust and dissolve in the cosmos. Only what pertains to the plant, animal, and human world will pass over to the Jupiter existence. Therefore, all the magnificent achievements of these sciences are related only to what is transitory. It is essential that knowledge is attained of that which endures beyond the earth.

[ 29 ] As already mentioned, whatever physical laws are discovered, whatever is investigated concerning the atomic weight of individual elements or whatever chemical formulae are produced—all these things are concerned only with what has merely transient significance. Man must grow beyond earth existence through knowledge of the kind of things I have explained. These are matters of great import and significance.

Translation cuts off here. It is filled in for completion

[ 30 ] When one looks in all seriousness at such significant things as we have now, I would say, brought out as the result of yesterday's and the day before yesterday's considerations, then one would also like to look again at the anthroposophical movement, which is striving to take into account the fact that spiritual life wants to enter the earth. One would also like to turn to the anthroposophical movement itself, and so allow me to say a few words about this anthroposophical movement now.

[ 31 ] You sometimes get the impression from what is happening in the anthroposophical movement today that things are very different from how they were years ago. The entire anthroposophical movement actually arose more from an esoteric deepening into the spiritual world. And when anthroposophy began twenty years ago, at that time within the Theosophical Society, everything that was being pursued, presented, and put forward in smaller circles grew, but also everything that was carried out of the smaller circles into the public sphere grew out of esoteric foundations. And what kind of esoteric background this was can be felt today in a publication such as my cycle “The Orient in the Light of the Occident” in “Drei,” where this cycle was printed in 1909; one feels the esoteric impulse throughout this cycle.

[ 32 ] Now, my dear friends, some older members look back on the earlier days of the anthroposophical movement with a certain dissatisfaction because they believe that this esoteric current no longer exists today — not really with good reason, because more esoteric things than have been presented in these three days can hardly be presented in the present. So one cannot say that esotericism has ceased to be pursued in our inner circles, especially here in Dornach, and this esotericism also flows through the public lectures. But the older members do not look back because esotericism is no longer there, because it does not flow into what is being offered, but because today they find other things as well.

[ 33 ] People find that university courses and congresses are now being held. A whole series of university courses have already been held in Dornach and in other cities — Dornach is not a city — in Dornach and in other places. A conference has been held in Stuttgart, and now we are facing a conference in Vienna. Now, our older members notice that there is a different tone at these university courses, at these conferences, that anthroposophy is treated in a different way [than they are used to], that anthroposophy is treated with a certain scientific character. Some of the older members are angry about this and say: That doesn't really interest us. They engage in logical acrobatics, developing one thing from another according to the pattern that prevails in science today. We have become accustomed to approaching the spiritual world in great leaps through inner understanding; we find it possible to approach the spiritual world out of a certain inner understanding. And now people come along and talk from chemical and physical principles, and in recent times even from mathematical formulas, stringing one thing after another, just as is customary in science today, except that they speak anthroposophically and show how anthroposophy has no reason to shy away from appearing fully valid in scientific circles. That doesn't interest us, say the older members today.

[ 34 ] Yes, my dear friends, there is something peculiar about this lack of interest. It was not actually this second stream of anthroposophical life that we sought, but it came to us. Anthroposophy has such a widespread literature today that many more people in the world are familiar with it than one might think. They just don't dare to come forward. But it is nevertheless a rarity that a book like my “Outline of the Secret Science,” which is difficult to read — it was meant to be difficult to read! — which is not written in a way that endears itself to the soul — it is not exactly travel literature — has had fifteen editions since 1909, all of which are now out of print. So, anthroposophy came out into the world, and it was only natural that it became known to people with a scientific or pseudo-scientific education. And then one day we were faced with the fact that other people were drawing anthroposophy into the current scientific enterprise. That was not a matter of choice. It was indeed the case that one day we were faced with a fait accompli. Anthroposophy was scientifically examined, scientifically rebuked, scientifically criticized, and held accountable before science, even if only inadequately today. On the other hand, it was natural that a number of younger friends took a different path than older scientists in our movement.

[ 35 ] I may have already mentioned here an older scientist with whom an anthroposophical conversation years ago was downright exasperating. The person in question is an exceptionally learned botanist. Well, I was so naive, or thought I had to be naive for certain reasons, that I thought the best way to talk to this gentleman about anthroposophy would be to start with botany. So I spoke to the scholar about the essence of plants, the essence of flowering, the essence of germination, in such a way that these individual things pointed to anthroposophy. It did not occur to him to take an interest in this. On the other hand, he was interested in—and very well versed in—all the descriptions that came from the Theosophical Society about the etheric body, the astral body, and so on. For heaven's sake, he thought to himself, I have to lecture on botany and explain plants to my university students in the botanical cabinet; yes, if anthroposophy comes into play there, it will be a fatal story. That won't do, it must be protected from that; I have to be a respectable professor who is not so different from the others. — Therefore, he was not at all interested in how I could talk about plants from an anthroposophical point of view, even though he is a botanist. Yes, one had to speak quite separately from the etheric body and the astral body and, in his opinion, preferably from Kama-Manas and Budhi-Manas and so on, and one could already talk to him about races and rounds, because so-called empirical research does not go that far.

[ 36 ] Yes, you see, the learned people of the older generation were not very interested in integrating anthroposophy into their science. So younger friends gradually came along, but because of their more inwardly coherent soul nature, they felt the need to deal with anthroposophy in their science as well. And so, on the one hand, you had, forgive me, the mob that attacked anthroposophy, and on the other hand, the younger people who now wanted to engage with their sciences from an anthroposophical perspective. This meant that, in a completely natural way, from outside, the scientific work was able to take place. And then, of course, it couldn't be that in university courses and congresses, I myself would have spoken in a way that was, I don't want to say unscientific, but anti-scientific, that is, apart from science. And so, through what came from the world, these institutions, these enterprises, acquired a kind of scientific character, which was also demanded by the fact that anthroposophy gradually had to intervene in practical life, even in therapy. All this, as I said, came to anthroposophy as a demand from the world. As I said, if older friends take into account that esotericism is still continuing, and are content with this, taking note out of general interest of how the scientific current flows when it is fertilized by anthroposophy, then they will soon come to the conclusion: We go to the conferences, we hear things about differential equations, integrals, and so on, and we find: Yes, now things have changed somewhat, but it is necessary that they have changed in this way.

[ 37 ] The difficulty actually lies elsewhere; it does not lie so much in these two currents, which you can see everywhere and about which you have more or less mixed feelings. My dear friends, I did not want to talk so much about these two currents, but rather about what is important to me in the present. Today, when one participates in anthroposophical life, one experiences on the one hand the continuation of the old esotericism and on the other hand the exoteric, scientific striving. Between them there is still an abyss; there is no connection. And that is what needs to be considered above all else. We have very significant, beautiful debates of an anthroposophical nature in the individual sciences, and on the other hand we have the continuation of the old esotericism. But today we simply do not yet have enough people and workers who can build bridges across the abyss that yawns between them. Today, individuals speak very beautifully about anthroposophy in botany, about anthroposophy in chemistry, about anthroposophy in physics, and so on. One can also continue the old esotericism, but it does not build a bridge from one to the other, and therefore so many people are no longer familiar with it. This bridge is, of course, entirely possible, and it must be built at some point; but today there is still a chasm, and there are still too few active workers among us for what should actually happen to happen in all areas. However, such shortcomings – for they are indeed shortcomings – are still largely overlooked.

[ 38 ] My dear friends, if we develop the necessary seriousness that can arise from such considerations as those I put forward at the beginning today, as well as yesterday and the day before, if we face the whole seriousness of the present situation of humanity, then we will say to ourselves: However many shortcomings the anthroposophical movement may still have at present—and we must keep an open eye for these shortcomings—we must nevertheless recognize that patience is needed to wait until we have enough active workers so that something like this abyss between our present exoteric and esoteric endeavors can be filled or at least bridged.

[ 39 ] Of course, there is a difficulty in relation to the world in that, despite all our conferences, everything that is achieved there always remains, I would say, within the conference. One need only remember the wonderful Stuttgart conference, which was extremely successful as such, but remained an internal affair. There was no question of implementing the results of the congress or making known what had been achieved there. No one is concerned with implementation. And so it has been with every single undertaking so far. So today we have far too few active workers to be able to achieve in a thoroughgoing manner what actually needs to be done. As a result, it happens again and again—when someone gets a whiff of the anthroposophical movement and listens to a single lecture here or there, from which they cannot form a judgment, but nevertheless form a judgment—as a result, it happens again and again today that we are inundated with assessments of anthroposophy by people who actually know nothing about it. This is partly because we have too few active workers, and partly because the seriousness I spoke of again today is not sufficiently present in reality.

[ 40 ] You see, my dear friends, if the anthroposophical movement were working uniformly everywhere, the time would have come today when people would quietly begin — I must say “quietly” — here and there to strike a note showing that anthroposophy has to do with the most serious issues not only of our age but, in fact, of the entire future of humanity. What appears in journals and so on is mostly written with a complete ignorance of anthroposophy, and in some cases with malicious intent.

[ 41 ] You see, I received a review of my last lecture cycle in Germany from a person unknown to me. It concerns the lecture cycle which, as you will have heard, was subjected to those appalling disturbances, which are clearly aimed at further and more gruesome attempts to eradicate the anthroposophical essence. I have said so often that these things will increase more and more; there is no need to repeat it. But I am accustomed to the fact that when something happens again, no matter how terrible it may be, people in the widest circles, even within our society, are of the opinion that this is the worst that can happen and that we therefore need not concern ourselves with it. It is not the worst, you can be sure of that!

[ 42 ] But I do not want to talk about that. I would rather point out that here and there today there is a quiet awareness of the importance of the impulse of the times. The person who wrote what I am referring to here has no idea of the significance of what I said yesterday, for example: that we must not ignore what has been achieved in recent centuries within Western civilization as a culture of reason, that we cannot return to the ancient Indian yoga breathing techniques, for example, and that we must not seek in earlier, more primitive epochs of human development the forces that can enable us to penetrate the spiritual world. The author of the article is one of those who believe that there is no other way forward in the present, that since we are cut off from all real human dignity and all real human nature, we must return to earlier paths by which humanity entered the spiritual world. — That is the great error, that people cannot find their way into a path that is adapted to the immediate present, to the soul nature of the immediate present.

[ 43 ] So the person concerned believes that when I always say that we should take into account what is necessary in the present, I am making compromises. That is why he says:

[ 44 ] Steiners personal calling ends where he attempts practical compromises in the face of the enormous complex that is Europe.

[ 45 ] It is not a compromise, but rather what is necessary from the inner connection of the matter! We do not want to give anything away in the way he forms the terminology here. Well, I cannot now tidy up the whole essay, and so I will read the passage to you as it stands.

[ 46 ] However, it must be the prophets who are most dismayed by the harsh inviolability of a “ground of given facts.” But he ceases to be a “prophet” in the full sense of the word when he becomes a political philosopher and makes corresponding concessions to this ground.

[ 47 ] So these concessions are not made. That is precisely the great mistake.

[ 48 ] For it is precisely in its radicalism that the radiant power of all prophecy lies. The prophet must—without the intervention of any human small-mindedness in everyday politics—give birth to the living spirit; he must hurl the seeds of powerful principles into humanity like an insensitive mediator, seemingly unconcerned about the seasons of their realization. He must leave the realizations to the creative function of the peoples.

[ 49 ] With the recognition of the necessity of saving Europe — which, with its poor cosmic circulation, is gradually clogging up the entire planet — anthroposophy no longer stands alone.

[ 50 ] At least there is already a very faint awareness that there is something wrong with the current European civilization, that it is in a “bad circulation community with the cosmos.”

[ 51 ] The objectified synthesis of all European philosophy emerges: the doctrine of the polarity of contrasts and their central resolution and balance—creative indifference. This means a revolution of the entire human standpoint. We see the human complex on a rushing precipice, completely skewed toward the universal force, filled with one-sidedly differentiated energy, closed off from the entire cosmos, an arteriosclerotic giant carcass, a catastrophe in the solar system, a “digestive disorder of God.” — Here, insights converge, anthroposophy identifies with the doctrine of creative indifference, and the mystery cults of the Egyptians and the breathing exercises of the Indian yogis emerge with new meaning.

[ 52 ] Now the person in question would like to argue, according to his view, that there is no other solution to the disturbed digestive system of modern civilization with its arteriosclerosis and constipation than to return to the practice of yoga. But at least he is beginning to grasp the seriousness of the situation, albeit in a somewhat strange, uninformed, and amateurish way. The author continues:

[ 53 ] At night we switch off our consciousness — insofar as we are not yet so disturbed that we barricade ourselves with individuality in our sleep from cosmic renewal — ...

[ 54 ] This is, of course, a completely wrong view, because human beings cannot draw any forces of renewal from sleep; on the contrary, it is precisely when they do not turn to spirituality that they draw forces from sleep in the last resort.

[ 55 ] ... without the inhibition of isolated consciousness, they absorb the healing forces of the cosmos.

[ 56 ] This is not the case with sleep.

[ 57 ] The moment we isolate ourselves, our whole life becomes nothing more than a mere existence, a living off capital, a running down of stored energy, nothing but a process of decay. The consequence of all individuality (individuality in the sense of bourgeois ideology) is therefore inescapable: death. Nothing stands in the way of human immortality—today a great utopia—except the false disposition of humans toward central balance.

[ 58 ] He also has no real understanding of what this is all about, that it is ultimately something he describes in very abstract terms as balance, and which can be understood in concrete terms when one sees how the astral body and the etheric body come together in the region of the human heart. There is also the central point for a real balance. This balance has a cosmic meaning. People today talk in abstract terms; they are simply incapable of penetrating the concrete realities.

[ 59 ] Today, anthroposophy is approaching the practice of yoga.

[ 60 ] It does not do this, but rather through a different practice.

[ 61 ] Whatever objections one may have to the dogmatism of anthroposophy, Steiner has accomplished an unprecedented work of rebellion against the entire monistic-materialistic natural science, which is only historically burdened instead of historically oriented. Perhaps Rudolf Steiner will succeed in establishing the practice of yoga against the narrow-minded materialism and arrogance of Europe.

[ 62 ] It would not be the practice of yoga itself. But to assert something against the narrow-minded materialism and arrogance of Europe is certainly something that is right and that is interpreted here in an unhealthy but nevertheless subtle way.

[ 63 ] Having reached the limits of its viability, Europe will, out of organic necessity, turn to this ancient wisdom of Indian yogis and recognize the spiritual significance of the breath.

[ 64 ] It would be very, very bad for Europe if it did that, if it returned to the practice of yoga. But at least we can see that here and there a quiet awareness of the seriousness of the situation is beginning to emerge, something to which humanity should commit itself.

[ 65 ] Well, it is possible that anthroposophy will be brutally crushed before it is able to carry out what is entirely possible according to its inner nature. But that is at least something that is significant. I am not merely pointing to this newspaper article, whose author is unknown to me. It was sent to me by those who organized this series of lectures. As I said, quite apart from this article, one can say that today, here and there, people are quietly beginning to point out the seriousness of our situation, of our human situation in modern civilization.p>

[ 66 ] And I would like to say: Only from such an understanding of the tremendous seriousness of the situation can that which can truly stand up to anthroposophy in a genuine way emerge. And we should strive to summarize what is emerging today as currents, on the one hand esoteric and on the other exoteric-scientific, out of the necessity of the times. We should take into account that these things have developed out of necessity and that the time will come—if anthroposophy is not killed off, as I said—when enough active forces will be found to bridge the gulf between these two currents. You see, that is what I wanted to give you today as an internal guide, following on from such an important consideration as I have tried to present to you here over the last few days.

[ 67 ] I will announce when we will have the next lecture, as I cannot yet determine the exact day when I will return from the Vienna Congress. I hope that this Vienna Congress will be well attended. I have not had the opportunity to find out who from here has been able to attend. But hopefully this Vienna Congress will be something that will have a greater impact on the general anthroposophical movement than our other events have had. For it is indeed the case that what happens at these congresses should then flow over into the entire anthroposophical movement and from there be further developed throughout the world. Otherwise, the great energy that is always expended at such events is more or less wasted.

Let us once more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions, not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them. What does this mean?

When you see colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole experience is toned down.

When you perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility, this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green, and so on.

But we must realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.

When you look at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate being.

We shall indeed see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised—but I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death. It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the gate of death.

As I pointed out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher experience.

We must then be able—as I also mentioned yesterday—to take all we have striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it. It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that—just as the physical world streams into us through our senses—so the spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world. Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This peace I can describe only in the following way.

Let us imagine we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is terrible—we say—when, from all sides, tumult assails our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London. But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes. Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.

Yet we can go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is nothing left—the purse is empty. We can compare this nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have less than nothing.

And now let us imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual world. Certainly—I will say more of this later—we must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return. But there is something else to come—an experience previously unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when, through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we can say the following:

If we study the human eye—the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical world, and is so important for us that through it we receive nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth and death—we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into which the eyeballs were inserted from outside—as indeed the physical record of evolution shows—were hollowed out at a time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of the organism.

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

The world we meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour and in sound—this world differs essentially from the world perceived by the senses. When we are living with it—and we have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for us—we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening, in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination, and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.

Following an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of Imagination, the astral world—the name is not important—and what we bring along with us from that world, and have carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation. For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails a further super-sensible step, which in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling; yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture, of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on Earth.

Earthly man has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws, the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant feature of human life on Earth—that out of a dim inner presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced cognition.

The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force. What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance, by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not in their usual sequence but in reverse order.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.

You will probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of experiences.” Then first try taking episodes—picturing, for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go back in imagination through a whole day in three or four minutes.

But that, after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from outside—we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing, blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals. We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy but with our will into every single event in nature.

All this must be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.

Experiencing these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual Intuition is possible only by applying—in stillness and emptiness of consciousness—the capacity for love we can first learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.

These Beings described in my book, Occult Science, these Beings of the higher Hierarchies—we now learn to live in our experience of them; they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear, through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical world.

If anyone wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man, in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego—the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths—is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves during our present earthly existence in order to have any insight into a preceding one.

When we have achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from experience.

I have had to describe for you—in outline to begin with—the path of Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a different way, conditions for his inner development in the various epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be learning more about these variations in course of the next few days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge which had to be given out in early times was very different from what has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years, to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual world differed from that of the present time, and how different, accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate today.

We have now a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula, demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything else—minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself—is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is described in a thoroughly scientific way.

The process is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken, sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have seen the process reproduced.

Now in moral life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no reality.

It is characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men. Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's laws.

I could give you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing this attitude towards nature: how—because a man absorbs this with the culture of the day—he considers nature to be governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—as I have pictured them. He must be led by Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.

In the old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time, had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood. About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals, plants, animals.

For primeval man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha—there were both earlier and later times when civilisation was different—a man had an inward feeling of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow, clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say: “With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals, or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

This was how people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed, but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which, though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those times. Knowledge had to be consoling.

It was consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally, or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.

These wise men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers, and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in their Mysteries—yet to be described—that even in this fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled with the divine.

Hence we learn from what is told of those past ages—told even of the Grecian age—that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it, for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self with God. All he now needs—in addition to his knowledge of nature and in conformity with it—is that a new Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths, could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Thus, in human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life, this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued, given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit, which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of the old Initiation.

Answers to Questions

Questions were asked about the nature of imagination, inspiration and intuition. The wording of the questions was not noted down by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: With regard to the question of the difficulty with such a word as “imagination”, I would like to remark the following:

When we take up a word in order to render a significant content, we should always go back to the original meaning of the word and not actually ask: “What meaning is given to the word just now in colloquial speech?”¹ because it is basically the case with all current colloquial languages that they have flattened the words. I have already had to draw attention to something this morning, but it has an inner justification. The word “intuition” is also used in, I would say, an everyday sense, but rightly so, because the highest knowledge of the spiritual life for the moral realm must come down to the simplest, even most primitive human mind. For such a word as “imagination” we cannot say the same thing, and one should therefore first of all always realize what is contained in such a word. The moment you peel off the prefix and suffix of the word and go to the middle, you immediately come to “magic”. “Magic” is in the word “imagination”: it is an internalization of the magical. If you go back to such an original meaning of the word, you will find that the linguistic usage on which it is based today is quite a flattened one.

Now I would like to know what one should actually do in anthroposophy and in spiritual deepening in general, if one does not make the requirement that all words must be brought back to their deeper meaning.

You see, you have to take something like anthroposophy so seriously that you also have to realize this thought: Can anthroposophy be represented at all in today's colloquial language in reality? Is it even possible to say anything so significant about anthroposophy in any colloquial language? - Well, all colloquial languages originally contain something deeper, and you can go back to these deeper meanings in all colloquial languages today.

When we speak of “imagination” today and also use the word for that which is incorporated into the imagination, we have simply taken the word for that which is known today solely and exclusively from an inner experience. Most people today, when speaking of inner experience, think that it is all fantastic, and they then describe the fantastic as the imaginative. From their point of view, they are quite right. But if one does not have the will to go back to the original meaning of the word “imagination”, then it will be very difficult to get anthroposophy into the language at all.

You have to realize the following: You see, there are many things in the word “magic”. First of all, there is something in the word “magic” that I would like to describe as follows: When we are scientifically curious today, we look into the microscope, and we then see that which is small in the world, that which is small in the world - be it the longed-for atom, which is also shown experimentally today, be it some germinal plant - today's materialistic science is always curious about this small thing. But the moment we go to the real causes of things, the moment we go to where the creative forces and powers of things are, we do not come to the small, but to the great. And the creation out of the great, the creation out of the mighty, the imposing, that which encompasses creative powers that surpass the small human being, to bring this into the human soul in an appropriate way, that is: to condense the magical so that it can be received and experienced by the human soul in the condensation.

And just as one should do with the word “imagination”, one should also do it with all other words that are used. Almost everyone today speaks of inspiration. I don't deny him the right - why should I deny him the right, because everyone has the right to use the word “inspiration” at the level at which he moves - but everyone speaks of “inspiration” today, even when he thinks of a joke. Now, of course, this interpretation of the word “inspiration”, when used in this way, is not appropriate for the paths of higher knowledge. But again, let us make it our principle to look at the words in the current languages of civilization in the same way as people were once looked at in general.

Just think about it: as late as the 18th century, here in England and on the continent, people everywhere were still very much occupied with so-called Martinism, with the philosophy that came from Saint-Martin, especially with his book: “Des erreurs et de la verité”. Yes, a book appeared in “Edimbourg” in 1775 that has been translated into all European languages, a book that dealt with the spiritual, so to speak, in the manner of the time, a final offshoot for the kind of spiritual contemplation that was still possible until the 18th century and into the beginning of the 19th century, but which is no longer possible today.

Now, if we take one of the main ideas of Saint-Martin's book “Des erreurs et de la verité”, then we find that man in his totality as an earthly being is seen as having fallen away from his original greatness; there the - I would like to say still complete man - is accused of the fall into sin. Man was once, in Saint Martin's sense, still a mighty being, girded with the so-called holy armor, which served him magically, made him magical in the face of all the forces and entities of the world, many of which were hostile to him. Man lived in the place described by Saint Martin as the place of the seven sacred trees, which in religious legend, or earlier for my sake in the Bible, is referred to as paradise. Man was gifted with the fiery spear, through which he exercised his corresponding power, and so on. All the things that are originally attributed to man are said to have been lost to man through his own pre-earthly guilt; even in his pre-earthly state a terrible sin is attributed to man, which even in social life today is shocking to mention. And so man is portrayed as a being who has fallen from his original greatness. And the whole of Martinism, the whole philosophy of Saint Martin, actually sets itself the task of showing what man could be if he had not fallen from his original greatness.

Now, these connections can no longer be made fully alive today; they are precisely the last offshoot of that way of looking at things which I described this morning as the old way of looking at things. Within the modern science of initiation we must proceed from the scientific way of knowing - not from natural science itself, but from the scientific way of knowing - for that alone will be able to satisfy man in the course of the near future. But with regard to special fields, if we really want to penetrate the anthroposophical content, all the content of any spiritual striving, with the necessary mood, with the necessary uplifting of the soul, with the holy enthusiasm with which we are to penetrate it in order to really understand it - if we want to do that, then we will not be allowed to take the words out of the ordinary colloquial language, but we will have to look at the words as if actually all words up to our civilization had undergone a fall from grace. Words today are no longer what they were: they have become sinful beings. They have fallen down into matter and no longer signify what they signified when they were once still close to that stage of human development in which they were used in the Mysteries. And we must, in a certain sense, take a step upwards in feeling the words. We must make an effort not to stop at what is common colloquial language; otherwise the words will also take on the color, the ‘timbre’ that these words have in colloquial language. The easiest thing to do today is to ascend from the words in the fall of man to a kind of sacred meaning of the words in the Hebrew language. For those languages that have been used more within modern life with its thoroughly unsacramental interests, it is of course difficult for these languages to move up to the sinlessness of words - if I may put it that way - it is not meant so badly, but in a certain respect we must do so. And so we have to be clear: the word “inspiration” has fallen to the point of sinfulness today, where anyone who makes a joke already says they are inspired. - So why not? Basically, the writers, even the cartoonists, of funny papers need a lot of inspiration in today's sense, but it's a profaned inspiration today.

But if we go back to the word in its more original meaning, then we are led into very deep regions of human aspiration.

There I must remind you of the way in which, for example, in India - at a decadent level - a wonderful, admirable form of knowledge has been preserved, which was once much more significant than it is today, but which did not, as it must be today, proceed directly from thinking, but which proceeded from a very specific regulation or even dysregulation of the breathing process. Within the original yoga method it was a matter of raising the breathing process, which otherwise always runs unconsciously in the human being, to consciousness. This can be achieved by changing the rhythm of inhalation, breath holding and exhalation from that which occurs unconsciously. If you give the breathing rhythm different numerical ratios than you have in ordinary everyday breathing, then you breathe differently in relation to inhaling, holding your breath and exhaling. What is called the yoga method is essentially based on such different shapes and forms of breathing. This yoga method brought the whole breathing process to consciousness. Man breathed by consciously changing the rhythm of his breathing: the flow of breath consciously entered into the circulation of the blood. The whole human being undulated and interwove with a changed breathing rhythm. And just as we receive sensory observation in the ray of sight or the ray of hearing, just as we receive knowledge of the colors of the surrounding things through sight, just as we receive knowledge of the sounds emanating from the surrounding things through the ray of hearing, so the one who made the breathing rhythm into an elevated, into a magical perception, felt the soul-spiritual, he perceived in the breathing process the soul-spiritual permeating him. At the moment when the breathing process became fully conscious, and when at the same time that disposition of soul was present which was present in South Asia about seven or eight thousand years before our era, at that moment, through this altered breathing rhythm, one not only sent the physical air into the body with this swelling and surging, but one sent soul and spirit into this flowing breath, and one experienced soul and spirit, insofar as the soul and spirit of man are in this flowing breath.

Now you can materially call the inhalation yes “inspiration” - that is the literal. If one spiritualizes the inspiration, one does what happened in ancient India: then one will experience the spiritualized inspiration, with the breath that has been inspired and spiritualized like any mental being. Then we are dealing with what the word “inspiration” actually always originally meant - even in non-Indian, European languages. So when we speak of the word “inspiration”, we also have to move up, I would say, to the sinlessness of the word. And for this reason I have always been reluctant to write so-called “popular” books on anthroposophy - even though such suggestions have always been made from all sides. Of course, that would be very easy. But even the beginner should not actually be given quite popular books on anthroposophy, but should have something in anthroposophical books that he can - I mean spiritually - break his teeth on, where he has to make a terrible effort, that is something that does not come easily! For in this effort, in the overcoming of that which one must overcome in order to understand something that is difficult to understand, there is at the same time something else. For if one is like - yes, how shall I put it? - popular anthroposophy like a popular speech, then one also has a different taste and a completely different attitude towards the meanings of the words, then one pulls the meanings of the words down into their sinfulness. But if you have to grit your teeth at the difficulty of a beginner's book, then you also acquire a taste for delving into the words. You may even be reminded of some historical events. Take a look at the wonderful way Jakob Böhme ponders the words first, ponders them deeply, before he uses them. I would say that Jakob Böhme distils entire worlds out of the words before he uses them. And so the position with regard to something like “imagination” or ‘inspiration’ or “intuition” or other words, as we use them in ordinary life, is at a lower level than we usually assume. And so I do think that one should not actually try to replace words that are rightly used - “imagination”, “inspiration” - with others, but that one should rather work to elevate these words to their sinlessness for the anthroposophical understanding, at least as long as one is dealing with anthroposophy. When one goes out into ordinary life, one can of course again fall into the sinfulness of the words, there is no harm in that. And so just such an attitude towards words could be extraordinarily beneficial to anthroposophical deepening. So, I mean, anyone who becomes aware of what is in the word “imagination” would in the end, if he is a fanatic, even cry out for a law that forbids the use of the word imagination for this “fantasy” game, so that such a word is preserved for the area where it is actually rightly used.

With regard to the question: “Who or what recognizes in man?” I would like to say the following: Unfortunately, these questions are asked faster than they can be answered, and there is a great deal to be said if one is to answer such a far-reaching, comprehensive question. When such a question is raised, it must be made clear what the content of this morning's speech was actually about. Is it not true that when we speak of the paths to supersensible knowledge, as I did this morning and also yesterday, what is it all about? It is a question of how this human soul, which is present in any human being in the present incarnation, how this spiritual-soul, which is thus present in a physical body between birth or conception and death, how it ascends to the gradual recognition, firstly, of the etheric world of formative forces in the imagination, secondly, through the stillness which I have described, through the empty consciousness, in inspiration, to the recognition of the pre-natal world. And then, through intuition, which is achieved through the special training of the ability to love, one arrives at the view of the previous, or one could also say the previous earth lives, those earth lives which - as I explained this morning - are already objectively confronting the human being, like some external object or process of nature, or for my sake I could also say like another human being is objectively confronting one. If I stand opposite another person in ordinary social life, I am related to that person through the inner kinship of the same human race, but I stand opposite him objectively. I must face my previous incarnations as objectively as another person if I want to perceive them in truth. Then one learns to recognize with the soul-spiritual, which is embodied in the present earthly body, the actual, true I, which goes through the repeated earthly lives.

Now the question seems to me to be this: Who is it actually, or what is it in man that now recognizes this true I that passes through the repeated earth lives, or which member in man is it? - This question itself, ladies and gentlemen, is not really a question that has any real, concrete content. It asks about the subject of cognition. This subject of cognition is precisely that I which is embodied in the present earthly life, which then soars up to cognition. The true I can only be attained by first embracing with one's consciousness that which is included in earthly life between birth and death; then one lives in the I on a certain level; one lives in this I, but one does not yet recognize the true I, which goes through many births and deaths. But through the methods I have described, this higher ego, which one carries in earthly life by bringing oneself to selflessness, is made capable of recognizing the true ego.

And remember: you change the subject during this path of cognition. Firstly, we are dealing with the ego that lives between birth and death; it does not yet recognize the true ego. Now this ego vibrates upwards and is initially the recognizer of the true ego, which goes through repeated earthly lives. In this way it actually identifies itself cognitively with the true I. Thus, by undergoing a metamorphosis, this higher ego is raised into the true ego. And then, when it is elevated into the true I, it can only recognize the true I.

So we cannot ask: “Who or what recognizes in man?”, but we must say: "What recognizes in man in ordinary life is in itself already made into another I, it goes through a metamorphosis, in that it rises from imagination through inspiration to intuition. But then it is a transformed ego for cognition. But the transformation is there precisely in order to reach the true self.

• 1. The word ‘imagination’ is also used in English for “phantasy”.