The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I will begin today by adding a few things to what we have said over the years about spiritual science. One of the most elementary facts we know is that human beings as they have developed through what we have called Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth phases of evolution are composed of four principal parts, namely physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. We have often emphasized that merely naming the four parts of human beings and listing them is saying and doing very little. What is important is that we connect increasingly definite and concrete ideas and concepts with what arises in our soul when we speak of these four parts of the human being.

Let us first look at the physical body. We think we know it really well, or at least the physical sciences must know this body very well since they study it so much. Well, we know our physical body has to be a highly complicated creation for the simple reason that its first rudimentary form can be found as far back as the Saturn phase of evolution. That early physical form was then transformed during the Sun phase of evolution and changed further during the Moon phase of evolution, and by now it has undergone long ages of earth evolution, which have also left their imprint on our physical body. Thus, our physical body has been shaped in the course of four very long periods of time. We have to assume then a fourfold structure for this physical body.

When we ask what has come into our physical body during Earth evolution, we will only get a false idea if we rely on what ordinary life and conventional science tell us. For during earth evolution our physical body has only been remodeled, transformed, and metamorphosed. Much of it already existed, not merely in rudimentary form, but in a process of development, of unfolding, during the old Moon phase of evolution. We cannot really see much of what has been added during earth evolution if we take “see” in the true sense of the word. Actually, it is only our posture that has been changed during earth evolution; we have become upright beings, walking around with our spine perpendicular to the earth's surface. Our posture and everything connected with it has changed. Our upright physiognomy on the surface of the earth has been imprinted upon us during our evolution on earth.

When we think of a centaur, a very well-known mythological figure, we can say, based on spiritual science, that this figure of human being and horse, or generally of a human being and any animal form, is actually an imaginative representation of our physical body as it would be if we envisioned our present upright position combined with what human beings had been during the Moon phase of evolution before they became upright. Such figures or imaginations, which are preserved in mythology, conceal infinitely profound wisdom.

I wanted to mention this only as an example of the profound wisdom in such imaginations. Let us recapitulate briefly: If we really want to do justice to our physical body, we have to think of it as much more complicated than any of the physical sciences nowadays finds it convenient to do. We must realize that really only the position of the individual organs and the posture of our whole organism have been impressed upon us in the long course of earth evolution. Essentially, human development reaches very far back into the past to a time long before the earth existed.

Naturally, we must think in similar terms of the development of our higher, spiritual elements, namely, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. Now we have to contemplate the interrelations, the interconnections, between these parts. At first glance, the physical body seems to be built out of physical substances, and as we grow, we see it constantly becoming bigger, adding on matter or inserting matter in the spaces between its limbs and its cells. Later, when we become fat—if we do—we see how more substance or matter is added on to our physical body. When we now study the etheric body in the same way, we find something similar going on. Only in this case it is not substances but movements that are added. These movements get more complicated in the course of life. In the etheric body of a newborn child we find comparatively simple and primitive movements. But gradually they become more complicated. Clearly, there is a process of multiplying, of growth an development, at work in both the physical and the etheric bodies.

Things are different in the astral body and I. In our life in the physical world, we are at first active only in our I, for it alone possesses full consciousness. When you look at a colored surface, your I is active; when you think, your I is active; when you feel, your I is active. In all your activities, even when you walk or move your hands, the I is active. Everything you do while you are awake on the physical plane is ego activity. The ego is present in all activity.

How does ego activity express itself in relation to our other parts? How do all the things we do between waking up and falling asleep, that is, in full consciousness, manifest themselves? They manifest not in building up and growth, but in breaking down, in a depletion of the substances of the physical body and of the movements and forces of the etheric body.

For example, when you look at something red, or at anything colored, you are in a process of breakdown or depletion through the mere fact that you received an impression of the colored object. What takes place in your physical body, albeit in a very subtle sense, is a kind of killing or destruction of living substance, of living matter. To use a rather crude example, suppose you had a crystal that could still be changed and undergo transformations and imagine you exposed it to some kind of influence, for instance, the influence of light, so that the crystal would change and turn cloudy. In the same way something in your physical body becomes cloudy, and matter is being destroyed in your constitution, every time light reaches your eyes.

From the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, we are destroying, albeit only in a very subtle way, our physical substance with our ego activity. Therefore, we must compensate for this by sleeping. During sleep, physical matter is restored for our use. There is a perpetual building up and breaking down going on in us. Activity when we sleep means building up of physical matter, especially its constitution; activity when we are awake, that is, ego activity, means a breaking down. Thus you have a continual, cyclical alternation: building up and breaking down, building up and breaking down. We are actually constantly being depleted, being consumed, by the activity of our I, and when we sleep, we have to regenerate ourselves.

That is why we often notice that something ascends, as it were, from our physical organism when we wake up. These are the regenerating forces, the restoring forces. When we have something pathological or diseased in our organism, even if only very slightly so, that also ascends. As long as our organism is healthy, it regenerates itself in a healthy way by the time we wake up. However, if it is sick, it works to expel the sickness upward. That is why many people and even children are in a bad mood and not cheerful when they wake up. The aftereffect of what is coming up out of the organism is still there. What spiritual science tells us about the human being and human life agrees with the phenomena of life in a wonderful way. It is only about an hour and a half after waking up that we are completely free of the forces of sickness that can rise up. This is how our I and physical body interact. This interaction plays itself out in the rhythm of sleeping and waking: building up, breaking down, building up, breaking down.

There is still another relationship that is very important although we don't notice it much in our everyday life. Our I and physical body interact in building up and depletion, and a similar relationship exists between our astral body and etheric body. The only difference is that the building up, insofar as it comes from the astral body, is completed earlier in life, and the breaking down thus begins earlier. What our astral body breaks down in our etheric body is connected essentially with the fact that we become weaker in the course of life and die when we have become totally decrepit. The relationship between our astral body and etheric body is fundamentally connected with our death. It is only because our astral body gradually consumes the forces of our etheric body; which in turn depletes, consumes, our physical body, that we can die. In a sense, then, we can observe a building up and breaking down in the interaction between our etheric and our astral body in the course of life—although this is not as rapid a succession as the alternation between sleeping and waking, it nevertheless has a certain rhythm.

We know that exerting ourselves with too much ego activity harms us. This is easy to understand because ego activity is after all a breaking-down process. If there is too much breaking down, we clearly and visibly weaken our organism. We can notice this visible weakening at first glance. But there can also be a weakening of our etheric body through the astral body since the latter can, so to speak, deplete our etheric body excessively. The most common symptom of this kind occurs when we live in a way that demands too much of our astral body, the vehicle of our passions and emotions. As you know, such a life-style can lead to permanent weakening. This impairment results from the astral body depleting the etheric body.

However, things may happen quite differently. How we gradually build up our astral body in the course of our life—beginning at birth or, let's say, at conception—is connected with our karma. Whether we have a tendency to develop strong emotions and passions in our astral body is of course connected with our karma. These passions, however, can in a way be humanly significant and meaningful. For example, let's take a quality that plays a role throughout human life and that is nevertheless a passion, albeit the noblest passion, the one that in its noblest form can develop into freedom from selfishness: love. Love is a passion, but it can become entirely free of egoism. It is the only passion that can become free of egoism. It is located in the astral body; the astral body is its vehicle.

Let us assume an artist with a true feeling for reality had been given the task to create a human form suffused and permeated through and through with the passion of love, the noble passion of love. Clearly, this artist could not be a naturalist, for naturalists have no feeling for realities but see only abstract, “naturalist” matter, so-called actuality. Every time artists had the task to create a Venus or an Aphrodite, they had to feel that the figure had to be completely suffused by this passion of love. Love has to be abundant; it has to pour itself out. What is the only thing that could happen in such a case? Obviously, not every ordinary female figure can represent Aphrodite or Venus. Consequently, then, the astral body of Aphrodite or Venus cannot be like any other female astral body, for otherwise every woman, every girl; would be an Aphrodite or a Venus—and that is not the case, is it? Thus, it is a matter of a special development of the astral body. The artist does not have to know anything about spiritual science, but he must feel as he creates a Venus that her astral body must be more developed, more strongly developed than that of a non-Aphrodite, a non-Venus.

However, as we have said, the astral body has a depleting, consuming nature. That has to be expressed in the work of art. How will the artist who really feels this, who really has a sense for the depleting astral body, set about creating a Venus? He will have to make it visible that there is something about the physical body that gradually consumes it. And here the spiritual scientist is in a different situation than a modern physician, for example.

Suppose an artist had created a Venus. As he was creating her, he felt correctly that she had a more strongly consuming and depleting astral body than any other woman. We will see this in the slender neck and the shape of the chest. We will also see in other parts of the body that her astral body basically has a depleting nature. If the artist gives the matter physical expression, perhaps we will see in her overall shape that she will not live to a very old age. When an artist achieves such a creation, spiritual scientists will say he has a sense for the underlying reality. From this standpoint, we will say that artists, while they are creating, often feel a true spiritual reality.

However, what will a physician say, especially one who is not a spiritual scientist, when he sees such a figure created by an artist? He will say, “This is a representation of a person suffering from consumption.” For indeed people who suffer from consumption also have a more strongly consuming and depleting astral body—due to their karma in an earlier incarnation—than do other people. Now, Botticelli has painted a most beautiful and wonderful Venus, which most of you will know.¹ In this picture of Venus standing on a shell, we see a physical body painted in such a way that we cannot help thinking it is based on a depleting astral body. That is why art historians disagree about this painting. Some of them admire the figure of this Venus precisely for its deviation from the so-called normal human form; they admire her slender neck and the unusual shape of her upper chest, and so forth. Others say these features are the result of Botticelli having painted a model who suffered from consumption.

Well, it is certainly possible to explain everything in a materialistic way. Probably Botticelli really did paint a consumptive model, namely, Simonetta, who died at the age of twenty-three. But that is not the point. What is important is that he knew he wanted precisely this woman to sit for his Venus, a woman who made it possible for him to paint a person whose physical body was being depleted by the astral body more quickly than is usually the case. I will pass around this reproduction of the painting although it is not good, but I don't have a better one at the moment. In this picture, you will see it is really clearly noticeable that we are dealing here with an astral body of a different constitution, namely, with an astral body depleting the physical body by means of the etheric body. You see, spiritual science can guide us and show us the way to an understanding of such things.

You will find that observation not sharpened by spiritual science is never enough to elucidate life. However, all things are illuminated when we approach them with the help of spiritual science, in everyday life as well as in art. We need to become patient and realize the human being is far more complicated than conventional science cares to acknowledge. The human being is a complicated creature, and one of the most irresponsible pronouncements frequently uttered in connection with world views is that the best explanation is always the one that is simplest. Well, it is not the simplest explanation that is the best; the best explanation is the one that correctly explains the matter. That's what we have to realize.

Now let me give you another example to show that the conventional sciences cannot get very far without using the approach of spiritual science. Remember the public lecture I gave in the Architektenhaus this winter where I said we have to distinguish first of all between two parts of our physical body: our head and the rest of our body. When you look at the human skeleton, you'll see the head standing out clearly, distinct from the rest of the body. In that lecture I said that, roughly speaking, everything “hanging” from the head basically developed on earth. The condition of the human being at the end of the Moon phase of evolution, at the transition to the earth is retained only in the shape of the head. The head is a considerably older organ than the rest of our organism. The head is our oldest, most venerable part. The earth added all the rest to the head—that is, not quite all, but roughly speaking all the rest; we have to approximate these things.

When we consider that the I continues from incarnation to incarnation, we have to differentiate between the forces underlying the head and those underlying the rest of the organism. Remember, as I said, the form and shape of our head are essentially the result of our previous incarnation. How we conducted our life, how we acted in our previous incarnation, has left its mark on our organism and manifests in the following incarnation in our physiognomy, particularly in the shape of our skull.

As you may remember, I once said that the existence of reincarnation, repeated earth lives, is plainly visible in your skull, for the shape of your skull is determined by what kind of person you were in your previous incarnation. The formation of the rest of our physiognomy, our posture, whether we are fidgety or not and whether we gesture much or little—all this has a bearing on the next incarnation, when it is expressed in the shape of our face and particularly in that of the skull.

You can see how disputes about quite important things can arise. There are people who, especially according to their own opinion, are very learned in craniology. They feel a person's skull with their hands and read his or her character from it. What they say may be more or less true and can sometimes even be quite correct, but it can never be the whole truth or be exhaustive, because it is a fact that every one of us has indeed a head of his or her own. No skull is exactly like any other, for our skull is the result of our previous incarnation. The rest of our organism prepares the skull we will have in the next incarnation. Craniologists and phrenologists quarrel among themselves because they insist on generalizing where they ought to individualize. Well, every one has a head of his or her own!

It is only through intuition that we can find anything about a person's deeper nature revealed in the structure of the skull. Not only phrenologists, but science as a whole does not know what to make of the shape of the human skull. I would like to point out here that this is another area where the conventional natural sciences need to be supplemented by spiritual science.

In 1887, the famous anatomist Karl Langer gave a lecture on three truly important human heads, namely, the skulls of Schubert, Haydn, and Beethoven.² Karl Langer examined the anatomy of these three skulls. He emphasized that in none of them had he been able to find any indication of special musical talents, least of all in the skull of Beethoven. He underscored that from the standpoint of anatomy and physiology, Beethoven's skull was so ugly one would have expected anything else but not that the soul of Beethoven could have been active in it. Now Karl Langer is an anatomist who observed carefully in this particular case and proceeded on the basis of realities, not fantastic theories. He had to admit there is nothing to be found in these skulls that would indicate musical talents.

We know that Haydn, Schubert, and Beethoven were indeed musicians in the incarnation where the anatomist found these skulls. However, they may not have been musicians in their preceding incarnation. And we can well understand that particularly in the case of Beethoven everything that was purified in the time between death and rebirth could have come from a strong, powerful fighter. What is retained from the preceding incarnation manifests in the shape of the skull.

Langer was particularly struck by the fact that all three men had been musicians, and yet their skulls had nothing in common. There were no characteristics common to all three men precisely because they probably had completely different experiences in their previous incarnations and became musicians only in the incarnation where they had the skulls Langer examined. Their musical disposition expressed itself in their soul, while the shape of their skull was an expression of their experiences during the previous incarnation.

Eventually, arguments about these three skulls resulted. Another anatomist tried to prove Langer wrong. But the argument wasn't leading anywhere; after all, on what does a physical anatomist depend to study such matters? Of course, he will not want to hear of a previous incarnation and will therefore seize upon heredity. And Schaaffhausen, the anatomist who wanted to refute Karl Langer, observed that the shape of our skull is inherited.³ In connection with such pronouncements, people never study what really happens in the hereditary transmission of the shape of the skull. If they did and did not proceed with the usual logic people so love to use in this area, they would soon see how unfounded it is to talk of heredity in this connection. In reality, we create the form of our skull based on the result of our previous incarnation. Granted, other elements can overlap or clash with what has come about in accordance with the preceding incarnation. We grow up in a certain environment, and especially if our feelings, our heart and soul, are attached to personalities in a particular environment, a good deal will still be impressed into the finer organization of our body. However, in essence, the skull is shaped according to the preceding incarnation.

You know, of course, how brilliantly people are trying to apply the so-called theory of genetics. There is now an erudite book, diligently researched—I really don't want to say anything against erudition in such a case; on the whole, the author really worked like a beaver to present his points. This book traces Goethe's ancestors as far back as possible. And what is the purpose of all this busy work? The objective is to show that traits that have appeared in several of a person's ancestors also emerge when the line of ancestors culminates in a genius. People think this is highly logical.

However, as I have often said, it proves no more than saying if a man falls into water and is pulled out again, he will be wet.

Obviously, anyone coming from a certain line of ancestors still bears traits of this ancestry, which, after all, he or she has sought out. In order to prove that the theory of genetics really applies the way natural science assumes, one would have to start with certain traits and then show they are present in the following generations. Thus, we would have to start with the genius and then show that his or her extraordinary capacities were passed on to the offspring. But, of course, people will do nothing of the kind. After all, they could not prove that Goethe's genius was transmitted to his son or to his grandchildren, for we know all about them, don't we! Among the descendants of other people of genius this can also generally not be proved. When hereditary transmission could be proved, it was due to something quite different from physical heredity, namely to an inclination of the soul to incarnate in a particular family and to look for certain traits. Well, we have often talked about this.

You see, this is another example showing that conventional science must be complemented by spiritual science. What conventional science and everyday life have to offer us must at every turn be illuminated by the insights of spiritual science. Nowadays people have no idea how wonderfully the mysteries of cosmic evolution work on the soul when they are seen in the light of spiritual science.

I have often spoken of the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Latin epoch, and of our present epoch, the fifth one, and indicated how we differ from the people of the fourth post- Atlantean epoch. People of our epoch look at the art of Greek antiquity and admire the artists' keen perception, particularly in the sculptures, revealing things people in our time cannot easily perceive anymore. The crass, materialist explanation for this difference is that the ancient Greeks simply had a keener sense of sight. Besides, they could observe the human body in their games, which some people have half a mind to reinstate in this day and age. Well, those who nowadays imitate ancient Greek games certainly won't turn into Greeks, you can take my word for it; but people just love to imitate mere outer appearances.

As I have emphasized before, the ancient Greeks represented what they saw differently than we do now. This was because the Greeks still had something within them. We know the Greeks had developed their intellectual or mind soul. Our I is directed to the outside while our intellectual or mind soul is oriented to the inside and perceives our inner balance and the inner mobility of our body. The ancient Greeks lived more within themselves than we do. Consequently, the artists in ancient Greece did not work with their models as modern artists do. Instead, when the artist wanted to represent an arm, he felt within himself the shape and form of the muscle. And when he wanted to represent a movement, he felt what it is like to perform the movement himself. Yes, indeed, the ancient Greeks could do more than we because they were more within themselves.

As you know, the sentient soul developed during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, and the intellectual or mind soul in the Greco-Latin epoch. Yet, the intellectual soul is still focused on what is inside us. It is only the I that emerges from our inner life and perceives the outer world. When the ancient Greeks watched a bird and imitated its flight with their own arms, they could feel in their arm movements how they had to sculpt the wings. In contrast, we need a model; we need to look at a real bird, and then we reproduce it in a painting or a sculpture.

It is with good reason that modern humanity has lost this faculty of inner experiencing. But we have to know and acknowledge the inner understanding of sculpture the ancient Greeks still had and we no longer have. We have to understand that when a Greek artist sculpted a person in movement, he knew out of inner knowledge, and not from looking at a model, how he had to position the legs, the toes, and the fingers.

Strictly speaking, people nowadays are unable to draw a bird in flight. In modern pictures, birds hover; they do not fly, and that is perfectly all right, but we have to understand it. We must not expect of our contemporaries what was expected of the ancient Greeks. This inner life of feeling had to be subdued so human beings could direct their I to the outside. We must not think of human evolution the way modern, materialistic Darwinists do and begin with imperfect human beings that develop into more perfect ones. Instead, we must see a parallel spiritual development that descends from the perfect state in the spiritual world down to human beings adapting themselves more and more to their physical organism. There are two streams of evolution, not just one. Thus, we can say our way of seeing things allows us to take in something that could not be perceived in earlier times. This earlier way of looking at things should not be carried over into later times, but, of course, it is occasionally carried over.

At this point, I would like to draw your attention to snapshots of people walking on the street you can find in any illustrated magazine. Snapshots reproduce the immediate outer reality; they show the person as he or she is—most of the time, that isn't very pretty. A snapshot of a bird will look very different from a painting. Now the strange thing is, when you look at a Japanese drawing of birds, you'll see it resembles a snapshot. That is a fact. There is a certain resemblance between Japanese drawings of birds in flight and a snapshot of birds. This resemblance applies even to Japanese drawings of people, because Japanese artists, more so than others, paint what a snapshot reveals—of course, we have to limit our observation to the representation of people walking.

This is because the Japanese have retained their way of seeing things from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch into the present. We, however, can no longer see things the way the Japanese do. Modern Japanese still see more correctly in the Greek sense—albeit not with the ancient Greeks' sense for beauty—than we Europeans do, for we have advanced to the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. We can comprehend these things only when we consider them from the point of view of spiritual science. And when you compare Asian and European painting and sculpture, you will find the difference between the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which has been preserved there, and our fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

You can see everywhere the necessity to bring spiritual science into things. However, in our culture today we are very far from understanding this need to bring spiritual science into outer knowledge. For the most part this is not because it is especially difficult to attain a spiritual scientific outlook; rather it is simply due to the fact that people resist it. What is described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment is relatively easy to understand.⁴ People could quite easily learn this, but they resist it. Of course, I am not speaking about you, my dear friends, but our outer culture resists spiritual science. The main reason for this resistance is that our culture does not want to establish the basic prerequisites for the development of conscience in thinking, conscientiousness in thinking, or logical conscience. Here we come upon an actual sickness in the culture of our age, and spiritual scientists have to take it into account because it confronts them everywhere. This sickness is the lack of a logical conscience, of a conscience in thinking. You can make the most peculiar discoveries in this connection. We have already looked at examples of this, but let's look at one more example today.

There was a man—and he is still alive—who wanted to prove philosophically that ideals are nothing real, nothing vital. He simply wanted to make allowances for the modern view that will let ideals stand at a pinch but considers them as not really existing in the way physically perceptible things do. By the same token, this man was a philosopher and thus would have had very little to do if he did not let ideals stand. After all, the physical realm is already taken care of by the other sciences, and there must be something left for the philosopher to do.

Now, then, ideals have no intrinsic existence, but he still wants to let them stand. Thus, he says they are just fictions, we must accept them as necessary fictions, as necessary assumptions. And this man then developed this idea into a whole philosophy, the philosophy of the As if, we have already talked about it earlier.⁵ According to this philosophy we don't need to assume atoms exist, but we can look at the world as if atoms existed. We don't need to assume the soul exists, but we can look at the world as if it did. You see, it's a complete philosophy of the As if.

Now this man used an analogy to help his readers understand that we can hold on to ideals while at the same time denying them an intrinsic existence, and this analogy is typical of this philosopher's logical conscience. His analogy was of a child playing with a doll, which the child knows has no life of its own. In other words, why should we reject ideals when children do not reject dolls? Even though dolls are not alive, children treat them as though they were. Why shouldn't we do the same with ideals even though we know they have no intrinsic being?

Here we have the view that ideals have no real existence but can nevertheless be useful to us in life when we use them as little children use their dolls, which are not alive either and yet are treated like living beings. We are dealing here with a philosopher who compares ideals to dolls! Now, let us try to understand this analogy, this image. First, we have a little child playing with a doll, but this is based on the premise that the doll is at least a reproduction of a living being. The child would hardly play with the doll at all if it did not in some way resemble or represent a living being. This is the precondition. Clearly, then, we can hardly compare the doll to an ideal unless we also assume the ideal is after all a representation of something real and alive.

This philosopher's first nonsense is to use this analogy. The second lies in saying we should base our life on ideals as if they existed. And what will come of all this? Naturally about as much as usually comes of children playing with dolls—on which he bases his recommendation—in other words, only a mere imitation of life. We are not only dealing here with a foolish analogy but also with a second error, a second foolishness. The analogy does not hold water because the comparison to a doll does not work: dolls are at least representations of living beings; ideals, on the other hand, are not supposed to represent anything. But even if they did, they would only lead to an imitation of life, not life itself.

We are dealing here with double nonsense. Here is a philosopher who perpetrates not just one but two absurdities. We could find many more such double absurdities in the sciences as well as in modern life in general. They are particularly numerous in the so-called wisdom of the world, in philosophy. When such thinking exists, when thinking has gone so far off the track, it cannot discipline itself to develop only valid analogies or at least a feeling for valid analogies—indeed, then we have no foundation for a spiritual view at all. For a spiritual view can develop only if our thinking is sound.

Therefore I would like to ask you to pay attention to what I say about the concept of reality in my new book, Vom Menschenrätsel.⁶ We must develop a concept of reality, and not just a concept of the logical. A crystal is a self-contained reality, complete in itself. When I examine the crystal for what it is, it tells me the truth about itself. But look at a tree trunk without its roots and branches, does it also tell us the truth about itself? No, certainly not; it is telling lies as it is lying there, for it cannot exist as a tree trunk by itself. It could never exist if it did not grow in connection with roots, branches, and leaves; all these belong to the tree trunk. I find the truth about it only if I picture the tree as a whole. With the trunk by itself I have a piece cut out of the world of the senses, but this fragment is not a reality.

If our thinking is to be true to reality, we must develop a sense for what has to be included in our concepts. Only when we have a feeling that a leaf is not a reality because it cannot be thought of apart from a plant—you see, a crystal and a leaf are very different—only when we develop this sense for reality, are we ready to ascend in the right way to spiritual realities. Many things can be logical, but whether they are true to reality is another matter.

It is very easy to make mistakes in regard to this sense for reality. When I look at a painting of a figure taken out of the whole context, then I am not looking at reality, for I have to see the whole picture. If someone now objected that this painting is the result of earlier paintings by the same and other painters, and we would therefore have to look at the whole history of art, that would again be nonsense. We have to develop a sense for reality that tells us there are self-contained realities. Otherwise the only thing that would be “real” would be the whole universe.

Now that I have more or less covered the topic of today's talk and am not subtracting anything from its essence, I would like to add the following—not to say anything derogatory or disparaging, but only to throw light on the way our whole movement should be taken. We can introduce spiritual science into modern culture only if there are many people with the good will to stand by this spiritual science with the right feeling and sensitivity. I do not like to say such things, but they have to be said. You see, I try in every way possible to show that there is in our time a tendency, an impulse, toward spiritual science. That is why I quoted from Hermann Bahr's two books Expressionismus and Himmelfahrt. Here we have a man who is over fifty years old and is now beginning, after having written many plays and novels, to develop a longing for spiritual science and also for Goethe, who is so closely connected with its impulses. I tried to show that at the age of fifty Hermann Bahr had the good will to finally begin—according to his own admission—to read Goethe's works and that he slowly began to find his way—“groping” as I put it—into spiritual science and so has reached the very first elementary stages of it.

Books such as Hermann Bahr's Expressionismus and Himmelfahrt are really extraordinarily revealing because they show us that spiritual science is also—pardon the trivial expression—a matter of time. We will advance in this area only if we take things really seriously, if we have the right kind of reverence for spiritual science, and know that spiritual science is a basic impulse people seek in the current stage of our cultural development. It will always be detrimental to our cause if things are taken only superficially. It will be harmful if what we are trying to do here, and—it may be said in all modesty—what we are trying to do thoroughly, is mistaken for charlatanism, foolishness, fantasy, or other things like that. Nothing is as damaging to our cause as being mistaken for some sort of fantastic nonsense.

Now we have been working together for a long time, and gradually a seriousness toward our cause has developed as well as the ability to distinguish between it and other things that resemble it to some extent. After all, even a mongrel dog has some resemblance to a lion: they both have four legs! Ultimately, everything resembles everything else! What has to be taken into consideration above all is the seriousness of our striving, the seriousness of our work. Now, let me put it this way: in the case I'm talking about, I certainly appreciate the underlying good will and am grateful for it; yet I must discuss the symptomatic features of this case.

In my last two lectures, I explained that Hermann Bahr in a sense presented a self-portrait in the character of his protagonist Franz, who went through various experiences in life, and then came to a kind of mysticism. In other words, this is a serious book that portrays a person's whole life. Well, someone who had heard all this sent me a book, the book Apostel Dodenscheidt by Margarethe Böhme. It arrived with a note saying Apostel Dodenscheidt, like Hermann Bahr's Franz, had gone through all kinds of developments and had finally found his way to accepting reincarnation and karma. Well, that book by Böhme is a roman à clef of the worst kind. You only need to remember certain events that happened here in and around Berlin at one time and names such as Josua Klein and others. In this novel there is a man named Gottfried Gross, and so on. There is nothing worse than for the things I meant here to be mentioned in one breath with the events behind that roman à clef, a novel that in terms of literature and art is a very poor and inferior one to boot.

Indeed, there is a tendency to name things in the same breath whenever there is any chance to connect and confuse them. Granted, it was no sin that this has happened in this particular case—after all, the book was sent to me. Nevertheless, this shows what kinds of associations between ideas are formed and what kinds of things people will mistake for what we are seeking here out of the wellsprings of life. I do not want to reprimand but only to discuss a symptomatic occurrence. The things discussed here are not meant as those people understand them who take the absurdities in the book Apostel Dodenscheidt seriously. It is precisely this connecting of our cause with one or another striving that does it the most damage, and it is important that this truth stirs our souls; for those who find any resemblance here to the Apostel Dodenscheidt do not really understand what we are saying here.

I do not intend to deliver a philippic here, but I want to point out again that I certainly recognize and appreciate the good will in this case. Nevertheless, I have to talk about symptomatic occurrences, for what came to light here is the same thing that comes up in the world outside again and again: what is discussed and represented here is not really taken with the necessary seriousness and insight.

• 1. Sandro Botticelli, 1445–1510, Italian painter.
• 2. Karl Langer, 1819–1887, German anatomist.
  
  Franz Peter Schubert, 1797–1828, Austrian composer. Famous for his song cycles.
  
  Franz Joseph Haydn, 1732–1809, Austrian composer. Regarded as first great master of the symphony and the quartet.
  
  Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770–1827, German composer. Studied with Haydn.
• 3. Hermann Schaaffhausen, 1816–1893, German anthropologist.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, 3rd ed., (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 5. Hans Vaihinger, 1852–1933, German philosopher. Developed his “As if” philosophy 1911.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner, Vom Menschenrätsel (“The Riddle of Man”), vol. 20 in the Collected Works, (Domach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984).

Today's talk is connected with the broader theme we have talked about here so often recently. As we have seen, we need to look at the activities, thinking, and beliefs of our times that resist and oppose spiritual science as we understand it. We believe this spiritual science must become a necessary part of human cultural development in the present and the near future. Thus, what I have presented here is connected to the outlook of spiritual science as well as to the whole impulse or force on which our movement is based. And in this context I want to add a few remarks today.

Again and again we have to caution people against letting certain ideas and concepts that are meaningful in our spiritual science become merely empty words. We have to warn particularly against approaching the ideas of spiritual science—in many respects a new acquisition of humanity—with old ways of thinking and old habits of soul. For instance, we must not approach such conceptions as “ahrimanic” and “luciferic” with all the usual feelings and ideas these words evoke. We need only picture how the name Lucifer in southern regions brings up the concept of demons prevailing there. However, when we arrive at the spiritual scientific view of Lucifer, we should not have the same negative ideas and feelings connected with the old idea of demons. Nor should the ideas that arose in human souls when the medieval views of the devil were alive be applied unhesitatingly to our concept of the ahrimanic.

We must be aware that the world as it presents itself to us is in a state of equilibrium or balance. The beam of a scale does not come to rest in a straight horizontal position just because it is a beam, but only because equal weights hang down from it on both sides and balance each other out. It is the same with everything in our world. The world exists neither because of a state of rest nor because of nothingness, but because of the balance created by the possibility of deviating radically from what is right and good either toward Lucifer or toward Ahriman.

Anyone who says that we simply have to guard against everything ahrimanic and luciferic is in the same position as people who say they want a scale, but don't want to put weights on either side. For instance, we know there would be no art if the luciferic element did not play a role in the world. On the other hand, we also know there would be no observation and understanding of nature if the ahrimanic element did not play a part, too. It is only a matter of establishing a balance in the human heart and soul. And that is why we can fall prey to the ahrimanic and luciferic elements just when we think we are rejecting everything ahrimanic and luciferic. We can sin against reality, but we cannot suppress it!

Thus, those who want to avoid everything ahrimanic will easily fall prey to the luciferic, and those who are trying to avoid the luciferic will be easy prey for Ahriman. The point is to find the balance, to fear neither the one nor the other, and to have enough courage to face both ahrimanic fear as well as luciferic hope or desire. But our culture does not like this; on the contrary, our contemporary culture, unknowingly and without wanting to, loves the ahrimanic and the luciferic. Believing it is avoiding them, it becomes all the more completely their prey.

Talking in general terms and abstractions usually leads absolutely nowhere. We can only get somewhere if we approach these important problems in life in a concrete way. That is why I chose so many specific examples that show how one can find a balance in life, the balance between rest and movement, between unity and diversity.

Now there are philosophers, or people dealing with world views, who say they are striving for unity. That sounds very fine but is purely luciferic. Others are striving for diversity and don't want to have anything to do with unity. Though this can be fruitful today, it is ahrimanic. Only those really strive for balance who seek unity in diversity and look for diversity in such a way that it reveals unity. It is simply a matter of finding a way to really do this. I can only mention a few sins against this balance.

In our times, one such sin is perpetrated primarily in the way people view history. How do they view history? They study how events follow each other and how they are connected in time through the law of cause and effect—at least that's what people think. What happens immediately after one event is taken as its consequence, and people try to explain the latter on the basis of what preceded it. However, as a rule people's memory these days is very short, as we can see from the fact that for nearly two years now people have been talking about historical events, the events leading to this terribly tragic war, as if the world had only begun in July of 1914! They forget so easily what happened before that. From our reading we know people have forgotten what happened prior to that date. But aside from that, when people look at history at all, they link events to the ones that preceded them, and those in turn they connect with other preceding events. Thus, the individual events are strung up like beads on a necklace, and the result is then called history.

This way we will never find the truth, at least not the kind of historical truth that will help us in life. Although events do indeed follow upon one another, one of them may be far more important than another. Sometimes a particular event taking place at a particular time may mean much more for the understanding of what follows than other events happening at the same time. The point is to find the right events, the right facts. I have often called this way of looking at history a symptomatic view of history, in contrast to the merely pragmatic view so popular nowadays. The symptomatic approach to history tries to understand our inner, spiritual evolution on the basis of symptoms, and it finds at certain times particular events that are of far greater significance than other, concurrent happenings.

This approach to history is basically a Goethean one. Goethe made it part of his whole outlook not to see events simply lined up side by side. Instead, he saw events as significant for the course of human history depending on whether the spiritual revealed itself in them to a greater or lesser extent. Someday people will write the history of the current tragic conflicts by describing certain specific events of recent decades, and from these they will understand why the current situation has come about. Today is not the time to explain these facts; they would only be misunderstood. But in the future historians will report events that people now ignore when they read about them. However, if I may say so, truth shines forth from these events.

Over the last few years I have told you about all kinds of facts with the intention to speak about the true spiritual course of events by means of them. Now, I have spoken more abstractly about the issue of history because if I had discussed certain facts in more detail—which would have clarified contemporary events—I would have had to talk about things that people don't want to hear about nowadays.

Those who do not look at history in this symptomatic way do not find the balance between the ahrimanic and the luciferic and fall prey to an ahrimanic view of history. The modern view of history is largely ahrimanic. Facts are not weighed properly. People believe they are evaluating facts and events but are not really doing it. Generally, they do not even know what the most important facts are because those are just the ones they consider the least important. But the opposite also happens, and we can talk about that in more detail. The opposite happens when people don't take facts into account at all, but develop general truths out of their hearts and souls; they carry these with them throughout life, trying to apply them everywhere. No matter how different the situations they may be in, they always try to apply the same tmth. That is really a kind of luciferic exaggeration, but it is what people prefer these days. They want to have a kind of essence of tmth that will never change and will carry them through each and every situation—that is what they would like. But that won't do at all. We have to find the balance.

Now I would like to explain what I mean. You see, people may go through the world, they may stand on a mountain and take in the wide expanses of nature. Well, they look at everything but don't connect it with the spiritual. Or people may go into homes where misery reigns; they look at everything, are touched by it, and feel sympathy. But what they think about the deepest mysteries of human existence is always the same; they carry the same thoughts into every situation. In the old folk wisdom, which is now on the decline, we can find a clear striving for balance in the soul. Thus it could happen that someone walked through a village at the time when there were still sundials—of course, nowadays sundials could not very easily be used for they cannot be set an hour back or ahead; that is impossible! But in the days when sundials were still of importance, someone might have passed through a village, seen a sundial, and found words written under it that were quite impressive. For example, people could find the following words under a sundial:

I am a shadow.
So too art thou!
I reckon with time;
And thou?

Just think, such profound words under a sundial, “I am a shadow. So too art thou!” A shadow cast by the sun. “I reckon with time. And thou?” Here, out of direct perception of a concrete reality, speaks the profound truth that human life is but a shadow of what works and weaves in the spiritual world. How vividly this comes to meet the weary wanderer, imprinting itself in his heart, when he steps before the sundial and sees the shadow! The sundial then points out to him: “A shadow so too art thou! I reckon with time. And thou?” Just imagine, these are profound and powerful questions for us, for our conscience: “Do you reckon with time? Are you finding your place in your time?” That is what I mean by saying balance must be sought.

It is important that people stop letting facts work side by side, each as important as the others and instead realize that there are important facts that can speak to us of great and eternal truths. Then what lives in the human soul and what is spread out in the universe can unite. We find ourselves truly united with the truth of the world only if we continuously come upon the truth in our interaction with the world, only if we don't insist on carrying a priori truths in us and don't walk by a sundial as we would by a plow or something like that. Instead, in looking at things, we must be instructed about the most noble and greatest striving that can light up in human souls.

This living together with outer reality, with all that is spread out throughout the universe, this feeling oneself at the right moment face to face with the eternal, is something quite different from learning out of books that this or that is an everlasting truth. No matter how often we abstractly impress upon ourselves that human life is a shadow of what happens to us in eternity, no matter how many beautiful ethical truths about the use of time we impress upon our memory, none of them will ever reach as deep as the finding of a right relationship between ourselves and outer reality. Then we will see a significance in the individual concrete fact, and only then will we find the balance in life we can never find by losing ourselves in the external world or by merely immersing ourselves deeply into our inner being. Mysticism is one-sided and luciferic; natural science is onesided and ahrimanic. But mysticism developed through observation of external nature or observation of nature deepened to mysticism, that is balance!

Let us take another example. Suppose someone were hiking one morning in a beautiful area in the Alps, noticing the song of the birds, the beauty of the woods, perhaps even the marvelous virginal purity of the water as it babbles its way downhill in brooks, and so on. Imagine the hiker wandered for an hour, maybe, or an hour and a half, and then came upon a simple wooden crucifix. The hiker may be inwardly glad, having all the forces of gladness in his soul shaken awake because he or she has seen beautiful, great, noble, and sublime views. But the hiker is also weary and approaches this place where a simple wooden crucifix stands in the midst of beautiful and wonderfully sublime nature. On the crucifix there are the following words:

Stay your steps, wanderer,
Look on my wounds.
Wounds abide,
Hours glide.
Take heed, and guard thy way,
Beware what on the judgment day
O'er thee as verdict I shall say.

The experience we can have on reading these words can be greater and can touch our hearts more profoundly than what we may experience on seeing the figure of Christ in Michelangelo's famous painting in the Sistine Chapel. The author of the words I have just spoken is unknown. Yet, all those who understand anything about poetry know that the person who wrote the words: “Wounds abide, hours glide,” is one of the greatest poets of all time. But first one has to have a feeling for this and know that true poetry is the poetry that pours out of the human soul in the right place. Not all words that rhyme, not all that passes for poetry is true poetry. But it is true poetry when out of Christianity's eternal truths there pours forth:

Stay your steps, wanderer,
Look on my wounds.
Wounds abide,
Hours glide.
Take heed, and guard thy way,
Beware what in the judgment day
O'er thee as verdict I shall say.

These are simple words, sublime words—grandest poetry! To be made aware of the greatest event in the evolution of the earth while surrounded by sublime nature and its graceful beauty means to experience with the soul the reality in the universe. This is only an example and a more profoundly touching one than the previous one of the sundial. The important thing is to develop in life so that when we meet with such things, we do not pass by reality but experience the human soul growing together with reality and maintain the balance even in our relation to what was not made by human beings, but was given by the eternal powers. We can perceive the spiritual world only when our striving is neither only one-sided mysticism, nor only one-sided observation of nature, but instead is directed toward the union of both.

I have to say this because it is part of what present-day humanity has the least real feeling for and what it can least experience. That is why spiritual science is so difficult for people to understand nowadays. What it offers is obliterated as much by a one-sided search for an all-purpose insight as by accepting the external world pretty much without seeking the symptomatic traits and the revelation of the spiritual in various events. That is what our contemporaries have the least understanding for. If they had it, there would be much less versifying and, if I may say so, much less defining. For definitions only lead people to overestimate words, and versifying leads them to misuse words. A poem such as the one under the simple crucifix—well, nobody knows who wrote it—surely originated in a time when a profound poetical sensibility lived in the hearts and souls of the people and true balance reigned in their souls.

Alas, people in our age have become inured to true poetry because there is much too much verse around, and poetry begets more poetry just as unhealthy living produces cancer. Encouraging everybody to write poems based on what already exists in poetry is the same on the cultural and spiritual level as stimulating the life process to produce cancerous growth. In this respect we have seen the most precious fruits of the art of versifying at the end of the nineteenth century. As you may know, one of the most biting critics in Berlin had to call himself Alfred Kerr, because his real name was Kempner, a name that could not be used at the end of the nineteenth century since it brought to mind Friederike Kempner.¹ Yes, she, too, was a poet. We need only remember one of her pretty poems—I won't recite many such verses, but just this one:

America, thou land of dreams,
Thou world of wonder, broad and long!
Thy trees of coconut how fair,
Thy busy solitude how strong!

This is a very striking example, but many contemporary poems, though less striking are just like this one, and many concepts formed are just like Friederike Kempner's “busy solitude.” For people nowadays often have no feeling for how strongly the adjective contradicts the noun when they speak or write. These things simply must be realized,- there is no other way. After all, quite a few people nowadays speak as though they did not take language to be just gesture, which is all words really are. I have pointed out to you how clumsy a theory like Fritz Mauthner's is.² He wants to reduce all philosophy and all world views to mere semantics and wrote three hefty volumes as well as a whole dictionary in two volumes, which lists alphabetically all philosophical terms but not a single philosophical concept.³ He completely disregards the fact that a word relates to its concept like a gesture. People always forget this in their world view. In everyday reality it cannot be forgotten; there we cannot easily confuse a table with the word “Table,” and we won't expect to learn about tables from the word “table.” But in philosophy and in matters of world view that is what happens all the time.

Well, Fritz Mauthner should just meet what we call in Austria a “Bohemian Privy Counselor” (“böhmischer Hofrat”). He would enter “Bohemian” in his dictionary and explain all sorts of things and then do the same with “Privy Counselor.” However, a “Bohemian Privy Counselor” is neither a Bohemian nor a Privy Counselor, in fact, he can be a Styrian office messenger. In Austria, we call all people “Bohemian Privy Counselor” who advance in their careers on shoes that make no more noise than slippers and who push aside their rivals without the latter noticing anything. In other words, they don't have to be Bohemians or Privy Counselors. Clearly, the meaning of this expression cannot be gotten from the words alone; they are merely a gesture.

That is what we have to realize: words are gestures. The larynx makes gestures, which become audible by means of the air, just as our hands or arms make gestures, which we cannot hear only because they are too slow. The larynx makes its gestures so quickly they become audible. The only difference lies in the quickness of the larynx. And just as it is wrong to describe somebody's gesture pointing to the table rather than describing the table, so it is wrong, in the cultural and spiritual realm, to use words to get to any truths about their concepts or the things they name.

Errors of this kind occur very frequently these days. People rely completely on words. When I was a young man—well, actually not yet a young man; I was only a boy and went to school in Wiener-Neustadt in lower Austria—I learned a little verse that has kept me from setting great store by definitions and explanations of words in general. This little verse was written on a building as the motto of the house, so to speak; it reads as follows:

I, Hans Carouser,
Prefer wine to water.
If I preferred water to wine,
Carouser would be no name of mine!

That is roughly what the modern definitions of words are often like. That is, one first makes up a definition and then formulates the explanation so that it fits, for if it didn't fit, then things would not be as they are. If you remember this little verse, you will be shielded from so much that emerges these days and is clearly visible in our so-called cultural life. Much, very much appears in our age. All these things are likely to divert our attention more and more from looking at the spiritual, from realizing that spirit reigns and weaves in what is real, in everything around us.

To an ever greater extent, we, and indeed the world, are losing all connection with the spiritual. For just talking about the spiritual does not bring it to us. A gesture pointing to a reality does not have the same meaning in regard to the reality concerned as the imitation of that gesture by another person in another room does. But what will become of our world if it loses all contact with the spiritual, if it casts off all that is spiritual? It is strange that people hardly seem to notice that they are losing the connection to the spiritual world. Humanity needs world views; people do not want to live without a world view. Yet, our modern time is largely without spirituality, without faith, or even an inclination to spirituality. However, not all those who are not inclined to spirituality can make do without a world view. And then strange justifications for a world view appear!

For example, in these last few weeks, I have been thinking about a man I spent much time with around the turn of the century, between 1898 and 1901 or so. Back then he was striving for a world view but unable to construct one. He was searching for it in Haeckelism, but apparently did not find that satisfactory. Then I completely lost touch with him. Now I see that this same man, thoroughly educated in the natural sciences, is indeed still striving for a world view, but he has the most peculiar ideas about the reasons why people arrive at world views. And incidentally, he also includes religion under the category “world view.” Someone who lives totally in the merely external, material understanding of facts, in the ahrimanic reality, cannot really feel justified integrating these facts into a world view. Now if he is nevertheless looking for a world view, how is he supposed to justify this search? We can see especially from this example how misguided people can be these days. Still, they are all honestly striving people.

Now this man I mentioned admits that on the basis of what the conventional sciences give us, on the basis of what is simply “the truth,” one cannot build a world view. How then do we arrive at a world view? We do not get it through our senses; our intellect, which is necessarily bound to the senses, also does not lead us to a world view—so what is left?

Well, this man hit upon the idea to look for the source of a world view in a place typical for our times, namely in psycho-sexuality! How do people build their world views? Through the fact that they are sexual beings! If we were not sexual beings, we would not integrate events and facts into a world view but would merely perceive them. I would like to read you a passage typical of this man's thinking:

If we follow Schopenhauer's thoughts to their logical conclusion, we can say that in psycho-sexuality there are supra-individual tendencies and strivings that ultimately have to be seen in connection with the metaphysical needs of human beings. These are expressed in the creation of religious feelings and ideas as well as in the formation and elaboration of integrated world views. At the same time, we find in psycho-sexuality an opposite pole, namely, a force that pulls human beings down into the depths of their darker side. Criminal instincts also spring from psycho-sexuality.

In other words, there are two poles in human nature, and both originate in psycho-sexuality. The one pole is religious feeling and thinking about a world view, the other, criminal instincts. Isn't it—I do not say sad, I say tragic—isn't it tragic to see where our time is heading?

These ideas are not to be taken lightly. Those who observe matters closely can see with what enormous speed these ideas are spreading. In my youth psychoanalysis, the Freudian theory, did not yet exist, and back then anyone who would have wanted to found it would have been considered a lunatic. Nowadays we have not only the Freudian theory, with its publications and with its representatives in all countries, but also psychoanalytical institutions all over the world where this psychoanalysis nonsense is practiced. These days, the most important and, as you have seen, even the most sacred experiences of the human soul are traced back to psycho-sexuality.

Humanity has indeed strayed very far from the paths it used to travel and to which spiritual science must lead it again. For what we are dealing with here cannot be refuted easily, because what is at stake when we speak about these things is the overall tendency of the soul, the whole form and understanding of the soul. When a pamphlet on psychosexuality appeared in our own Society—and a very superficially and badly written one at that—we had a big fight on our hands, which is not yet over. People could not understand why we thought such a booklet unsuitable. I told the author that the occultist is cautious in these matters because here only a very fine line, a thin spiderweb, so to speak, separates misunderstanding from the truth, and what is important is the whole attitude of the soul, and it is dangerous to speak of these things.

We will have to speak about these things for they are investigated by external science, where they will come to play a certain role. But first we must return to the direction the soul has to take so humanity can find its way to the spiritual.

In connection with the grotesque idea to look for the source of world views in psycho-sexuality, let me tell you about another fact, one sacred to all of us. I mean the fact that in the section on Paradise in the Bible, the Hebrew has been translated appropriately into our language, and we read: “And Adam knew his wife.” There you have knowledge, the concept of knowledge brought into connection with sexuality. But how? It is done exactly in the opposite way! This conceals a deep mystery. Only when people will come to things that are true on this opposite path, only then will light be shed upon these things. These truths must be looked at from the point of view of the spiritual if they are not to lead us astray. In the present age we must guard against the lack of respect for spiritual research, a lack that definitely exists. In the truest sense of the word, there is a general disrespect for the spiritual world. People believe that based on their experience of what is immediately in front of them, or on yesterday's experiences, they can intervene in the course of the world to reform and improve it.

A pathetic example of this has recently caught my attention. A man allowed himself to be so affected by the present tragic events of this terrible war that he concluded it would be a disaster if peace were ever to return to the world. He concluded that the war must continue because warfare is the natural condition of humanity. He wrote:

War is not leamt in a day. It is really fortunate that the threats of our enemies are speeding up the process of adaptation, above all this last threat of the complete destruction of our export trade. [You see, this must have been published very recently for it takes into account the Economic Conference in Paris.] Now nobody can evade the logical conclusion that peace would be a catastrophe, that war remains the only possibility. Up to now, war has been a reaction against provocation and a means to an end; from now on it will become an end in itself. From now on all those unredeemed German souls, and possibly even the most stalwart pacifists, will realize the error of their ways and see that their ideals are not relics but fossils. The whole nation as one man will demand eternal war ...

Educate people to hate, to revere hatred, to love hatred, to organize hatred! Away with immature timidity, away with a false sense of shame in the face of brutality and fanaticism! Even in terms of politics Marinelli's words hold good: “More slapping, less kissing.” We must not hesitate to announce blasphemously: “Ours are faith, hope, and hatred.” But hatred is the greatest of these.

Yes, my dear friends, such things exist. It can never be a matter of sticking one's head in the sand like an ostrich, but only of knowing where materialism leads, especially in its latest phase, when it is denied even by its adherents. In fact, things were better in the nineteenth century, in the days of Büchner, David Friedrich Strauss, and chubby Voit, the one who analyzed the metabolism, and all the others who at least declared themselves materialists.⁴ Nowadays materialism wears a hypocritical air, and people say it has long since been overcome. However, what they have put in its place, hypocritically denying it is materialism, is nothing else but materialism, an increasingly fierce materialism.

What we need, my dear friends, is Goetheanism; we need a world view that allows the soul to grow together with reality in its particular, characteristic phenomena. This Goetheanism is nothing else but the renewal of the true Christian life of feeling and experience.

Why do Orientals not understand the Mystery of Golgotha? They do not understand it because they cannot understand that one event is more significant than another. We understand the Mystery of Golgotha only when we know the difference between events, for only then can we realize that one event can give the earth its meaning. Only when we can see differences between events can we see one event as more important than another. In the Orient, we find at most a continual play of cycles, where everything is said to repeat itself. That the earth is based entirely on the fact that we have a time of preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha followed by the Mystery of Golgotha itself as the zenith of earth evolution, and then the living into it, this truth is what humanity will gradually have to understand, based on the symptomatic view of history, of course.

Everything spiritual science can give us will ultimately culminate in the Christian view of the world, which will prevail. As I have often said, spiritual science does not want to be a new kind of religion. Rather it wants to provide the tools for humanity, which would otherwise completely fall prey to materialism, to fully understand again the spiritual that is contained in Christianity. It is absolutely necessary to look with open eyes at our age, and that is much more important than any sentimental looking into it.

• 1. Alfred Kerr, real name Kempner, 1867–1948, German theater critic He was a relative of Friederike Kempner (1836–1904), a poet notorious for the unintended humor of her poems.
• 2. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923, German writer and theater critic. Exponent of philosophical Skepticism.
• 3. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einei Kritik der Sprache (“Contributions to a Critique of Language”), 3 vols., 1901–2; Wörterbuch der Philosophie (“Dictionary of Philosophy”), 2 vols., 1910–11.
• 4. Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig Buchner, 1824–1899, German physician and philosopher. Evolved philosophy of consistent, determinist materialism; roused controversy with view of mind and consciousness as epiphenoma of physical brain.
  
  David Friedrich Strauss, 1808–1874, German theologian and philosopher.
  
  Carl von Voit, 1831–1908, German physiologist. Conducted pioneering research on animal and human metabolism.

Before today's talk, there will be a recitation of several poems in the first part of the evening. In these poems I have tried to express some things connected with the way we think and feel in our spiritual science. These verses were originally intended for a eurythmy performance in Dornach and were indeed first performed in eurythmy. I will soon publish them with a few words of explanation, and they will be available here in a little booklet as part of our published cycles.¹ However, before we begin, I would like to introduce the verses with a few comments.

Last time, in another context, I spoke about the art of poetry. Now we must really take seriously what I have said so often this winter, namely, that the whole impulse, the whole spirit of our spiritual science has to enter the culture of our times and bring something special to it. Poetry is after all not just a matter of expressing something one has invented or thought, but of expressing it in a certain form. Spiritual science seeks to connect the human being with the great laws of the universe, the great laws of the cosmos. The deepest impulses of spiritual science will be understood in the true sense of the word only when people realize how extensively we are actually searching for the connection between human beings and the great transcendental laws of the universe.

What is nowadays called poetry will gradually take on a new face. Granted, this is hard to understand these days, but it is true nevertheless. Though nowadays people hardly feel this way, poetry should represent what human beings experience together with the cosmos, what is drawn from the mysteries of the cosmos. All this must flow into poetic form. If we create certain mental images that are representations of what belongs to imaginative knowledge, we can then discover the laws governing the position of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the relationship of the movements of the seven planets to these twelve signs. We can also identify certain movements and laws that do not apply to all seven planets, but only to the sun and moon and their passage through the signs of the zodiac. What matters is not that we serenade what goes on in the universe, but that what speaks there in the great laws of the universe also speaks in the form of our poetry.

And today you will hear attempts at poetry where the laws that reign in the cosmos also prevail in the sequence of the lines, their relationship to each other, and in their meaning. For instance, you will hear a poem of twelve stanzas, and each stanza has seven lines. The structure of the poem is such that what the seven lines express represents the laws of the movements of the seven planets. The fact that there are exactly twelve stanzas and that the mood of the seven lines is repeated in each stanza corresponds to the laws determining the planets' orbits through the signs of the zodiac. Thus, what is going on outside in the cosmos, in the harmony of the spheres, is also in the meaning of the twelve stanzas of seven lines each. The laws of the cosmos are meant to prevail in these twelve verses of seven lines.

You will find, let us say, in the Capricorn stanza that the fourth line expresses a certain position of Mars in regard to Capricorn. The meaning of this line must be such that if you were woken up from sleep and heard only this one line from the Capricorn stanza, this Mars line, you would be able, after having developed a feeling for this, to say this line is the Mars line of the Capricorn stanza. In the same way, all the other lines have their meaning. Thus, the structure is not just superficial or merely external; it is the poem's inner structure. This is what matters.

Similarly, the short poem of quatrains is arranged so that certain movements express cosmic events. One of the poems of twelve verses is to be taken seriously; the other, as you will see, is really a satire. Now you may easily think it improper to treat “sacred things” satirically. But truly, my dear friends, if we want to advance in this sphere of a spiritual world view, one of the basic requirements is precisely that we do not forget to laugh at those things in the world that are a laughing matter when judged rightly. A lady once told a story about a man who was always in a mood of “looking up to the great cosmic revelations.” He never spoke of other people at all, only of “masters,” and she also said he usually made a long face.

When she told me about this man with his long, tragic face, I remembered a very interesting experience I had long ago in Vienna. Back then, there lived a man in Vienna who tried in every sort of way to live himself into spiritual spheres. He was professor of physics and mathematics at the Vienna Agricultural College, and his name was Oskar Simony, the same man who found a tragic end much later, in fact only just recently.² We met in Vienna—I remember it as if it had happened only yesterday—in the Salesianergasse. I knew him by sight but had never spoken to him. He did not know me at all, and we met just as two people do who pass each other on the sidewalk. I was then just a young fellow of twenty-six or twenty-seven. Oskar Simony looked at me, stopped, and began a conversation about all sorts of things spiritual—remember, I am only telling you the facts. Then he took me to his house and gave me his latest publication on the extension of the four arithmetical operations, which he had published in the old Academy of Science. All this happened just at the time when the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and the Archduke Johann—who, as you may know, later disappeared under the assumed name of Johann Orth—were busying themselves with the unmasking of a psychic medium and other such things.³ Naturally, people in Vienna back then talked a great deal about these kinds of things, and Oskar Simony examined these matters scientifically. He wrote a book about tying a knot into a round ribbon of one piece, which is very interesting.⁴

Well, as we were talking, Simony paused and then said, “In dealing with these things, one needs a good sense of humor!” Indeed, that is true; for precisely when we enter into the depths of spiritual understanding, we must not forget how to laugh. In other words, we should not feel obliged to always make a long, tragic face! I am convinced that Oskar Simony lost his sense of humor in the last part of his life before he found such a tragic end.

Now there is ample opportunity to develop this sense of humor, particularly in our spiritual movement. Caricatures of the striving for the spirit love to cling to such spiritual movements. By caricatures I do not mean people, but only aspirations; the things said to sail under the colors of spiritual striving or, shall we say, of membership in a movement that has taken on spiritual striving!

That is what makes it so difficult to represent our spiritual movement in the world. Basically, there was nothing to be said—and still is nothing to be said—against some women wearing the kind of clothing I had to design for the performance of the first scene of my first mystery drama. After all, we couldn't have had modern dress on stage there. Then several women made such dresses for themselves. That is certainly praiseworthy, but then it got out of hand.

I don't need to tell you about that, as it is well-known how far these things got out of hand. Then people believed such clothes absolutely called for short hair. Yes, indeed, one could hear people say that in our movement the women wore their hair short, and the men theirs quite long—which has actually happened in only a few exceptional cases. Anyway, this has led to people asking me after public lectures whether having one's hair cut short was part and parcel of being a theosophist.

Well, all this is merely a matter of appearances; however, even in matters of inner, spiritual significance people in our circle have been up to mischief many times, mischief we must strongly oppose. The things I am supposed to have said and the things that are supposedly thus and so, and on and on! Sometimes what is said seems to indicate that the person who spoke just wanted to get some attention, to put it mildly. In other words, there are excesses that make it difficult to represent our movement to people who can't help laughing when they hear about things they do not understand. They will then also laugh about what is serious and even about what is most significant. But we do not need to provoke their laughter and give them a certain justification for it with the caricatures accompanying the striving for the spiritual. These things have led me to write a satirical poem to be performed in eurythmy, which will also be presented
today.

In this satire on the twelve moods of the signs of the zodiac, the planets are also used, but they are used to give you a glimpse, so to speak, of the seamy side of all this to-do about spiritual science—not of spiritual science itself, which, of course, has no seamy or dark sides at all, only its adherents do. These poems are intended to show how the intuited cosmic laws lead to true laws of form for the poetry of the future.

These verses will be recited with several by Robert Hamerling.⁵ Please keep in mind that they were intended for performance in eurythmy; today they will be presented without eurythmy, but never mind.

Program of the recitation by Frau Steiner that followed:
Poems by Robert Hamerling: “O, let me sing in solitude,”
“Son and heir of eternity,” “Between heaven and earth,”
“Nightly movement,” “Spirits of Night,”
“Don’t scold the soft tones,” “Venice,” “Song of life.”
”Followed by music on the harmonium
“The Eagle” by Robert Hamerling
Poems by Rudolf Steiner:
“Dance of the Planets,” “Pentecost,” “Twelve Moods.
Followed by music on the harmonium
“Lost Echoes” by Robert Hamerling
“Diamonds ”by Robert Hamerling
“ The Song of Initiation,” a satire by Rudolf Steiner.

I want to start from the same basis as in so many of our talks, namely, spiritual science as it permeates us should not live in our souls so that we simply know it in the same way we know geography, botany, or political science, and can keep it nicely separate from the rest of life. On the contrary, spiritual science should give us impulses and life forces that flow into our understanding of the reality surrounding us. This is how it must be for the sake of spiritual science and also because it has the task to intervene in our cultural life and revitalize many areas where our culture has reached a dead end. Spiritual science is to heal what is sick in our cultural and spiritual life. One thing above all must permeate the activity of our soul if we really want to enter deeply into spiritual science, and that is honesty. We will have to be so imbued with honesty that we do not waver from it in our whole understanding of life. However, we are confronted today by a view of life that is certainly not permeated by honesty in its judgments and attitudes.

Now let us take as our point of departure an event we have recently learned about. It is already a bit dishonest to think too little about such events and not to see them clearly enough in the context of life as a whole. You may have read about the shocking events that have recently taken place on a small scale, in one person's life, and must be added to those terrible, great, and gigantic blows of fate we witness in our time. Nowadays everything that is not part of the great events of the day is considered to be on a small scale.

Well, a painter, and apparently a good one at that, as the court records show, had painted pictures and signed them Böcklin, Uhde, Menzel, Spitzweg, and other famous names.⁶ He had painted many such pictures and sold them to people who wanted to buy a Menzel, a Lenbach, a Böcklin. However, the painter's name was really Lehmann.⁷ Lehmann was a good painter, and so his paintings were bought as genuine Böcklins, Menzels, Uhdes, and so forth. And then he was prosecuted. It was obviously a clear case of fraud. The experts held the fraud to be the greater because he was such a good painter and had been able to do so well that his paintings were indistinguishable from those painted by these famous artists. For this fraud he was sentenced to four years in prison.

Now, let me tell you a story that is the counterpart to this event. Goethe used to place a picture and its counter-picture side by side; that was his method. This is of course not so convenient as the usual way of thinking, but it throws more light on reality and truth. In Brussels, there is the Wiertz Museum, where paintings by Wiertz are exhibited.⁸ One can't help but be utterly amazed at the originality of these pictures by Wiertz. They are indeed different from any other paintings; they are unique. Some of them may seem weird and crazy to strict and narrow-minded critics. Well, their opinion may not always be a valid criterion,—in any case some of the paintings are very deeply moving.

Wiertz was born into a poor family at the beginning of the nineteenth century and grew up in poverty. One day, however, he was struck by the thought—and here true vocation met with extraordinary vanity; a combination that is indeed possible—that he wanted to become a painter greater even than Rubens, a successor of Rubens, a super-Rubens.⁹ In post-Nietzschean times, I think we can say a super-Rubens. So he wanted to be a super-Rubens, and he certainly had talent. He got a scholarship and could go to Rome and study Italian painting. And then he painted a picture, a very large picture, a gigantic picture, of a scene from the Trojan war. It was better, indeed far better, than the average pictures you can see in exhibitions.

So, he submitted this picture to the committee of the Louvre in Paris. The committee accepted it, but hung the painting in such a way that it looked as though it had not really been accepted. You know it is a frequent practice of the committees in charge of selecting artworks for museums to hang pictures as if they did not really belong in the exhibition. But it is of course essential for a picture to be seen! When people cannot see it because it is hung in a poorly lit place, then even though the painting is on exhibit, it's as good as not really there. And since Wiertz had just as much vanity as talent, this vexed him greatly. He got very furious with Paris, went back to Brussels, and never again wrote the word “Paris” without drawing a thunderbolt above it that was striking the word. He later received other distinctions, but they did not particularly please him. For instance, he received a bronze medal from the king for something he did. However, Wiertz only said that if he could not have gold or silver, he did not need bronze either. He remained furious.

Then he wanted to test the Louvre committee again. In 1840 he sent two pictures to an exhibition. One of them he painted and signed with his name. The other he had come by in a different way. An acquaintance of his had a genuine, an admittedly genuine and significant Rubens painting. Wiertz at once scratched out the name Rubens and put in his own name instead. Thus, he sent two pictures signed Wiertz to the Louvre committee. The Louvre committee looked at them, at the two paintings by Wiertz and said, nothing doing; both are not suited for exhibition; they are both worthless daubs! But one of them was a genuine, even a quite excellent, Rubens! Thus Wiertz avenged himself; naturally he broadcast the story everywhere, and at the time it made quite a stir.

This is the counterpart to the event I told you about earlier. Think of the amount of dishonesty there is these days when people judge art. Do people buy actual works of art? No, names are what people buy. Names are bought! If somebody were to paint a picture today that was as good as any of Leonardo's—it might be a really good painting—it goes without saying people would buy Leonardo's but not the other person's painting.¹⁰

There have been other painters, and a newspaper wrote about them, who have taken to copying old masters because they were unable to sell their own work. When they wrote the name Leonardo or Michelangelo on their pictures, they could sell them!¹¹ By the time it was discovered what they had done, they had already died, and so it was too late to imprison them for four years!

Such events have to be seen in the light of the dishonesty of our general culture. Lehmann would not have sold a single one of his pictures had he signed them Lehmann, but they would have been just as good as they are with another name on them. These things are very distressing. It is necessary to think about them, for they are examples of things that are becoming more and more frequent in other areas of everyday life and show how much our age needs honesty and the avowal of honesty, the striving for honesty. But striving for honesty is not within our reach if we do not have the will to face things, to deal with them, instead of quickly passing over them and ignoring them. What matters is that we concern ourselves with what is happening around us and try to understand things more deeply. If we do not take a practice of observing reality in all its depth, we cannot really get very far in understanding the impulses of spiritual science. For spiritual science is born out of true reality, and if we are to understand spiritual science, we must familiarize ourselves with the impulse of true reality.

Those who know the facts realize that people who deal with truth the way it is usually done cannot understand spiritual science. At the same time, they see that the impulses of spiritual science must enter the spiritual life of the present and the immediate future. People nowadays read everything that comes before their eyes only superficially, their books as well as life. They look only at the surface of events, skimming lightly over them. Here I would like to point out something that can be understood only when we accept to some degree the facts of spiritual science. If you look at the development of our age, you can make an astonishing discovery if you pay attention to what the human soul takes in directly and to what it takes in to preserve and work on.

Now, in our time most people who read anything read the newspapers. Newspapers don't last beyond their day, and people think the newspapers leave their soul as easily as they entered it. They imagine this compensates for the superficiality and dishonesty of our journalism, which really defy description. But things are not the way people usually believe them to be. The contents of a book does not imprint itself as deeply into the soul of most people these days, though they remember it much longer, as the contents of the short-lived newspaper. It is precisely this fleeting and transitory character of the newspaper and the fact that we do not try to remember it but want to forget it quickly—forgetting here must be quick—that allows it to imprint itself infinitely deeply into our unconscious.

I have pointed out before how quickly we must forget in the case of some newspapers. One time, we were in the area of Pirano in Istria, where the Piccolo della Sera is published. Now, that is an evening paper, and one day it ran a very sensational article; I don't even remember anymore what it was about. Anyway, the article took up three columns, nearly the whole of the front page. But there was still a bit of space left on that page, and there this very same article was officially disclaimed and corrected because the article was based on an error. Now this is a thing not often found: a newspaper article that is disclaimed on the very same page. Particularly the big city newspapers are ever so gradually moving in this direction.

It is important to know that what we take in so quickly and then quickly forget is actually imprinted deeply into the subconscious of our soul and works there as a force over time. It goes on working in what we can call the general spirit of the times, the ahrimanic spirit of the times. In other words, good books today have far less effect than newspaper articles. What is carefully taken in and works upon the ego, which imprints it into our memory, has much less effect than what we take in hastily from a newspaper. Please do not take this to mean that you should not read newspapers, but accept it as your karma. Obviously, I don't mean that we must avoid reading so much as a line in a newspaper. We must take newspapers as part of the karma of our age and develop the side of our being that is able to sense whether we are reading actual content, something containing true spiritual striving, or mere empty words.

Thus, one can only hope that people will once again develop a feeling for how mental and spiritual achievements come about. For this feeling is what we are so sorely lacking nowadays. We cannot distinguish between what is written well and what is written very badly. We take in the content of a well-written piece just as indifferently as we do that of a badly written piece. The difference, the capacity to distinguish, is what we have lost. How many people nowadays can tell the difference between a page written by Herman Grimm and one written by Eucken, Kohler, or Simmel, and I could name many other writers, too?¹²

Who can see that in one page of Herman Grimm lives the whole culture of Central and Western Europe—in his composition, in the way he forms his sentences? Who can sense that if we give ourselves over to this sentence structure, we can connect with what is ruling spiritually in the world? The usual scholarly babble, however, connects us with nothing except the eccentricities of the gentlemen, or, as we may say today, of the ladies in question. I have known scholars and spoken with them about Grimm; well, these scholars actually dared to compare Herman Grimm with Richard M. Meyer, or someone like him.¹³ The initial “M” in Meyer's name was always used; Meyer never wrote his full middle name; I don't know why he was too timid to do that. Well, these scholars said Meyer's works showed clear, decisive, and strictly methodical research. Herman Grimm, on the other hand, was not to be called a real worker in the field of science; rather, he was only strolling through it. It was customary in those days to call him a stroller through the field of science because he had too few footnotes. Who nowadays can see that the whole of European culture up to the end of the nineteenth century really lives in the style of Herman Grimm's works, in his manner of presentation, regardless of the content? That is precisely what we must achieve: a sense for style, a true feeling for art even in this area, for that alone can school us in honesty. The hurried reading for content only, which aims only at getting information, is really a schooling in dishonesty, in lies.

You need only look at our modern age to see how infinitely much has to be done before people will again develop a feeling for style. Granted, we have to read newspapers nowadays, but we should also be so sensitive that the style that has gradually taken root there irritates us and drives us to distraction. This must really come about. How much this is lacking these days can be seen in countless examples, and you have no idea how little people are generally inclined to go to the bottom of things in their thinking.

I am not introducing what now follows in order to talk about national prejudices or personal likes and dislikes after all, we must be able to understand every point of view and get a feeling for it. No, what I would like to tell you has nothing to do with all this. A few months ago, a book was published that is not available in Germany, and for good reason. It is entitled J’Accuse, written by a German and has been translated into all languages except German, and several hundred thousand copies have been sold throughout the world.¹⁴ Now I am not going to speak of the accusations in this book and the very pessimistic picture it presents of the connections between Germany and the war and Austria and the war. I do not want to talk about that; everyone has his or her own point of view in these matters. The point here is not that this book presents everything in the darkest light and puts the blame exclusively on the Central European powers, while exonerating all the others, completely clearing and whitewashing them—and not just whitewashing them, but presenting them as whiter than white. That is not what I want to talk about.

What matters is that this book has evidently been distributed widely not only among people who have been corrupted by newspaper reading and read nothing else anyway, but also among people with supposedly enlightened minds. Now this book is trashy literature of the very worst kind imaginable, quite apart from its point of view. If you just read it as it is, you will find in terms of form, in terms of sentence structure, a piece of trashy literature, really artistically abominable literature. It is the artistic side I want to look at here, regardless of the point of view; for I can perfectly well understand a point of view opposed to mine, or indeed any point of view. But what is so infinitely sad in this case is that people did not feel that anyone who writes so abominably badly—in his sentence structure, his thinking, and logic—comes into consideration only for those readers who do not go in for respectable literature but only for stuff that's peddled on the backstairs.

I would not be speaking about this today if the subject had not been revived the day before yesterday in an article in the Vossische Zeitung, which used to be a gossipy rag but is now a modern newspaper. The article was written by Dr. F. Oppenheimer, an untenured extramural lecturer, and deals with this book as well as with a very successful reply published as Anti-J'accuse.¹⁵ However, Dr. Oppenheimer starts out in a strange way by explaining that this book J'Accuse had been brought to his attention by a man from one of the neutral countries whom he had always considered one of the most outstanding and most unappreciated authors of our time. Then Oppenheimer goes on to talk about his own impressions of the book. He has at least some idea of how badly the book is written—and that is what I want to emphasize here—but I was anxious to see whether he would draw any conclusions from this insight. It seemed to me that Oppenheimer's thoughts and feelings about the book should have led him to question whether he had been in full possession of his faculties when he believed the man great who recommended such an abominable book as something special. But he did not come to that conclusion in this article.

Now I am not saying this to criticize this particular case, but to point out that it is a typical one. People just skim over the facts these days. After all, isn't this case suited to make Oppenheimer ask himself what his judgment is worth when he had taken a man for important who later tried to foist such a book off on him as significant? Is this not something that leads necessarily to some self-knowledge? Clearly, drawing the obvious conclusions from the situations confronting us now in such a terrible way is not a priority in the souls of many people. We can see the basic character and structure of contemporary spiritual life in just such typical examples. We must really feel that the basic shortcomings of our time are expressed in such things, and we must not ignore them as if they were of no importance.

These things are tremendously important, for they show on a small scale what I pointed to on a larger scale when I said that nowadays many people believe themselves to be good Christians though they have not even managed to be good Turks! Remember, I once read you a short passage from the Koran to show that Turks who know their Koran believe much more about Jesus than many modern pastors do. It is the same all over again but now on a field where the mighty facts of existence arise before the soul. The same mistake, however, the same type of mistake, meets us everywhere in our daily life, in the terrible superficiality of modern everyday life, which is really nothing else but dishonesty. We must go beyond that if all talking about spiritual science is not to be a washout for our time. The important thing is that spiritual science be more than just a failure and a waste.

We have to realize that in the nineteenth century and so far also in the twentieth century we have been wedged into a spiritual scientific development that has influenced modern thinking and feeling from two sides. There have been two streams, left and right, so to speak, and we have been wedged in between them. And now we have to extricate ourselves. Just this winter I have devoted a good many of my talks to drawing your attention to the fundamentals leading to what is thought nowadays. Truly, it is possible to show in many different symptoms what prevails these days. I have showed you this by drawing your attention to many occult movements active in different societies. I have told you that to a large extent the direction and attitude of modern thinking go back to the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, when the predominating spirit lived in the accomplishments of Bacon, Shakespeare, and Jacob Bohme.¹⁶ This had to be so. However, we are now at a point where we have to overcome what was rightfully inaugurated at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

This is what I wanted to present in my new book Vom Menschenrätsel,¹⁷ I wanted to explain the spiritual streams to which the fifth post-Atlantean epoch led, especially in Central Europe, and that the way out through spiritual science must be found. Time will tell whether this book, into which I really put all my heart—sometimes spending two whole days on a sentence that takes up a quarter of a page in order to be able to justify every word and turn of phrase—whether it will be read properly or just as badly as previous books.

You see, my dear friends, all our reflections amount to the insight that we must find in our soul the elements, the forces, to take in the Mystery of Golgotha in a new way. However, only those can understand the Mystery of Golgotha who do not seek this understanding with the forces of the physical body but by means independent of the physical body. Now, you may object that then the Mystery of Golgotha, the true wellspring of life for Christianity, can be understood only by people who have gone through esoteric development. Well, this is not the case, definitely not. Up to now people have indeed been able, even without spiritual science, to experience this freedom of the soul from the body necessary to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But the number of those who understood dwindled while the number of those who opposed this true understanding grew ever larger.

Just think of one of the symptoms of this development: in earlier centuries, people were also reading the four Gospels and found the force contained in them. Thus, they approached an emotional and psychological understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then came the people of the nineteenth century who were naturally more clever than their ancestors and discovered that the four Gospels contradict each other! How could their intellect avoid seeing that the Gospels contradicted each other? Great pains were taken to find all the contradictions and to unearth a core common to all Gospels. Not much came of all this, but the attempt made many people famous in the course of the nineteenth and even in the twentieth century. Well, are people of earlier centuries supposed to not have seen that the Gospels contradict each other? Were they really so foolish that they didn't see that the Gospel of Matthew differs from the Gospel of John? Or, perhaps, has it just not occurred to nineteenth century people that their ancestors had a different sort of understanding, sought understanding with a quite different organ of their soul? You can answer that question for yourselves on the basis of what you have learned of spiritual science.

However, the days are gone when people could understand Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha without taking the path of spiritual science. The number of people who can understand Christianity without spiritual science will become smaller and smaller. Spiritual science will become more and more an indispensable path to the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, which has to be understood with the etheric body. Everything else can be understood with the physical body. But spiritual science alone can prepare us for an understanding of all that has to be understood with the etheric body. Therefore either spiritual science will be fortunate and succeed, or there will be no further spread of Christianity because the Mystery of Golgotha will not be understood. In this respect we are still misunderstood by all those who think they are on the right path.

I have to tell the following story again and again. A few years ago, I lectured in a town in southern Germany about some of the treasures of wisdom in Christianity. Two clergymen were present who came up to me after the lecture and said they were really astonished at my positive attitude toward Christianity. They remarked that I had presented everything exactly the way it was supposed to be in Christianity. However, they felt my manner of presentation could e understood only by people with a certain amount of education, while their way of presenting Christianity was for all people and therefore the right way.

Well, I told them we must not judge on the basis of what pleases people; rather we are obligated to consider for our judgment only what corresponds to reality. People can easily delude themselves into believing that what they think is right. The less people are grounded in reality, the more they are usually convinced their opinion is right. Those who know the least about Christianity are often the very same ones who believe they know the most about it. In other words, it does not matter what we fool ourselves into thinking true; what matters is that we judge on the basis of reality.

So I asked the two clergymen whether everyone was still going to their churches, for that alone would decide the issue. The decisive point was not what these clergymen thought about Christianity but whether they were indeed speaking for all people, whether all people still went to their churches. They had to admit that indeed many people were staying away, unfortunately! Well, I told them that some of those people who didn't go to their churches anymore had come to hear my lecture, and I was speaking to them. For those who do not go to their churches are also seeking a way to the Mystery of Golgotha.

This way must be found. Our opinions must be dictated to us by reality, by what lives and works in reality, not by what we imagine. Obviously, everybody thinks his or her own method is the right one. But the right thing is not what we think is right, what we have thought out and have felt is right, but what reality reveals to us. Of course, that requires that we get used to immersing ourselves deeply into reality. It requires that we have the reverence for reality and devotion to it necessary to have our power of discernment, our sensitivity, and our feelings guided by reality. This is precisely what people have forgotten these days. They must learn it again in order to understand the smallest as well as the greatest things, to understand everyday life as well as what gives meaning to the whole earth evolution, that is, the Mystery of Golgotha.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Twelve Moods, (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1984).
• 2. Oskar Simony, 1852–1915, Austrian mathematician.
• 3. Rudolf, 1858–1889, Archduke and Crown Prince of Austria. Only son of Emperor Franz Joseph. Died, allegedly by suicide, at his hunting lodge Mayerling together with Baroness Maria Vetsera.
• 4. Oskar Simony, Gemeinverständliche, leicht contiolierbare Lösung der Aufgabe: In ein ringförmiges geschlossenes Band einen Knoten zu machen, und verwandter merkwürdiger Probleme (“Generally understandable and controllable solution to the problem of making a knot in a ringlike, closed ribbon, and other curious related problems”), 3rd. ed., Vienna, 1881.
• 5. Robert Hamerling, pseudonym of Rupert Hammerling, 1830–1889, Austrian poet. Best known for his epics Ahasverus in Rom (1865) and Homunculus (1888).
• 6. Arnold Böcklin, 1827–1901, Swiss painter. Known for paintings of moody landscapes and sinister allegories.
  
  Fritz von Uhde, 1848–1911, German painter.
  
  Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, 1815-1905, German painter.
  
  Carl Spitzweg, 1808–1885, German painter. Most representative of Biedermeier artists in Germany. Known for humorous and detailed portraits of small-town characters.
• 7. Franz von Lenbach, 1836-1904, German painter. His works included copies of Rubens, Titian, and others, as well as portraits of famous people.
• 8. Antoine Joseph Wiertz, 1806-1865, painter.
• 9. Peter Paul Rubens, 1577–1640, Flemish painter. Renowned for excellence of his coloring.
• 10. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519, Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist.
• 11. Michelangelo, 1475–1564, Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet.
• 12. Herman Grimm, Goethe, vol. 2, Lecture 23, p. 171f., Berlin, 1817.
  
  Rudolph Christoph Eucken, 1846–1926, German philosopher. See Lecture One, note 14.
  
  Josef Kohler, 1849–1919, German jurist and writer. See Lecture One, note 14.
  
  Georg Simmel, 1858–1918, German philosopher and sociologist. His work was very influential in establishing sociology as a scientific discipline in the United States.
• 13. Richard M. Meyer, 1860–1914, German philologist.
• 14. J’accuse von einem Deutschen (“J'accuse by a German”), Lausanne, 1915.
• 15. Franz Oppenheimer, 1864–1943, German economist and sociologist. The reply was J’accuse! Aus den Aufzeichnungen eines feldgrauen Akademikers (“J'accuse! From the Notes of an Academic in field-gray”), Berlin, 1915.
• 16. Francis Bacon, 1st Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, 1561–1626. English philosopher and author.
  
  William Shakespeare, 1564–1616, English dramatist and poet.
  
  Jakob Böhme, 1575–1624. German mystic. He was first a shoemaker, then had a mystical experience in 1600.
• 17. Rudolf Steiner, Vom Menschenrätsel (“The Riddle of Man”), vol. 20 in the Collected Works, (Domach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984).

When we look at the world around us as our senses and intellect perceive it, we have something we may call, metaphorically speaking, a great cosmic edifice. We form concepts, ideas, and images of what it is like and what goes on in it. What happens in this cosmic edifice, even down to the details, affects us so that we develop certain sympathies or antipathies for this or that, and these then are expressed in our feeling life. Prompted by our will we do this or that, and thus intervene in the processes going on in this cosmic edifice.

At first, people think that this building of the cosmos consists of separate parts, and so they study these parts and find them made up of still smaller parts, which they then examine, and so on. Finally, scientists arrive at what they call the smallest parts, the molecules and atoms. As I told you, nobody has ever seen these molecules and atoms; they are hypothetical—in a certain sense the hypothesis of their existence is justified, as long as we keep in mind that it is only a hypothesis. In short, we are to some extent justified in thinking that the cosmic building consists of parts or members, and there is nothing wrong with trying to get a clear picture of these. However, the people who give rein to their fantasy in thinking about the atom and who perhaps even talk about the life of the atom, or have still wilder notions about it—well, they are simply speaking about the nothing of a nothing, for the atom itself is merely hypothetical. To build a hypothesis upon other hypotheses is nothing else but building a house of cards; not even that, for in a house of cards we have at least the cards, but in speculations about the atom, we have nothing.

Based on the insights to be gained from spiritual science, people should admit that if they want to see more of the cosmic edifice than our senses perceive, they must arrive at a different perspective. They must come to a way of thinking that is as different from our thinking in everyday life (which is also that of ordinary science) as our usual, everyday way of thinking is from dreams. We dream in pictures, and we can have a whole world in these pictures of ours. Then we wake up and are no longer confronted with the pictures of our dreams but with realities that impinge upon us, that push and tug at us, demanding attention. We know this from life itself, not on the basis of a theory, for no theory can enable us to distinguish between dreams and so-called everyday reality. Only our direct experience of life can teach us this.

Now, it is also true that we can wake up from everyday life experiences, which we may call by analogy “a dream life,” to a higher reality, the reality of the spirit. And again, it is only on the basis of life itself that we can distinguish between this higher spiritual reality and that of everyday life.

Now, what we see when we enter this world can be described with the following image—of course, one could use many different analogies to show the relationship between spiritual reality and ordinary reality, but I want to use a special image for this today. Let's imagine we are looking at a house built out of bricks. At first glance, the house appears to be composed of individual bricks. Of course, in the case of a house we can't go beyond the individual brick. However, let's assume the house doesn't consist of just ordinary bricks but of ones that are in turn extraordinarily artful constructions. Nevertheless, on first seeing the house we would only see the bricks, without having any idea that each brick in turn is a small work of art, so to speak. That is what happens in the case of the cosmic edifice.

We need only take one part of this cosmic edifice, the most complete one, let's say, the human being. Just think, as a part of this cosmic edifice, the human being seems to us to consist of parts: head, limbs, sense organs, and so on. We have tried over time to understand each part in its relation to the spiritual world. Remember, just recently I told you that the shape of our head can be traced to our previous earthly incarnation. The rest of our body, on the other hand, belongs to this incarnation and bears within it the rudiments of the head for the next life on earth.

I also spoke about the twelve senses and connected them with the twelve forces corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. We said that microcosmically we bear within us the macrocosm with its forces working into us primarily from the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each of these forces is different: the forces of Aries differ from those of Taurus, which in turn differ from those of Gemini, and so on. Similarly, our eyes perceive different things than our ears. The twelve senses thus correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, but there is more to it than that.

We know that the rudiments of our sense organs were developed already on old Saturn, then evolved further during the old Sun and the old Moon periods up to the time of our earth. During our earth period, we have become self-enclosed beings with completely developed sense organs. In the Moon, Sun, and Saturn periods, human beings were much more open to the great cosmos, and the forces of the twelve signs of the zodiac affected the essential core of the human being. While the rudiments of our sense organs were being formed, they were affected by the forces of the zodiac. Thus, when we speak of the connection between the senses and the signs of the zodiac, we mean more than a mere correspondence. We seek those forces that have built our sense organs into us. We do not speak superficially of some vague kind of correspondence between the ego-sense and Aries or between the other senses and this or that sign of the zodiac.

We speak about this correspondence because during the earlier periods of our earthly planet the senses of the human being were not yet developed to the point of being enclosed in the organism. It was only through the twelve forces that the sense organs were built into our organism. We are built up out of the macrocosm, and when we study our sense organs, we are actually studying world-embracing forces that have worked in us over millions and millions of years, and have produced such wonderful parts of the human organism as the eyes and the ears. It is indeed true that we study these parts for their spiritual content, just as we would have to study each brick in order to examine the artistic structure of a house.

I could explain this with yet another image. Suppose we had some kind of structure artistically built up out of layers of paper rolls, some of them standing upright, others at an angle—all of these arranged artistically into some kind of a structure. Now imagine we had not just rolls of plain paper, but inside each roll a beautiful picture had been painted. Of course, just looking at the rolled up paper, we wouldn't see the paintings on the inside of the rolls. And yet, the paintings are there! And they must have been painted before the paper rolls were arranged in the artistic structure.

Now suppose it is not we who build up this artful structure of paper rolls, but the paper rolls have to form it by themselves. Of course, you can't imagine they could do this by themselves; nobody can imagine it. But let's suppose because the pictures are painted on all the paper rolls, the latter now have the power to arrange themselves in layers. And that gives you a picture of our true cosmic edifice. We can compare the paintings on the rolls with all that happened during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, and is woven into every individual part of our cosmic building. These are not dead pictures, but living forces that build up everything meant to exist on earth. And we draw out what is artfully hidden in the structure made up of the individual rolls of the cosmic edifice—which science describes. This is what confronts us in our outer life. I have given much thought to finding an analogy corresponding as closely as possible to the facts of the matter and have come up with this image of the paper rolls with their living, active pictures. When you think this analogy through, you will find that when we first look at this structure, we cannot know anything about the paintings inside the rolls. If the structure is rather artful and ingenious, we can get an artful and ingenious description of it; however, it will not contain a word about the paintings inside the rolls.

You see, that's how it is with the conventional sciences. They describe this artistic structure, while ignoring completely the paintings on the inside of each roll. Now, you may wonder if a description of the elaborate structure of the rolls allows us to get an idea and to really know what is inside each roll as long as the rolls are rolled up and part of the whole structure? No, it does not! Conventional science is completely unable to arrive at the idea that the spiritual underlies our cosmic edifice. Therefore, simply continuing along the lines of conventional science will not lead to an understanding of spiritual science; something else must be added, something that has nothing to do with ordinary science.

Now picture all these layers of rolls; we can easily describe them and find them interesting and beautiful. Maybe some rolls are more slanted than others; maybe some are curved, and so on; all this can be nicely described. But in order to find out that there is a picture inside each roll, we will have to take out one of the paper rolls and unroll it. In other words, something special must be added to the human soul if we are to advance from the ordinary scientific outlook to that of the science of the spirit. The soul must be taken hold of by something of a special nature. This is what is so difficult to understand for our materialist culture. Yet, this must be understood again as it was in earlier cultural epochs when a spiritual world view permeated the physical one. In ancient times, people were always aware that everything they had to know about the spiritual content of the world was based on the spiritual taking hold of the soul. That is why people back then spoke not only about science, but also about initiation and the like.

Another analogy, one taken from the ancient traditions of spiritual science, will make the matter completely clear to you if you think it through. In spiritual science we speak of an “occult reading of the world,” and rightly so. What conventional science is doing cannot be called “reading the world.” If you look at what is written on a page of some book or other publication and you can't read at all, then what is written there will of course remain completely in comprehensible to you. Still, you could describe the handwriting; you could describe the lines, loops, and crossbars; you could tell what the individual letters look like and how they are combined. It will be a nice description, not unlike the one contemporary science gives of outer physical reality or the one contemporary history provides. However, this is not the same as reading.

Obviously, people do not learn to read by taking a page from a book, without having any idea what it means to read, and trying to figure out the meaning of the text from the shape of the letters. Reading is taught in childhood. We learn to read not by describing the shape of the letters, but because something spiritual is conveyed to us, and we are mentally and spiritually stimulated to read. It is the same with everything we call the higher and lower degrees of initiation. Initiation was not based on teaching souls to describe what was outside them, but on teaching them to read it, to decipher, so to speak, the meaning of the world. Thus, it was with good reason that what is spiritual in the world was called “The Word,” for the world has to be read if it is to be understood spiritually. And we do not learn to read by memorizing the shape of the letters but by receiving spiritual impulses.

That is what I want to make clear through the presentations in our circles. As you remember the themes running through our lectures, you will see I have always tried to use images. Today I am also using them, for it is only through images that one can lead the way into the spiritual. As soon as images are crammed into concepts applying only to the physical plane, they no longer contain what they should. This confuses people because they cannot grasp what is given in images in such a way that it is a true reality for them. Right away, they think of the images themselves in completely materialistic terms. When we look at more primitive cultures, we see that people then did not have our modern concepts but thought in images and expressed their reality in them. Even in Asian cultures, which are somewhat atavistic because they have kept features from earlier times, you find that to meaningfully express something profound, people always speak in images, images that definitely have the significance of a reality.

Let us take an example where the image really has the significance of an immediate reality, of a coarse and rough reality, so to speak. Europeans frequently find it very hard to understand Asians who have preserved older, atavistic ideas of reality; they often have only a very rough understanding of Asians. There is a very beautiful Asian novella telling the following story.

Once upon a time there was a couple, and they had a daughter. The daughter grew up and was sent to school in the capital because she showed special talents. On leaving school, she married a merchant, an acquaintance of her father. She had a son and died when the boy was four years old. The day after the mother's funeral, the child suddenly said: “Mother has gone upstairs to the top floor, and she must be there now!” And the whole family went upstairs.

Now we must put ourselves into the Asian soul in order to understand what follows. I am telling you something bordering closely on reality. Yet if a European were told by a four-year-old that his mother, who had been buried the day before, was upstairs and if he were then to go up with a candle to look around, he would of course find nothing there. The whole thing would be denied. In other words, we have to try to put ourselves into the Asian mind.

Well, the family went up there with a light and found the mother actually standing there before a dresser and staring at it. All the drawers were closed, and the people felt that there had to be something in the dresser that was troubling her. They emptied the drawers and took the items that had been in them to the temple to store them there. In that way those things would be removed from the world. They believed that now the soul would not return anymore; they knew it would return only if something was still binding it to this world.

However, the soul returned anyway! Every evening when the family looked upstairs, she was there. Finally, the family went to a wise guardian of the temple; he came, said he must be left undisturbed, and recited his sutras. And, when the “hour of the rat” struck—in the Orient, the time between midnight and two in the morning is called the hour of the rat—there was the woman again, staring at a certain spot on the dresser. He asked her if anything was there, and she gave him to understand by a gesture that there was indeed something. He opened the first drawer but nothing was in it, the second, nothing, the third, nothing, the fourth and still nothing. Then it occurred to him to lift up the paper lining of the drawers, and there between the last layer of paper and the bottom of the drawer he found a letter. He promised to tell nobody about this letter and to burn it in the temple. He did so, and the soul never returned again.

Now this oriental story actually agrees with reality; it expresses reality. It would be very difficult to present this matter in European concepts. Besides, the conceptions of modern Europeans are still too coarse. They think when something is real, then everybody must be able to see it. Europeans generally allow only for two things; either everyone sees something, and then it is a reality, or not everyone sees it, and then it is subjective and not objective. Now this distinction between subjective and objective applies only to the physical world but has no meaning in the spiritual world. There we cannot call anything others do not see subjective but not objective.

Now you may say that such things as told in that story also exist in Europe. Indeed, they do, but Europeans are generally glad to say it is only fiction and is not necessarily true. That is why it is so much easier to speak about the spiritual world in fiction. Fiction does not lay any claim to truth. People are content when they do not have to believe what is said in stories and the like. However, the objection that this is after all only a novella does not count. Europeans obviously have little understanding of Asians or they would not say such things. What Europeans call novellas, or art, is a most superfluous and useless game to Asians and means nothing to them. They even make fun of our telling stories about things that do not exist. Asians do not understand this. In what they call works of art, they tell only about what really exists, albeit in the spiritual world. That is the profound difference between the European and the Asian world views.

That Europeans write novellas about things that do not exist is, according to the Oriental view, a highly superfluous activity. In their view, all our art is only a rather superfluous and useless occupation. Clearly, we have to understand the Asian art works we possess as Imaginations of spiritual reality; otherwise we will never understand them at all. We Europeans in turn judge Asian stories not by Asian standards but by our own and call them fanciful and beautiful fiction, products of the fertile, unbridled Oriental imagination.

People will gradually have to realize that we have to speak more and more in images. Of course, if we were to speak in pictures only, we would be going against modern European culture, so we can't do that. But we can gradually allow ordinary thinking, applicable only on the physical plane, to turn into thinking about the spiritual world, and then into pictorial thinking, which develops under the influence of the spiritual world. Natural scientists also develop a view of the world, but if they think their view is clear and comprehensible, they make the same mistake as we would if we claimed we could paint a portrait, and the subject would then step out of the canvas and walk around the room.

In my latest book, Vom Menschenrätsel, I move from the usual logical presentation to a pictorial one.¹ This has to become our general style of presentation if spiritual science is really to become a part of Western civilization. A philosophical treatise about the same matters would cite innumerable logical arguments, would turn the most elaborate and artificial phrases; yet it would be virtually dead. It would aim only at understanding the outer layering of the rolls, not what lives as paintings on the inside of each roll. These things become meaningful only when we apply them in our lives, for that is how we learn to understand life. So-called logical proofs have to be imbued with life before we can understand spiritual science in a living way.

As you know, some people are musical and others are not, and there is a very great difference between those who are musical and those who are not. In terms of the soul a musical person is quite different from an unmusical one. I do not mean this as a criticism of unmusical people; it is simply a statement of fact. Those who look more closely at life may perhaps not go so far as to agree with Shakespeare's statement, “The man that hath no music in himself ... Is fit for such treasons, stratagems and spoils ... Let no such man be trusted.”²

Though we may not arrive right away at that conclusion, there is a certain difference in the souls of musical and unmusical persons.

Now, you may want to know why there are musical and unmusical people. If you look for an answer in psychology, which follows along the lines of the natural sciences, I do not think you will find much that could cast a light on this question. If psychology were to explain why one person is musical and another is not, if it were to deal with such subtleties, then it would finally do some good.

However, there is yet another difference between human beings. We find people who go through life and are, in a sense, hardly touched by what goes on around them. Others go through life with so open a soul that they are deeply affected by what is going on around them. They feel deep joy over some things and suffer over others; they feel happiness about some things and sadness about others. There are those who are dulled to impressions and those who are sensitive and empathize with all the world. There are people who shortly after entering a room that is not too crowded have a certain rapport with the others, because they can feel very quickly what the others feel by way of so-called imponderables. On the other hand, there are individuals who come into contact with many people but do not really get to know a single one of them because they do not have the gift I have just described. They judge others by what they themselves are, and when these others are different from them, they really consider them more or less bad people.

Still, there are those who give their time and attention to others, sharing their experiences. As a rule these are people who can also empathize with animals, with beetles and sparrows, who can feel joy with some events and sorrow with others. Notice how often this happens in life, especially at a certain age; young people are happy about all kinds of things. They are up one minute and down the next, while other people call them stupid because, to their minds, nothing really matters much anyway. So, there exist these two types of people. Of course, the two qualities are sometimes more and sometimes less developed; they are not necessarily very pronounced but are still clearly noticeable.

Now, the spiritual scientist, trying to understand the world from his point of view, comes to the conclusion that those people are musical in this life who empathized with everything and moved easily from joy to sorrow and from sorrow to joy in their previous life. This was internalized, and that is how the rhythmical flexibility of the musical soul developed. On the other hand, people who were dulled in their sensitivity to outer events in the preceding incarnation do not become musical. Nevertheless, they may have other excellent qualities, may even have been great world reformers and have influenced world history.

Imagine a person living in Rome at the time when Michelangelo and Raphael produced their great works and not seeing anything but immorality in the Rome of that time. Now Rome was indeed immoral and decadent. But this individual ignored everything that was not immoral, for instance, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael. Perhaps he became a very important personality, a reformer who accomplished great things. What I am telling you is not meant as malicious criticism. Still, people are unmusical because in the previous incarnation they did not receive vivid impressions of things that do deeply impress other souls.

Think how transparent life would become and how well we would be able to understand others if we approached them with such knowledge. And when we keep in mind that spiritual science imbues our souls with a longing to perceive in pictures, then all this should seem to us something desirable.

Of course, if everything were limited to concepts and if spiritual science were to dissect everyone and investigate what the person was like in previous incarnations, then people would do well to be on their guard against spiritual science. No one would venture forth among people anymore if they would analyze like this. However, this would happen only if we worked with crude concepts. If we stay with pictures, the latter lay hold of our feelings, and we arrive at an emotional understanding of others, which we do not need to transform into concepts. We turn it into concepts only when we express it as a general truth. It is quite all right to talk about the flexibility of the soul in a preceding incarnation and musicality in a later one, as I have done, but it would be in poor taste if I were to approach a person who is musical and describe what he or she was like in the previous incarnation based on this talent. These truths are derived from individual details, but the point is not to apply them to details. This must be understood in the deepest sense.

Most people may understand truths like these, but when we go a bit further, then what is meant to enlighten humanity can easily lead to nonsense. For example, we often speak about reincarnation in general terms, and at one time, I talked to one of our branch groups about the relationship between reincarnation and self-knowledge, a theme that deserves some attention. I said it would be good to try to apply certain concepts we acquire from spiritual science to our efforts to understand ourselves. I explained that at the beginning of our life karma often brings us into contact with people who were connected with us at about the middle of our previous life, when we were in our thirties. In other words, we are not right away with the people we were with at the corresponding time in our earlier incarnation. This is how I have explained various rules of reincarnation; you can also find in my lectures how reincarnation can be applied to self-knowledge. Well, what did all this lead to in those days? It turned out that shortly thereafter a number of people founded a sort of “Club of the Reincarnated.” Yes, indeed, there was a clique that explained who each member had been in the preceding incarnation or even in all previous lives. Of course they had all been exceedingly eminent figures in human history, that goes without saying, and they had all been connected in their earlier lives.

That was a nuisance for a long time. Naturally this is all terrible because it violates what I have emphasized, namely, that if you are to know anything about your previous incarnation, in our era you will not understand it from within yourself. Rather, your attention will be drawn to it through some outer event or through another person. In our time it is generally false when somebody looks within and then claims to have been this or that person. If we are to know anything, it will be told to us from outside.

Those who founded the “Club of the Reincarnated” would have had to wait a long time before being told about their previous incarnations. Yet they had all been important personalities, the most important in human history! When the thing became known, and those people were asked why they had done all this, they answered that they did it because I had said in a lecture one should cultivate self-knowledge in the light of reincarnation. Since then they had all been busy thinking about who they had been in previous lives and how they had been connected with each other.

In such a case we sin against the reverence we should have for the great spiritual truths. This reverence consists in staying appropriately with the image, with the metaphor; only when it is really necessary should the picture be left behind, and should we go beyond the metaphor. In spiritual science we have to develop reverence and to realize that this sophistry, this putting things into the concept, is always a bad thing. It is always bad to think about spiritual matters in the same way we think about things on the physical plane. Indeed, when we acquire this reverence, we also develop certain moral qualities, which cannot unfold if we don't carry all this in our soul in the right way. Accordingly, spiritual science will also lead to a moral uplifting of our modern culture.

Now we Europeans say—and rightly so—that because we can see the Christ Mystery in our spiritual life, we have an advantage over other cultures, for example, over the Asian or oriental ones. What those cultures know about the spiritual does not include the Christ Being. The Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Persians, do not include the Christ Being in their thinking about the spiritual interrelationships in the world. We are therefore right in calling the Asian world view atavistic, a relic of an earlier age. Though those people may have an exceedingly lofty understanding of the world, as, for instance, in the Vedanta philosophy, their inability to understand the Christ Mystery makes their world view an atavistic one. To be able to penetrate deeply into certain connections is not necessarily a sign of great spiritual heights.

For example, I used to know a man who was among us for a long time and even belonged to the “Club of the Reincarnated,” and he propounded excellent theories about certain conditions of life on Atlantis. Continuing along the lines of my book on Atlantis, this person came to very interesting conclusions that were true. Yet, he was so loosely connected to our movement that he left it when external reasons made it convenient for him to do so. Under certain conditions, it takes only a particular formation of the etheric body to see into supersensible regions. However, if spiritual science is to flow in a living way into our culture, it has to take hold of the whole person so that he or she can grow close to its deepest impulses. And then spiritual science will create what our culture, which is developing more and more into a materialistic one, is lacking.

Thus, we are right in saying we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over the Asian cultures. But what do Asians say about this? Now, I am not telling you something I just made up; I am telling you what the more reasonable Asians really say. They agree we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over them. They say, “That is something we do not have, and that's why you Europeans think you are on a higher stage of cultural development. However, you also say, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and your religion tells you to love one another. But when we look at how you live, it does not seem as though you are doing that. You send missionaries to us in Asia who tell us all kinds of great things; however, when we come to Europe, we find people do not at all live as they should if all we've been told were true.” Well, that's what the Asians say.

Now just think whether they are so entirely wrong. At a religious convention where people from all religions were to speak, this case was discussed, and the Asian representatives said what I have just told you. They said, “You send us missionaries, which is very nice. However, you have had Christianity for two thousand years now, and we cannot see that it has advanced your moral development so much beyond ours.”

There are good reasons for this, my dear friends. You see, Asians live much more in the group-soul and much less as individuals. Morals are in a sense innate to them, inborn through the group-soul. Europeans, precisely because they are developing their I, must leave the group-soul behind and must be left to their own resources. That is why egoism inevitably had to appear. It goes hand in hand with individualism. People will only gradually be able to come together again by understanding Christianity in a higher sense.

Much has prevented those who have thought about Christianity, even the best of them, from truly understanding the consequences of the Mystery of Golgotha. Granted, it is certainly very “profound” to say we must experience the Christ in our own inner being. You see, there is what I would like to call a symbolical theosophy. As you know, I have always spoken out against this theosophy that wants to explain everything as symbols. It explains even the resurrection of Christ as merely an inner experience even though in reality it is a historical event. Christ really did rise again in the world, but many a theosophist finds it easier to deal with the matter by claiming it is merely an inner process. As you know, this was the special skill of the late Franz Hartmann; in every lecture he repeatedly explained theosophy to his audience by saying that one has to understand oneself inwardly, to comprehend God in oneself, and so on.³

Now if you understand the Gospels properly, you will not find any grounds for the idea that the Gospels advocate people should experience the Christ only inwardly. There are theosophical symbolists who reinterpret various passages, but in reality everything in the Gospels confirms the truth of the great word, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” The Christ is a social phenomenon. The Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality, and He is here as a reality, belonging not to the individual but to the common life of all people. What He does is what is important. These things can often be better understood in pictures than in abstract concepts.

Just recently we went to see a friend on leave from the front lines of the battlefield, where he has since returned. This friend was kind enough to get us a taxicab, and when he returned with it and pulled up, he told us he had had a conversation with the driver. This driver was an altogether peculiar man, for when we had arrived and were about to get out, he opened the door and after he had been paid, he gave us two little pamphlets called “Peace Messenger.” He was making propaganda for the spiritual world while working his job! Then our friend told us that this driver had told him the essential thing is for people to find the Christ, everything depends on the Christ. In other words, our friend had picked out a cab at the taxi-stand and gotten into a conversation with the driver, who told him the world will advance only when people find the Christ, whom they have not yet found.

Well, the cab driver added a few other things and said, “You see, with Christ it's like this. Just think, I am a very respectable man, an exemplary man, and I have children who are all good for nothing. But am I any less respectable and exemplary a man because I have children who are no good? They all know me, or think they know me, but they are still good-for-nothings. That's how I think of the Christ. He belongs to us all, He is the person we all look to but that does not mean everybody necessarily really understands Him.”

This cab driver has created a marvelous picture of the special life of Christ, of His isolated life! He has discovered that Christ is living among us, living with us, belonging to us all and not to any one individual. He saw his sons who were all no good as the individuals, who were good for nothing and would have to struggle before reaching an understanding. If this cab driver had wanted to express this extraordinarily significant idea in philosophical terms, nothing would have come of it. But his picture reflects wonderfully what we are trying to understand. Of course, such a picture is not quite sufficient; an individual may understand it, but you will not influence our culture with it. I just wanted to show you that even the simplest soul can light on a true picture. This is how things should really flow into pictures. I have tried to achieve this particularly in the style of my latest book, which deals with non-theosophical matters. However, in its presentation this book is “theosophical,” if we want to use that expression.

It is important to understand our teachings more and more between the lines, so to speak, if we want to grasp correctly that they have to become life, the life of each one of us. And what weighs so heavily upon one's soul is just this awful difficulty of integrating these things into life.

You see, if these things are important to you, and particularly if you really know our rationalist culture, you will realize that what pulsates through spiritual science has to live in all branches of culture. It must influence thinking, feeling, and willing, only then will it fulfill its mission. To feel connected with our cause really takes quite some inner strength. It is a pity that it takes such an infinitely long time for people to feel thoroughly connected with the impulses of spiritual science. In the meantime, we can see people passing by and ignoring precisely what they should be focusing on.

Now let me tell you about another case. There was a very learned gentleman who used to be a member of our Society; in fact, he was tremendously learned, but his erudition did not satisfy him. He was profoundly unhappy in spite of all his learning, which included a knowledge of oriental languages and the culture of the Near East. Now this man came and asked for advice. In such a case my advice will necessarily have to show that through an understanding of spiritual science the spirit can enter into a science such as oriental philosophy. So I indicated that he should permeate all this scholarly material with what he had received from spiritual science. However, for him the two things merely continued to exist side by side. On the one hand, he pursued his oriental studies as this is done in the universities; on the other hand, he pursued spiritual science. The two never came together for him; he could not permeate the one with the other.

Now just think how fruitful it would be if someone who knows so much—and this man did indeed know a tremendous amount—were to take his science and learning and imbue it with theosophy! He wouldn't even have to let it be known that he thinks theosophically if he feared people might look askance at him for that. Still, he could then present all this in his university lectures. That man could very well have penetrated the culture on the Euphrates and the Tigris and the one a bit further west—he was particularly at home in Egyptology—with spiritual science and could have accomplished something remarkable. In any case, he could have achieved something more fruitful than the popularizing stuff produced by our common writers. Recently a piece by such a popular writer appeared in a widely read daily paper. The fellow had written an article on the discovery of a sphinx-like figure during construction for the Baghdad railway—well, even if his name is Arthur Bonus, he is still definitely not a “good one!”⁴ This article is absolutely terrible!

The ideal we have in mind, my dear friends, is to let our thinking be carried by what spiritual science gives us. And it should be the same in life too, in our everyday life with each other. Spiritual science can be carried into everything. If we did not intend this, did not have this ideal, then spiritual science would not be able to bear fruit. The challenge to make it fruitful meets us everywhere.

Just think, there are excellent historians who write about the history of England at the time of James I, let's say.⁵ Then there are excellent historians who write books about the life of Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit.⁶ As you know, I have to be careful what I say when I speak about Jesuitism. That is, I must not say too much that is positive—or at least what can be misunderstood as positive. Nevertheless, it is true that most people know about this Suarez only that in one of his writings he is supposed to have explicitly preached regicide. But this is not true. In general, people often know things that are untrue but don't as often and as thoroughly know things that are true.

Now, excellent books about this Suarez are available nowadays; most of them are written by Jesuits. You can read these books about Suarez, the successor of Ignatius of Loyola, and understand them.⁷ That does not mean that you will become, or have been, a Jesuit, nor that you have to put up with people drawing such conclusions. The facts are clear, and when we connect them, we can answer one of biggest questions of modern history. These two individuals, James I and Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit philosopher, are complete opposites. At the time of James I, a very ahrimanic new development was inaugurated. Another development began with Suarez that was very luciferic. Their combined influence, and particularly their fights against each other, shaped much of what lives and weaves in the present age.

Here we come to mysterious connections. I don't want to blame anyone with what I am going to say now. For example, we find that a great deal of what these days is called historical materialism or Marxism, the Social Democratic outlook, can be traced directly to Suarez. Now please do not take this to mean that I am saying the Social Democrats are Jesuits. Nevertheless, there are in a certain sense good reasons for connecting the Social Democrats with the Jesuits. By the same token, many members of the opposing party, that is, those who oppose social democracy, can be traced back directly to what was inaugurated by James I.

With this, I have indicated something that lives in many people's thoughts. Particularly in occult communities you find two main streams, and from these flows something that is not occult. These two main streams produce two typical, contrasting figures: James I of England, in whom an extraordinary initiate-soul lived, and Suarez.

Now, if you read the biography of Suarez, you will not understand it at all if you have not really grasped spiritual science. Suarez was one of those people who are at first bad students and don't learn anything. According to the contemporary materialist view, such people are hopeless cases and not good for anything. However, one can easily prove that many great geniuses did not learn anything when they were in school. Well, Suarez was also one of the bad students, and even in college he was not yet what one might call a bright man. Then all of a sudden he changed, and every biography of him describes this sudden awakening. The gift of brilliance suddenly awakened in him, and he wrote extraordinarily interesting books, which are, unfortunately, not widely known. This happened all of a sudden, kindled by some of the things I told you about in my lectures on the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, which Suarez also practiced. Through these he awakened something in himself that enabled him to develop special mental and spiritual forces.

Thus, the biography of Suarez proves—as it can also be proved in the case of James I—that he turned around, so to speak, and came from the unspiritual into the spiritual. This soul, which later achieved outstanding accomplishments, was born at a certain moment. Its development did not proceed in a straight line, but took place in a sudden jolt, produced either by karma or by an influence on the person in question that can be compared to how we learn to read in elementary school: not by describing the shape of the letters, but by receiving an impulse through which we learn to understand the letters.

Here, you see again how spiritual science can guide us in understanding these historical connections, and then we can see life quite differently. If you take in spiritual science in a living way, then your attitude to life really changes, an you can think of other things to do than what you have been doing. It is hard to imagine that a person who takes in spiritual science in a living way could come up with the strange idea, for example, that he or she is Mary Magdalene reincarnated. This would not occur to such a person; instead he or she would focus on other contents of the soul.

It is hard to have to watch how slowly the development in the direction I indicated proceeds. People really take Spiritual science far too much as merely a theory or as simply something to be enjoyed. However, it must be studied in a living way. Now that we are together before parting or some time at the beginning of summer, when we will have to return to Dornach, I would like to discuss briefly a few important points we must consider in this regard.

You see, my dear friends, if things had turned out as many people adhering to older traditions had expected at the time when we first established spiritual science here fourteen years ago, we would have become a sect. For all the ideas brought over from England were headed toward the formation of a sect. And many people felt very comfortable being completely secluded in their small circles. Then they could call the other people outside their circles fools. There was very little control over this. However, this kind of thing had to stop.

Spiritual science has to reckon with our whole culture. We have always considered this culture, and we have emphasized particularly in public lectures what one can get into European heads these days—regardless of how many objections were raised. Now I don't want to criticize—that would be silly—but still, we have to understand that our movement really must not become a sect and must not even have any characteristics of a sectarian movement if it is to fulfill its task. We can accomplish much if we take the general culture into account. People outside our movement for the most part write nonsense about it—if they write about it at all. You may say this does not matter in a deeper sense. On the contrary, it matters very much! That is why we have to defend ourselves and do what we can to stop it. We have to do everything possible so that eventually people will not write nonsense but something better.

However, in a spiritual sense it is even more harmful when what was intended only for members of our immediate circle is brought in the wrong way before the public so that our lecture cycles are now sold in second-hand bookshops. Granted, we may not be able to prevent this. Still it happens again and again, not only that our lecture cycles can be bought in second-hand bookshops but other equally detrimental things as well. For instance, somebody just recently told me about a person he had worked with for a long time. He said that person did not write anything on his own initiative but belongs to a somewhat dubious clique, which has complete control over him. He himself only sits down and goes ahead with his writing. Now this person has written many brochures about our spiritual science and even big books. In those you find not only quotations from my printed and published works, but also long passages from the cycles. In other words, it is not just that one can buy these cycles in second-hand bookshops, but, in fact, anyone wanting to write a stupid book these days is able to get hold of them. Such people then buy two or three cycles and copy passages that sound completely absurd when taken out of context, and then they can make a book out of all that.

These are the problems that result from our having to face the public while at the same time being a Society. However, we have to understand this problem if we want to overcome it. As I said, I do not want to criticize, for that would be totally useless; instead, I want to describe the problem. I want to show you where the difficulties lie, and we just have to watch for them. In the immediate future even more abominable things will be done against our Society than we have had to endure up to now. We won't be able to change that in the twinkling of an eye. Still, we must not ignore both the encouraging, pleasant elements and the annoying ones in the way the world judges our movement as though we were trying to become totally unmusical in the next incarnation.

You see, those who think purely egoistically—as I said, this is not meant as criticism, but merely as description think that spiritual science has more to say about certain relationships in nature than ordinary science. Thus, people turn to me for medical advice even though I have emphasized repeatedly that I am only a teacher or cultivator of spiritual science, and not a physician. Of course, people may want some friendly advice and to refuse that would be absurd. If people come for friendly advice, why should it be denied them even if it concerns matters of natural science? However, after everything that has happened, I have to request that nobody seeks my advice on medical matters who is not in the care of a physician. People who think selfishly do not consider that such things are not permissible nowadays and that they bring us into conflict with the world around us, and that is detrimental to our spiritual science. We have to make an effort to improve things; we have to advocate everywhere that there should be more than just the officially authorized medicine, which is based on pure materialism. We can certainly do this, but we must not just selfishly think of what is good for us individually if this could interfere with what our movement must be.

Spiritual science can give advice, and it would be absurd if it didn't. It would be pathetic indeed if one could not give some advice to a person suffering from this or that ailment. However, it is a great risk to give advice when the following happens—and I am telling you a true story here. Someone was ill in a town where I had just previously said that I definitely do not want people to turn to me in case of illness. I had said so publicly and officially. Now, someone became ill and was admitted into a sanitarium, where he remained for some time. A long-standing member of ours who had always been connected with the most intimate aspects of our cause wrote to this sanitarium, explaining that the patient in question could now be discharged because Dr. Steiner gave such and such advice. The member wrote this to the physician, who replied that this just goes to show we don't mean it when we claim theosophy wants to be nothing but theosophy and does not want to meddle in other people's business.

Yes, indeed, my dear friends, we have to pay attention to such things. If we ignore them, it will not be for the good of the movement. Of course, this is only one case, but variations of this are happening again and again. This leads to a peculiar feature of our movement, about which I have to speak now. What I am referring to is that the new good side of our movement comes to light less rapidly than other new developments that have also never before been there. They prove that our movement is indeed something new; however, these are peculiar novelties.

For example, let us suppose this or that were written in my published books. If no cycles were getting into the wrong hands, people outside our movement would refute what is in my books. Well, let them do it, but then they would present their opinion. It would never occur to people out there who do not belong to our Society to copy sentences from my books to prove I am a “bad guy.” No one would do this; instead people out there would present their own opinions. What happens in our Society, however, is that someone accepts our teaching—swallows it hook, line, and sinker, as the saying goes—but then refutes me with my own teaching. You can see an example of this in an as yet unpublished exposition.

As you may remember, in an earlier edition of Riddles of Philosophy—the book then was called Views of Life and World in the Nineteenth Century—I explained that Leverrier discovered the planet Neptune merely on the basis of his calculations about Uranus, before Neptune had been seen.⁸ Neptune was first seen at the Berlin observatory, but its existence was already known earlier simply because of calculations. I referred to this example to show that something may follow from calculations, that we can know of a fact merely on the basis of our thinking.

Well, just recently someone wrote that he has applied this very obvious and convincing idea, but in a different field. He claims to have found that something is wrong in our movement, that there are disruptions and interferences like the ones Leverrier found in observing the planet Uranus. If Uranus does not move the way it should according to calculations based on the general laws of gravity, then obviously something is interfering. Similarly, according to this individual, something supposedly interferes with our movement. So he propounds the hypothesis that there is something disruptive here, interfering with everything. And then, in the same way Leverrier discovered Neptune, this individual discovered that the evil interferences in our movement are in me. As the astronomers in the observatory here turned their telescope to the place where Neptune was said to be, so this person focused his spiritual telescope on me and found the evil there.

This is a special case; the methods I have given are all applied to my character and I am refuted with myself. In this man's circle a letter was written recently—not by him but by others from his circle—saying that I have no right to complain about this refutation because I myself had always said spiritual science was the common property of everyone and that it would be wrong to think spiritual science originated with the spiritual investigator. Well now, when things get this confused, there can be no simple, clear explanation for them. This, indeed, is something new arising in our Society. Outside, where the old still holds good, others are refuted by means of what the critics themselves think. But within our Society people do not take their own thoughts, but what they read in the lecture cycles and use it against me.

For example, in the letter I mentioned you can find many quotations from my book An Outline Of Occult Science and others.⁹ Everywhere you'll find exhortations to read this or that for yourself so you'll see I am actually an evil, bad guy. Now, the letter does not claim what I say is bad. On the contrary, because it is good, it can be used as evidence. This is something entirely new arising in our midst, a novelty based on the theory that our teaching can be accepted and then used to slander the one who is trying to popularize it. That is indeed something new!

This may be a particularly blatant case; still, on a smaller scale such things occur very frequently. If we so much as say anything about such things, then we get threats! Recently a letter informed us that articles and pamphlets, whose titles constitute a direct threat, would soon appear in shop windows and newspapers. As I said, if we dare make a sound, this is what happens. This is a novelty, something new in our movement, and we must pay attention to it.

We can see difficulties cropping up before they have fully emerged, so to speak, for we can predict what will happen. Tell me, should we really never talk about such a case as the one I have mentioned; should we always keep quiet about it? That is certainly possible. However, since the members themselves are not trying to discover such things, nobody in our circles would ever find out. Therefore, we must speak about it. But what happens when we speak about it? Pretty soon you will probably read in another letter—of course, this is just a hypothesis for now that I have been speaking about a private letter before a large number of members. And this is simply because there are certainly people here who will immediately report somewhere or other what I have said tonight. That is happening all the time. Not talking about these things is no good, but talking about them only encourages what is repeatedly being done. We can predict the outcome.

I do not want to criticize; I only want to point out that in a movement where spiritual science lives, that is, where occult things pulsate, difficulties do indeed arise, and we must pay attention to them. If we ignore them, they will continue and get worse. Yes, we have to be prepared for the attacks to get more and more trenchant. If we were a small sect, this would not be the case. But our movement had to become just what it has become, and so that's the way it is.

Much of what comes from outside is understandable although many attacks ostensibly from the outside actually can be proven to have originated within our circles. Just today we have learned that in Dornach we practice eurythmy, which supposedly consists in dancing to the point of reaching a trance, as the dervishes do, and so on. We were told this news was reported by members. Members have reported that we dance until we reach a state of trance! In reality this was told to one of our members by people totally unconnected with us, but these people said they had heard it from members whose names they mentioned.

These difficulties come up because we have united spiritual science and the Society, and we must examine them carefully. If we ignore them, we cannot progress properly and we risk the dissolution of our Society and its total annihilation. True, all this does not harm spiritual science as such, but it does harm what spiritual science is also trying to be. It is harmful when people come and tell me that much of what they read about spiritual science interested them, but then they sat at a table in a boarding house and heard a lady prattle on about theosophy and say all kinds of things, and, of course, they feel they cannot join a Society where such a lot of rubbish is talked that's supposed to be theosophy. Now, this is not an isolated case; this happens again and again in one way or another.

Speaking about these things at the end of a serious talk may be misunderstood. However, it is absolutely necessary, my dear friends, that you know about them and pay attention to them. Our Society must be the carrier and helper of spiritual science; however, it can easily develop in such a way that it works against what spiritual science is to bring to world evolution. Naturally, in the individual case it is easy to understand that much of this damage could not be prevented. Yet we can be sure that the damage will look quite different if we pay attention to it and if we ourselves try to keep to a certain line, a certain direction, so to speak. Sometimes it is indeed extremely difficult, but also necessary, to take a hard line in a certain direction. Then novelties like the ones I just described will be rightly judged. It does not happen anywhere else that a person is refuted with his own works, for the idea of accepting a person's teaching in order to refute him with them is in itself absurd and foolish. Of course, if someone talks nonsense, you can use his nonsense against him, but that is not the point here. Rather, the new twist here is that the teaching is accepted and the person is refuted on the basis of his teaching.

On a smaller scale, things like that are very widespread. And they are not far removed from another evil I will also speak about before coming to a close. Indeed, it happens nowhere else as often as in our movement that somebody does something one can condemn, in fact, has to condemn. Then people take sides. For example, somebody may say something against the leading personalities in our Society, or against long-standing members, or against the Vorstand, as we unfortunately have to call it. Yet, even if the allegations are completely unfounded and perhaps only made up, clearly revealing the accuser's underlying motivation, you will rarely find that people try to discover whether the unfortunate Vorstand is right. Instead, people immediately take sides with the person who is wrong.

In fact, that is the rule here: people take sides with those who are wrong, and write letters asking the victims of the attack to do something to preserve the friendship, to straighten things out again—after all, one must show love. When somebody commits an unkind deed against another, people do not write to the one who did the deed. Instead, they write to the one who suffered it that he should show some kindness and that it would be very unloving not to do something to set things right again. It never occurs to them to ask this of the one who is wrong. Such peculiar things happen in our circle.

Of certain other things we will not even speak; nevertheless, there may of course come a time when we have to speak about them too. Today, we wanted to talk about a serious topic since we are living in a serious time and our movement is to influence it in a serious way. Still, we absolutely had to point out these peculiar things. You must pay attention to them, for things are indeed happening that you will find hard to believe if you hear about them. Nevertheless, we constantly have to deal with such things, and nobody should misunderstand that I had to speak about them; instead you should all reflect on them a bit.

It is our intention not to have as long a break between lectures as we had in the past. We may be able to meet again in fall; however, it is better not to promise anything specific in this time of uncertainties and obstacles. And so I ask you to use the picture I have tried to paint in this winter of our souls and to let your souls dwell on it during this summer. Bring to life in your souls, in a kind of meditation, what we have talked about and reflect on the basic requirements for the integration of our spiritual science into the general culture.¹⁰

And so let us now part, my dear friends, in the realization that we can do much to help integrate what we take seriously into our times if we are all really committed to it. People now sacrifice much more than ever before in such numbers and in so short a time. We are living in a hard time, a time of suffering. May the hardships and sufferings also be a summons to us. No matter how difficult it may be to incorporate the spiritual into human evolution, it has to happen. However much or however little we can do as individuals, let us do it! Let us try to understand the right way to do our part so that what cannot come about of itself but has to be done through people will result. Of course, there will also be help from the spiritual world. Thus, let us remain united in thoughts like this even when we will be apart for a while. People who are united in spirit are always together. Neither space nor time can separate them, and particularly not a more or less short span of time. Let us remain united in thoughts that try again to penetrate a little bit what I have said here in these days to your souls.

We must take in the full weight of the significance of the truths connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us realize that in order to understand this or that we have to be in the solitude of our souls and return there again and again. But let us also understand that we belong to humanity and that the One Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha brought something from spiritual heights to the earth for all human beings, for the working together of all people. And let us remember that He said: “When two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in their midst.”

Through all we experience in solitude we can prepare ourselves for what the Christ is destined to be to the world through us. But Christ is in our midst only if we try to carry into the world what we strive for in solitude, and we can do that only if we understand the conditions for carrying it into the world. Let us look at these conditions! Let us open our eyes, and, above all, let us have the courage to admit that things are as they are and must be dealt with accordingly.

When I speak here about Christ, I do so knowing that He is helping because He is an actively living being. We can feel His presence among us; He will help us! But we have to learn His language, and His language today is that of spiritual science. That is the way it is for the present. And we have to find the courage to represent and support this spiritual science as much as we can among ourselves and before others.

This summer, let us reflect upon this and let us meditate on it until we meet again.

• 1. See Lecture Two, note 4.
• 2. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1.
• 3. Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912, doctor and theosophist. Founded his own movement within theosophy.
• 4. Translator's note: The Latin word bonus means “good.”
• 5. James I, 1566–1625, King of Scotland as James VI and of Great Britain as James I. Son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Succeeded to English throne at death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. During his reign group of scholars prepared new version of the Bible in English, called in his honor King James Bible (1611).
• 6. Francisco Suarez, 1548—1617, Spanish theologian and scholastic philosopher. Joined Society of Jesus (1564), considered foremost Jesuit theologian.
• 7. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, Spanish religious. Founded Society of Jesus in 1539. Began composition of his Spiritual Exercises in 1523.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
  
  Urbaine-Jean-Joseph Leverrier, 1811–1877, French astronomer. Investigated disturbance in the motion of Uranus (1845), making calculations indicating the presence of an unknown planet, which was discovered in 1846 and named Neptune.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, 3rd ed., repr., (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 10. After these words, Rudolf Steiner spoke about the day care nursery the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Berlin had organized:
  
  “I would like to add here that our dear friends who organized and cared so devotedly for our day care nursery are concerned that it might be forgotten—not completely of course, but perhaps almost forgotten. Naturally, we will have a kind of vacation, but after that the nursery will have to open again. Then we will need some money and, above all, some dear friends who will help with the day care—of course, only those who can help. Maybe there are women here who could help with the cooking or something like that. All this is needed. Those who have worked in the nursery and know something about such matters can tell you that its results are very good. The children gained something from having come here,- something has been made of them. Therefore, I would like to ask that the women who could take on this task again do so as a labor of love. Of course, if you take on such a task, you have to stay with it. If you cannot make a certain commitment to it, it is better not to take it on. For example, we cannot have somebody promising to be in the nursery at 5 o'clock and then send a note in the afternoon to cancel; we will not be able to find somebody else to fill in on such short notice. We have to know about cancellations at least one day in advance. Thus, I now ask those friends who can work in the nursery to contact Frau Dannenberg, who, together with others, has done so much for the nursery, so that the nursery can open again in winter.”

From the description contained in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS you know that when the human being will be able to look into the spiritual world, he will, to a certain extent have that experience which we designate as the “crossing of the threshold”. In my book I have described this crossing of the threshold by pointing out that the three soul-forces of man, which have a rather chaotic and intermingling activity during his physical life begin to organise themselves; the forces of thought, feeling and of the will become independent. These forces become independent through the fact. that the human being crosses the threshold. In many respects, the whole course of mankind's development resembles the life-course of the individual human being. But things have become displaced. What the individual human being experiences consciously when he strives to attain clairvoyance in the spiritual world, namely, the crossing of the threshold, must be experienced unconsciously by the whole of mankind, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, Humanity has no choice in regard to this; it must experience this unconsciously—not the individual human being, but HUMANITY, and the individual human being together with humanity. What does this mean?

What is now a joint activity of thought, feeling and will within man, will in future take on a separate character and this will come to the fore in various spheres. We are just passing through a time in which humanity is unconsciously crossing the threshold of a significant portal, a fact which is clearly evident to the clairvoyant power. Humanity passes through this crossing of the threshold in such a way that the spheres of thought, feeling and will become separated. This imposes duties upon us, the duty of shaping external life in such a way that the great change which takes place in man's inner life may be experienced even in his EXTERNAL life. Through the fact that thinking grows more independent within the life of humanity, we must build up a foundation upon which the activity and influence of thinking can become sounder; we must moreover create a foundation upon which feeling can develop independently, and also a foundation upon which the will can reach its particular development. What has hitherto exercised a chaotic and intermingling activity in public life must now be organised into THREE SPHERES. In public life, these three spheres are: ECONOMIC LIFE, POLITICAL or JURIDICIAL LIFE and CULTURAL or SPIRITUAL LIFE. This need of a three-partition is connected with the mystery of human evolution which pertains to the present time.

Do not think that the “threefold social organism”, which is now being advanced, is just some sort of invention. It has been born out of the most intimate knowledge of human evolution, out of the knowledge of what must occur if the goal of human evolution is not to be renounced. During the past years, we have been involved in the fearful catastrophe of the great war, because of the difficulty which existed in recognising a goal of a spiritual character, and because people withdrew themselves more and more even from the mere act of recognising at least the existence of such goals. We must extricate ourselves from this chaos. The very course of human evolution demands that we should extricate ourselves from this chaos. Indeed, for this reason I think that the necessity of a threefold social organism will only be recognised thoroughly by those who depart from anthroposophical feelings and from a knowledge of the events which are taking place in the evolution of humanity. At present, people do not like to acknowledge such things. The present time likes to turn to tasks connected with the things which lie closest at hand, and it does not like to penetrate into the deeper mysteries of life.

What grieves the heart of one who is able to look into these mysteries, is the fact that humanity has such a strong aversion to the very things which it needs most. Yet it is impossible to abide by the thought which has just been expressed. We may say: every kind of pessimism is wrong. But this does not imply that every kind of optimism is right. Right and justified is, however, the APPEAL TO THE WILL. It is not at all a question of whether something takes place in this or in that way, but that we should WILL things in accordance with the direction of human evolution. We should realise over and over again that the old time has come to an end and that we must close our accounts with it. A real understanding of the present can only be gained if we rightly close our accounts with the old time. For the NEW time can only be taken into account from a SPIRITUAL standpoint! We should not delude ourselves that we can carry over into the new time the things which we have cherished in the past. In our external life, we must begin to turn to the new thoughts, which are now beginning to be active.

Mankind now faces two paths: One of these leads through the mechanization of the spirit. In more recent times, the spirit has become very mechanical, particularly in regard to the abstract laws of Nature, which have also been applied to social life, as ruling laws. Mechanization of the spirit—vegetalization of the soul! Vegetables sleep—and the human soul also tends to sleep. In a sleeping state we pass through the most important events. The most important events of the past years have literally been ‘slept away!’ Even to-day, most important events are being slept away.

Let us now turn our gaze to the East. There we can see that the animalization of the bodies is coming up in a very strong measure. Just as the Americanization of the spirit represents a mechanization of spiritual life, so the Bolshevism which tends to spread out in the East represents an animalization of the bodies. Emotions lead people to reject and criticize this or that, yet they do not wish to grasp real life.

At the present time, humanity has therefore the choice of advancing in a direction where it can find, on the one hand, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetalization of the souls and the animalization of the bodies, or else it may, on the other hand, seek the path leading to an AWAKENING OF THE SPIRIT, discover this awakening of the spirit in the impulses which correspond to the epoch of the consciousness-soul, discover it in the connection of the human soul with the higher Hierarchies, discover, it in the recognition of the conscious human soul which comes from earlier conditions of earthly existence, discover it in the three-partition of social life! All these things are connected. And the human beings who unite in that movement which we designate as a spiritual-scientific movement oriented towards Anthroposophy, should feel that they are a KERNEL from which the forces ray out that can give rise to a new social structure. Everything which comes from other directions and seeks to transform social life may be very useful; but humanity should strive after the goal of transforming social life in a real and true way, and this can only be the outcome of SPIRITUAL IMPULSES!

At present, the human beings still ignore a secret of life which is intimately connected with the present moment of evolution. In the past, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to attach great importance to this mystery, but to-day it is necessary to bear it in mind. This Secret of life consists therein that man, such as he is constituted to-day, from the aspect of body, soul and spirit, contemplates in a certain way every night the events of the following day, but so that it is not always necessary for him to be fully conscious of these coming events, to have them in his day-time consciousness. The one who, is fully conscious of these coming events, is his angel, his ANGELOS. What we experience during the night in common with that Being whom we call our “angel”, is a FORESIGHT, a prevision of the next day. But. you must not consider this from the standpoint of human curiosity, for this would be quite wrong; you must instead consider it from the standpoint of PRACTICAL LIFE. Only if the human being is intimately pervaded by this feeling, will he be able to make the right decisions and take over thoughts into the course of his day. Let us assume quite concretely that someone wishes to do a certain thing at a definite time, say, at midday. What he thus intends to do, has already been arranged during the preceding night between himself and his Angelos. This is the case with the human being ever since the middle of the fifteenth century, but it is not necessary that he should be conscious of it, for it has nothing to do with his curiosity. Man should instead be pervaded with the feeling that the things which he has arranged with his angel during the preceding night should become fruitful in the course of his day.

Many things of the present can show us in an overwhelming way what I have explained to you just now. Particularly the years of sorrow, the past four or five years, can send a great truth trickling into humanity, namely, that the consciousness of being connected day by day with the higher Beings, through the experiences of the preceding night, unfortunately did not exist. What a different course would the events of the past four or five years have taken, had the human beings been pervaded by the feeling: “Whatever you do, is in agreement with the arrangements which you have made with your Angel, during the past night!” These are the things which must be discussed to-day. We must speak of the fact that the human being should, learn to consider his life between birth and death as a CONTINUATION of his soul-spiritual life before birth. We must speak of the fact that throughout his life the human being should be able to feel the revelations of the god within him, and we must speak of the fact that the human being should carry into the life of daytime the conscious feeling: “Whatever you do, from morning, to night, has been arranged between you and your angel from the time of your falling asleep to the moment of waking up!”

The human beings should turn to these kinds of feelings, which are far more real in the face of the spiritual world than the more abstract feelings of to-day pertaining to religious beliefs; they should turn to feelings which do not depart from selfish, but from unselfish human impulses. Feelings of this kind can give rise to the connection which we need with the Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These Beings can then once more interest themselves in the human beings. Man's attitude and feelings towards the spiritual world should move in the direction which I have just now indicated.

One more thing should be grasped clearly. You know that the religions of to-day talk a great deal of “God” and of the “Divine”. To WHAT do they really refer? They merely refer to something which at least exists in the human soul as a pale inkling. It is not so important to consider HOW certain things are named, but rather what exists in the human soul. People speak of “God”, they speak of “Christ”—yet they always mean nothing but their ANGEL! They can still turn to their Angel, for this touches a familiar note in their souls. It is quite an indifferent matter whether the religions of to-day speak of God, of Christ, or of anything else, for the THOUGHT-material which gives rise to their talk merely reaches as far as the Angel-beings that belong to man, as far as the Angeloi. At present, people do not rise beyond this hierarchy, for to-day they feel averse to seek a connection with the spiritual world which is more encompassing than the one which rises out of their egoism. The connection with the ARCHANGELOI, with the hierarchy of the Archangels, must be sought in another way. The present field of human interests must be considerably enlarged, so that the human beings may rise in their feelings from their inclination for the Angeloi as far as the Archangeloi.

The human beings should experience in their souls more or less the following and say to themselves: Terrible events have taken place in the whole civilised world, during the past four or five years. Many people have searched for the cause of these happenings; many have accused one another; they have spoken a great deal of “guilt” and “lack of guilt”. Even if we discard the most extreme form of superficiality, we shall soon lose interest in this empty talk of “causes”, “guilt”, or “lack of guilt”, simply because we can see that what has risen to the surface during the past four or five years resembles the waves Of the sea, which are driven to the surface from below by the sea's own forces. The forces of humanity had been stirred up from year to year. One nation after the other began to participate in the great foolishness which had taken hold of humanity during the past few years and one could say: Something which has the nature of elemental forces has been stirred up and has been driven to the surface; the sea of human life has grown restless. What is that?

A clear view of things is impossible unless we extend this fact, that a great restlessness has taken hold of mankind, to that space of time which we designate as “history”. We must say to ourselves: The armed contest of the past four or five years is only the beginning of events which will be enacted upon an entirely different sphere, events of a kind which has not hitherto existed in the development of humanity. We are not facing an end—for to say this, can only result from a superficial observation of human evolution—but we are facing the BEGINNING of the greatest battles, of the SPIRITUAL battles of the civilised world! Let us concentrate our efforts upon the task of being ready to cope with these, battles. In the near future, the East and the West threaten to face one another AS SOULS, in an ever growing measure!

When we pass through birth, we bring along with us into our physical-sensory existence the forces of the super-sensible world, taken from our super-sensible existence. These forces continue to be active. At the present time, this can only be grasped with greatest difficulty. How do these forces continue to be active?—They are active in everything we develop in the physical world in the form of SPIRITUAL LIFE. It would be impossible to have poets among us, it would be impossible to develop a world-conception or a science, it would be impossible to develop impulses for the education of man, and there would be no possibility whatever for the development of a spiritual life, if we would not bring along with us through birth the impulses that come from our pre-natal life.

On the other hand, what we develop within the economic life as impulses of the will—brotherliness, human love, thinking for others and not only for ourselves, working for others and not only for ourselves—what we do, as it were, “on the quiet”, through the fact that we stand within the economic life, gives us the most important impulses for what we then carry along into the spiritual world in the form of impulses. In the same way in which we bring along with us from the spiritual world forces that constitute, above all, our spiritual life upon the earth, so do we bring back again into the spiritual world those forces that we develop through our economic life in the form of love for humanity and brotherliness. These forces accompany us in the spiritual world; there, they are important impulses for us. If we contemplate that which develops from year to year in the life of a child, we can see in it the inheritance coming from the spiritual world, enabling us to develop a spiritual sphere of activity upon the earth; and if we look upon that which occurs through our economic life, namely, that through our will we develop activities for others, we can see therein the impulses which we carry along with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the portal of death.

What we develop ONLY between birth and death, appears to one who is able to contemplate the spiritual world as a contrast to what we develop in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Read my descriptions of the “Soul-region” and of the “Spirit-region” in the book Theosophy, for there you will find that these things are described in concepts that arise altogether from a living contemplation of those conditions. Everything that constitutes the sphere of law is the, very opposite of the impulses that arise during the life between death and a new birth.

Our spiritual life is based upon the forces that come from the time before our birth, or conception; we develop an economic life in order to carry into the spiritual world forces that we unfold through it; and what we unfold HERE, what pertains exclusively to the earth, is the political, juridical life, the life of the State. This has no connection with the spiritual world.

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

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

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

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

It was followed by a recitation by Marie von Sivers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This lecture is the 4th of 12 lectures from the lecture series entitled, The Human's Connection with the Elemental World, and the 3rd of 4 lectures in the series entitled, Olaf Asteson and the Awakening of the Earth Spirit.

The period from about Christmas to the present date (Jan. 7th) is really an important and significant period of the year, also in an occult connection. It is called “The period of the Thirteen Days.” The remarkable thing is that the importance of these thirteen days is felt by those who through the constitution of their souls have preserved an inkling of the ancient connection of the human soul with the spiritual world, of which we have often spoken. We know that the primitive human being who lives in the country or in a community which is little infected by our town life, preserves more of the connection with the spiritual world which existed in ancient times than one belonging to a town.We find many things in folk-poems regarding experiences of the soul during the period from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, Jan.6th.

This is the time when—after darkness has been greatest over the earth, directly after the winter solstice, when the sun again begins his victorious course,—together with the deepest immersion and subsequent liberation and redemption of nature,—the human soul can also have special experiences if it still has a definite connection with the spiritual world. Those who o longer possess the old clairvoyance, but who in their souls are still connected with the spiritual world, perceive a difference in the abnormal world of dreams at this period of the year. What the soul can then experience is important, because the soul—if it is still susceptible—can then really penetrate best into the spiritual world. To the modern man the course of the year is such that he can no longer distinguish the various seasons of the year; for while the snowstorms rage outside, when the darkness descends about 4 p.m. and it grows light late in the morning, the city man feels the same as in the summer months when the sun develops its greatest power. Man has been torn out of his ancient connection with the Cosmos in which he lived when he was outside in nature. To those however who have kept in touch with nature, what happens at Christmas time is not the same as what takes place at some other time in the year, for example, at midsummer. Whereas at midsummer the soul is most emancipated from what is connected with the spiritual world, at the time when nature has died away the most it is connected with the spiritual world and formerly had special experiences during this time.

Now there is a beautiful folk-poem in the old Norwegian language, a poem which was re-discovered a short time ago and has quickly become popular again owing to the peculiarly sympathetic understanding of the Norwegian people. It treats of a man who was still in connection with the spiritual world,—Olaf Oesteson. What he goes through in the time between Christmas and Epiphany is beautifully described in this poem. At the New Year Festival in Hanover on Jan. 1st, 1912, I tried to put this folk-poem “Olaf Oesteson” into German verse, so that it might come before our souls too. We will begin this evening with the song of Olaf Oesteson, which contains his experiences during the “Thirteen Nights.”

The Dream Song

O listen to my song!
I will sing to thee
Of a certain youth:
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A deep sleep fell upon him soon,
And he could not awake,
Till on the thirteenth day
The people went to Church.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long,
Of him I sing to thee.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve:
Long, long did he sleep!
And he could not awake,
Till the thirteenth day
The birds were spreading their wings.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long
Of him will I sing to thee.

Olaf could not awake
Till on the thirteenth day
The sun shone o'er the mountains
Then did he saddle his nimble steed,
And rode to the church in haste.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
Who once slept for so long,
Of him will I sing to thee.

The priest already stood
By the altar saying mass.
When by the church-door Olaf seated himself
To give tidings of many dreams,
Which during this long sleep
Had filled his soul.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

Young folk and old ones too,
Give heed unto the words
Which Olaf speaks about his dreams.
This was Olaf Oesteson,
who once slept so long.
Of him I sing to thee.

II

I went to rest on Christmas Eve,
A deep sleep soon enveloped me;
And I could not awake,
Till on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

Up to the clouds was I lifted,
And flung to the depths of the sea.
Mirth cannot fall upon
ONe who follow me.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

Up to the clouds was I lifted
And thrust into dismal swamps,
beheld the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.
Brightly shone the moon
and the paths stretched far away.

Into earth's depths did I journey,
Where streams of Gods roar frightfully,
To look at them I was not able,
But I could hear their roaring.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

My black steed did not neigh,
And my dogs did not bark,
Nor did the bird of morning sing;
There was but one marvel everywhere.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

My spirit-land I had to travel o'er
The wide plane of a thorny heath,
And also the nails on my feet.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I came to Gjaller-Bridge
It hangs high up in windy heights;
It is covered with red gold
and has nails with sharp points.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

The ghostly snake did strike me,
The ghostly hound did bite me.
The bull, he stood across the way
These are three beasts of the bridge:
Of frightfully evil nature are they.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

The dog to bite is ready
The snake desires to sting,
The bull, he threatens violence:
They let none pass across the bridge
Who will not honour truth.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I went across the bridge
Narrow it is, and makes one dismay.
I had to wade through swamps ...
They lie behind me now!
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I had to wade in swamps,
Bottomless did they seem.
When I passed o'er the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth—
Like the dead who lie in the grave.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

III

Then I came to waters
In which, like blue flames,
Masses of ice gleaned bright.
And God my purpose guided,
So that I shunned that region.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

I turned my steps to the winter-path
On the right could I perceive it.—
I looked as into Paradise,
That threw its light afar.
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

And the holy Mother of God—
I saw her there in radiance!
She made no travel to Brooksvaline:
Saying that there men's souls are judged!
Brightly shone the moon
And the paths stretched far away.

IV

In other worlds I tarried
Through the length of many nights;
And God alone can know
How much distress of soul I saw
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

A young man there I saw,
Who had recklessly a boy had killed:
Now he must carry him eternally
In his own arms!
He stood deep in mire,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Also an old man did I see,
He wore a cloak as though of lead.
Thus was he punished, because he
In avarice had lived on earth.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Ad men came into sight
Who carried fiery burdens;
Dishonesty weighs heavily
On their poor souls,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Children too could I behold.
With glowing coals beneath their feet.
These worked their parents ill in life,
Which hurt their spirits grievously
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

I was charged to approach that house,
Where witches had to work
In the blood which in life
Had stirred them up to wrath,
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

Down from the North in savage troops,
Come riding wicked spirits,
Led by the Prince of Hell.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

What came from out of the North
Seemed worst of all;
In front rode he, the Prince of Hell,
On his black charger.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

But from the South there came
In serene tranquility yet other bands.
Foremost rode St. Michael
At the side of Jesus Christ.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

The souls laden with sin
Could but in terror tremble!
Their tears ran down in streams—
The result of their bad deeds.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

In majesty stood Michael there
Weighing the human souls
Upon his scales for sin;
And giving judgment stood
The judge of the world, Jesus Christ.
In Brooksvaline, where souls
The Day of Judgment undergo.

V

Happy is he who in earth-life
Gives shoes to those in need;
He need not walk with naked feet
In the field of thorns.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he who in earth-life
Hath given bread to the poor!
He cannot in that world
Be injured by the dogs.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he, who in earth-life
Hath given corn to the poor!
Threatened he cannot be
By the sharp horns of the bull,
When he must pass the Gjaller-bridge.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

Happy is he, who in earth-life
Gives clothing to the poor!
The ice-masses in Brooksvaline
Cannot avail to freeze him.
Thus speaks the tongue of the scales,
And universal truth
Resounds within the spirit-state.

VI

Young folk and old ones too,
Give heed unto the words
Which Olaf spake about his dreams.
Long didst thou sleep indeed ...
Wake now, Olaf Oesteson!

The poem itself is old; but as we have already said, it has recently reappeared as if of itself among the Norwegian people and is spreading with great rapidity. The fact of this poem spreading id one among the many things at the present time which shows how people are longing to understand the secrets now being opened up by Theosophy, for the fact that what is here described takes place—or at least could take place a comparatively short time ago—in a soul, is not merely “imagination.” Olaf Oesteson is a type of those people living in the North who, even in the Middle Ages, about the middle of that period, were able to experience literally, one might say, the things mentioned in this poem. When our Norwegian friends gave me this poem on my visit to Christiania the time before last, and wished me to say something about it, it was the fact just mentioned, one of general theosophical interest, which came particularly to notice, but what led up to include this poem in our theosophical understanding we can really penetrate more and more deeply into what comes to light in it. Thus for instance, it was significant to me that Olaf (that is an old Norwegian name) has the surname “Oesteson.” “Oesteson”—the son of what? Of “Oste”; and I tried to find what sort of mother this is the son of. Now of course we might adduce many things—including some that might lead to dispute—about he meaning of the word “Oste” (East): but it would be impossible to-day to explain all that is connected with it. If, however, we take into account all that comes into question, “Olaf Oesteson” means approximately this: One who is still a son of that soul which passes down from generation to generation, and is connected with the blood which is handed on from generation to generation. Thus we have traced this name back to what we have so often spoken of in Theosophy, namely, that in ancient times the old clairvoyance was connected with the relationship of the blood which passes through generations. We might translate “Olaf Oesteson” thus: Olaf, the one born of many generations and who still bears in his soul the characteristics of many generations.

Now when we examine his experiences, it is extremely interesting to notice that what Olaf Oesteson went through while he was asleep for thirteen days, beginning from Christmas Eve, during which time he did not woke was in a sort of psychic state. When we read these verses describing his various experiences with the broad homeliness of the nation, we are reminded of certain descriptions of the first stages of initiation, where we are told that so and so was led to the portal of death. We are shown in many places in the poem that Olaf Oesteson arrives at the portal of death. It is pointed out particularly clearly where he says that he feels like a corpse, even to the earth which feels between his teeth. When we remember that in initiation the etheric body extends beyond the limits of the skin and the neophite becomes larger and larger, so that he lives into the large, into the wide expanse of space, we are told in this poem how Olaf Oesteson descends deeply, feels himself in the depths of the earth and ascends to the clouds. Olaf Oesteson experience what man has to go through after death, for example, in the sphere of the moon. It is poetically described how the moon shines clearly and how the paths stretch far away, then the chasm is described which has to be passed over in the world which lies between the human world and the one leading out into cosmic space. The heavenly bridge connects what is human with what is cosmic. Our attention is then drawn to the beings expressed in the constellations; the bull and the serpent. To one who can look spiritually into the world, the constellations are only the expression of what exists spiritually in space. Then the world of Kamaloca is disclosed in the description of “Brooksvaline.” It describes how there is a sort of recompense, how people have there to experience what they have not acquired here on earth,—but in a compensating way.—We need not, however, go into all the details of the poem. We should not do this at all with poems such as this. We ought to feel they have originated from a frame of mind still closely connected with something which existed in such a people as this, much longer than among nations which lived in the more interior part of the continent or who were connected with the life in cities. In the Norwegian people, which still possesses in its national language many things which border closely upon occult secrets, it is possible to keep souls in touch for a long time with what exists behind outer material phenomena.

Remember who I explained that, parallel with the seasons of the year, there are spiritual facts taking place, how in the spring when the plants spring forth the earth, when everything wakens, as it were, when the days grow longer, we have to recognize what may be called a sort of sleeping of the elementary and higher spirits connected with the earth. In spring, when outwardly the earth awakens, we see that spiritually this is connected with a sort of falling asleep of the earth; and when outer nature dies down again it is connected with an awakening of the spiritual nature of the earth. When about Christmas time outer nature is as though asleep, it is the time when the spiritual part of the earth is most active, and includes elemental, less important beings, as well as great and mighty beings connected with earthly life. It is only when it is observed outwardly that it seems as though we must compare spring with the awakening of the earth and winter to its going to sleep. Seen occultly it is the reverse. The “Spirit of the Earth” which however, consists of many spirits, is awake in winter and asleep in summer. Just as in the human organism the organic and plant activities are most active during sleep, as these forces then work even into the brain, and as the purely organic activity is subdued while the person is awake, so is it also with the earth. When the earth is most active, when everything has sprouted forth, when the sun has reached its zenith about St. John's Day, the Spirit of the earth is asleep. In accord with this occult truth the festival of Christmas, the festival of the awakening of the spirit, was fixed in winter. Things which have been handed down as customs from ancient times often correspond to these occult verities.

Now one who knows how to live with the spirit of the earth celebrates, for example, the festival of St. John in summer, for this festival is a kind of materialistic festival; it celebrates that which is revealed in an outward materialistic form. One who is connected with the Spirit of the Earth, with what lives spiritually in the earth, awakens in his inner being—that is, he sleeps outwardly like Olaf Oesteson—best at Christmas time, during the “Thirteen days.” This is an occult fact, which to occultism signifies exactly the same as, for example, the fact of the outer solstitial point to ordinary materialistic science. Of course materialistic science will consider it to be an obvious thing that in astronomy it should describe the activity of the sun in summer and in winter in a purely external manner, it will consider foolish what to occultists is a fact, namely that the spiritual solstice is at its highest point in winter, that therefore the conditions are then the most favorable for those who wish to come in touch with the Spirit of the Earth and all that is spiritual. Therefore to one who wishes to strengthen his soul's powers it may come about that he can have his best experiences during the thirteen days after Christmas. At that time, without noticing it, experiences come forth from the soul,—although the modern man is emancipated from outer processes, so that occult experiences can come at any time, but in so far as outer conditions can have an influence, the time between Christmas and New Year is most important.

Thus are we reminded by this poem in quite a natural manner, that a great deal of what we are able to relate regarding the period between death and rebirth was known among certain peoples a comparatively short time ago, many knew it from direct experience.

What I have to say today will be somewhat related to the remarks I was allowed to present here last time, and will therefore also have to tie in with some of the ideas presented then. Today I would like to speak about the materialism of present-day religious creeds, but I would like to do so in connection with a certain aspect of the Christ problem. It is precisely with the Christ problem that a whole series of misunderstandings about anthroposophical research work begins. Although the dispelling of these misunderstandings is not to be expected from those who reveal them with a certain interest, a great deal may depend on it with others.

In the latest phases of the development of Western civilization, we have seen all sorts of inclinations towards distinctly atheistic views of the world. It cannot be my task today to point out the various nuances of the atheism that has emerged; but I would like to draw attention to something that is a common basis of every atheistic world view. This is the failure to look at the source of the content of the consciousness of God. The consciousness of God cannot come from the contemplation of external nature alone, but from the whole of man's coexistence with external nature, with the world of the senses. It may seem paradoxical that I say that the consciousness of God must come from man's coexistence with the world of the senses. But this God-consciousness must not be taken as the fulfillment of a moment, so to speak, but as the content of earthly life from birth to death. In this earthly life, we feel ourselves to belong to nature through heredity. We entered this earthly existence as physical human beings through purely natural processes. As we go through this earthly existence, we perceive a certain development of what we have received through our birth into this existence. Now it is a matter of whether we are careful enough - of course I do not mean this only intellectually, but also in terms of feeling and from the will impulses that we also have and must experience - whether we gain a certain awareness of our consciousness for living together with the outer world of the senses in the course of our earthly existence. If we summarize purely through popular experience what the world of the senses can give us, we will certainly never come to feel our full human nature if we do not think spiritually about the world of the senses and what it can be with us. No matter how carefully we examine all the secrets that the external sense world can give us through sensory perception, we can never come to understand that the human being is also placed in this sense world. But since we, as physical beings on earth, have nevertheless emerged from this sense world, but can never find ourselves as human beings in its ingredients, it simply follows that for a healthy consciousness, this consciousness is filled with the divine being, or rather, with the contemplation of the divine being.

This is precisely what modern natural science, despite its great and comprehensive achievements, has brought to humanity: that because it refuses to recognize a spiritual element within the world of sense-perception, it effectively excludes the human being from the totality of existence that it seeks to embrace. I have already expressed this before you by saying: If we consider, for example, the in many respects tremendous theory of evolution of modern times, we do not actually find it treated of man as 'man', but as the conclusion, as it were, the crowning of the animal world. If we ask natural science, as it is constituted today, about the essence of man, it does not actually answer us, if we understand it correctly. It only answers the question: What is the highest of the animals? That is, it only considers man in relation to his animality. In many respects she is right in what she has to say about this, but in so doing she places man, as it were, outside the sphere of her consideration. She cannot answer the question about the essence of man with her means; indeed, she can only understand herself correctly if she declares this question about the essence of man as being outside her realm.

This is, of course, only an indication of the feeling that arises from the wholeness of a healthy person, that precisely in so far as he regards himself in connection with the whole of nature, he must actually come to the consciousness of God, but only to the consciousness of God, not to the consciousness of Christ.

Thus, by applying his healthy understanding and healthy intuitive perception, man can by no means be an atheist. I have already expressed this here by saying that even if, of course, not every slight illness can be diagnosed by ordinary means, it is nevertheless clear to anyone who can distinguish the healthy person from the sick person that, first of all, atheism can only find its place in a morbid disposition of human nature as a whole. Therefore, one could say that denying God is actually the result of being sick. But now the following applies: We arrive at this awareness of God in the present epoch of human development, I would say, only in a wavering, doubting way when we survey everything; for here attention must be drawn to a significant defect in our present pedagogy, the defect that the Waldorf school movement, for example, seeks to correct. When one speaks of the decline of present-day civilization, one cannot actually ignore the present youth movement. This youth movement means much more than is usually thought, and I consider it to be something extraordinarily significant that, at a number of events of our anthroposophical movement in recent times, including the last Stuttgart congress, a impressive number of members of the youth movement had actually come and made the very positive decision, from the point of view of the youth movement, to join forces with what is intended by the anthroposophical spiritual movement. Whatever one may think of the details of this youth movement, one must recognize that in a large part of our youth the authority of the older generation has faded, and that someone must guide the young. No matter how much one may criticize today's youth, one cannot ignore the fact that when young people say that they can no longer recognize any authority, then it is not only the youth who can be blamed for it, but also the older generation, who should be the guides of the youth. Recently, during a lecture I gave in Aarau, Switzerland, the very question of the lack of authority among today's youth was discussed. After the lecture, a religious representative appeared who thoroughly scolded the current youth. But scolding does not really achieve much when dealing with something that is so elementary. You have to understand things. It was interesting when a very young lad from the cantonal school stood up afterwards — the cantonal school there is definitely a secondary modern school — who, in my opinion, actually gave the best speech in the discussion. He spoke with great fire and said: We want authority, we actually crave authority, but when we look to the old people, do we see anything other than that no authority can come from these old people? We see how they quarrel with each other at every opportunity, how they fight. – And then he listed all sorts of things that today's youth notice about their elders, and in the end he said: We do crave authority, but we cannot have it!

But if you look at what it is about, you find that today's civilization has become highly intellectualistic, that actually everything that considers itself to be leading and authoritative today has become intellectualistic, purely intellectual. Basically, natural science and intellectual culture belong together. Natural science is the objective, intellectual culture is the subjective. But intellectualism only occurs naturally at a certain age. You cannot be an intellectual as a child. Children are not intellectuals. Intellectualism can only occur after sexual maturity. And since humanity has now fully grown into intellectualism, everything is dominated by it today. Those aspirations that often reject intellectualism today and grumble about it do so only out of a different intellectualism. Today, all those who claim intellectualism are abstract beings. But one only grows into intellectualism at a later age, and because we are overwhelmed by it, children no longer understand us and cannot have anything left for the forms of thought that we adopt under the influence of intellectualism. We ourselves no longer feel what we took in when we were children. Childhood is no longer fully alive in us. We have become so terribly intellectually clever that childhood no longer plays any role in us. But we cannot be educators or teachers if we have been thoroughly abandoned by what we ourselves experienced as children. So we no longer have anything to say to children, and they grow up without any special care for their being. We declaim that we have to be vivid, but the vivid is only the objective side of intellectualism. Thus we create an abyss between us and the youth, and this is what we encounter in the youth movement. But again, nothing is done by just scolding intellectualism. For it has now entered Western civilization as a necessary phenomenon since the last three to five centuries, actually since the 13th to 15th century. It had to arise so that humanity could truly live into the impulse of freedom. So it is not a matter of merely criticizing the intellectual impulse, but of understanding it in the right way, in order to be able to strive for further development through understanding in a way other than the intellectualistic one.

And now we must say: What is the essence of this intellectualism? It is actually already indicated by the fact that one points to the connection of this intellectualism with the feeling of freedom. And the feeling of freedom is in turn inconceivable without the full development of the human ego. It is actually the development of the ego that has emerged in a certain way in modern times in humanity and takes hold of the ego from the consciousness soul. This is the essential factor that provides the impulse for modern Western civilization. However, this I, of which human beings have become fully aware over the past three, four, five hundred years, can initially only come from the human body. The experience of the I between birth and death can only come from the human body; this can be examined in particular through anthroposophical spiritual research.

One of the most significant moments for the whole of life after death is the moment of dying itself. This moment of dying is, of course, only known to the earthly human being on the outside. It must be recognized from the inside out of the consciousness that the dead person has between death and a new birth. Whether this occurs more or less later after death is not our concern now. Today we want to consider in general the consciousness that a person has between death and a new birth. This consciousness depends entirely on whether the person has an extraordinarily significant impression at the moment of dying. Consider, for a moment, that during the whole of life between birth and death, the human being only comes out of his physical and etheric body with his ego and his astral body, and that is in a state of sleep; so that during life between birth and death there is a constant, uninterrupted connection between the physical body and the etheric body. At death, the human being leaves his physical body with his etheric body – you know that he remains with his etheric body for days – so that he only has this experience of his full physical body at the moment of dying. If you want to have knowledge of something, you cannot have it otherwise than by having what you want to know outside of you. What they have in mind, you do not see, you only see what is outside the eye. So you also do not see spiritually-mentally anything that you have within you. You must first go out of yourself with the spiritual-mental part of your being, then you see the outside of your body. This happens in the moment of dying in relation to the separation of the etheric body and the physical body. When falling asleep, the human being never has a conscious, complete view of his physical and etheric bodies. These two remain behind when falling asleep. This is why, when one attains the conscious view during sleep, one can only see the human head and part of the trunk, and that one cannot actually see the limb-human being in ordinary sleep. Only in death, in dying, is the moment when man, in relation to his physical body, has himself completely as an object before him, and the whole time from death to the new birth, this impression remains, I might say, as the end of perspective, to which one looks back after death. One sees this moment of dying, for one would not recognize an ego for oneself if one were no longer, if one did not have the ego as an object in that one has before one, as the object of knowledge at the moment of dying, that which one brings to consciousness here in the physical world, namely the full physical body. This tremendous impression, that one can say to oneself: What your ego-consciousness has given you, your whole, your total physical body, you have seen that at the moment of dying! — that remains and forms the content of the ego-consciousness between death and the new birth, where everything becomes temporal, where the spatial, in a certain respect, is no longer there. After death, one looks back from that point and sees, as an important point, the direction then continues, but the rays cross at the moment of the final death, that moment of dying. This is what, as a “time element”, I would like to say, has the same effect after death as the spatial physical organism gives the sense of self between birth and death. So that we can say: The sense of self here in earthly life actually comes from the physical body.

Now the following is present. You look out through your senses into the external nature. You see the three kingdoms of external nature, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and in addition the physical human kingdom. You see clouds, rivers, mountains, stars and so on. Everything you can see can be considered 'nature', and what you cannot see is continually supplying the elements that also penetrate the human organism, both in the physical and in the etheric. With food, you take in substances from the physical and sensory world. These substances unfold their physical and chemical forces and activities even when they are in the human organism. In terms of his physical organism, the human being is, so to speak, what he takes in from the outside world. The minerals, plants and animals are, if I may put it this way, allowed to be “nature”. They have the right to be nature. But when what is present in them enters the human organism with food, breathing and so on, it becomes something other than nature. Then, in the human organism, it can be said that What lives in nature must not, if man is to remain 'human', allow itself to remain nature. Nature beings have the right to be only outside of man; within man, nature becomes a destructive element. It seeks to continually dissolve the human being and to bring about a state in which the soul can also acquire powers that work towards destruction.

In this respect, the older instinctive consciousnesses of men saw much more correctly than today's intellectualism. Today's intellectualism starts from concepts, not from facts, and when the facts do not agree with the concepts, it reinterprets the phenomena according to its concepts. Today, people do not talk about the fact that plants, animals and humans come to an end, but they say that death should be examined. The fact that the end of plants, the end of animals, the end of humans could be something completely different, that cannot be grasped under the common concept of the “dead”, is not considered by anyone today. You become grotesque for today's world, you become paradoxical when you draw attention to such things. But it is absolutely the case in this regard. Today someone says: a knife is a knife – and then he gets a razor and wants to carve his meat with it, because – a knife is a knife! Today, when we believe that we have both feet firmly planted in reality, it is important to realize that reality cannot be grasped through abstract concepts. Intellectualism does not take this into account, starting only from concepts instead of from facts. It therefore also fails to recognize how justified it was from older levels of consciousness to speak of the fact that nature, in its effects and processes, by continuing its existence in man, no longer has the right to remain nature, but that it should be transformed, and that in man, if it is to retain its validity as nature, it becomes “sin”. The concept of sin in connection with natural phenomena is no longer understood at all. The connection between the natural and that which is rooted in the human being as spiritual-soul is not considered. The animals, plants and minerals have the right to be outside in nature; that which moves from them into the human being must be transformed by the human being, because if it remains nature, it would be transformed into destruction. That is to say, if it is mere nature and man has not the strength to transform it, it becomes illness, and in imparting itself to the soul, sin.

If now man, who looks at his relationship to the world of the senses without prejudice, consults with himself and takes into account everything that can be taken into account, he must say the following to himself: When I look out into nature and first consider my origin from it, I cannot be an atheist. But on the other hand, precisely as a man of the present, as a man of the newer epoch, I cannot but attribute my ego-consciousness to the mere physical body, to the natural existence in me. What I express here in thought is present in feeling and emotion in every healthy person who is not afraid of coming to self-knowledge today. He comes, if only he does not avoid it out of fear or comfort, to look into his own soul, to this conflict, that he says to himself: If I consider myself as a being of nature, emerging from nature, then a divine being must underlie the whole world, which also contains me. But this healthy sense is actually contradicted by the modern development of the ego, because this can only come from the natural existence of the physical body and - as I have even shown you - through the impression that dying makes on a person. Thus nothing less follows from this than that modern man must instinctively come into doubt about God-consciousness, not because something in the observation of nature leads away from God-consciousness, but because in the present epoch, when one considers his entire being in terms of body, soul and spirit, man cannot be completely healthy because of his ego-consciousness. Because: nature in man, if it remains as it is and has an influence on the soul, means something that causes illness, and on the soul it has the influence of aberration, of sinning.

Of course, this should not be viewed in a philistine way, but rather, one must keep in mind the facts as they speak from existence. In other words, if we go back to ancient times, when the sense of self did not yet exist, the divine being — regardless of whether it was imagined as modified in one way or another — was always conceived under the concept of the Father. One could not imagine the divine essence other than as a unified divine essence, which more or less embraced the world, which one sought to grasp from the concept of the Father; and since the sense of self was not yet there, since it can only arise from the natural, nothing disturbed this Father-consciousness. Modern man can only have this father consciousness if he perhaps through moral reinforcement, but nevertheless dampens his ego and withdraws somewhat, but which must arise through the development of freedom, with the development of modern humanity. Therefore, man as he lives today cannot be satisfied with the one consciousness, the father consciousness. He must say: I would have this father-consciousness if I could still be instinctive like that humanity that existed before the heightened sense of self developed. But as a person of the present, this sense of self prevents me from fully confronting myself in dependence on the father-consciousness.

This is where what the modern human being can very well experience by reflecting on his ego comes into play, when he is clear that the ego, if it does not have the body, extinguishes itself. It extinguishes itself when falling asleep; in death, it only maintains itself by having the contemplation of the dying body. The human being knows that it is precisely through his consciousness of self that he is turned away from the divine consciousness of the Father. But he must feel this as a sickness, and when he feels this in the right way as a sickness, the impulse arises for him that leads him to the Christ present today. The consciousness of the Son must arise out of the inner soul experience to the consciousness of the Father. This son-consciousness can only come into us through an act of freedom. And we must always bear this in mind: if atheism is actually a manifestation of illness, then what can be called agnosticism in the face of the mystery of Golgotha, agnosticism in the face of the present Christ in particular, is a misfortune, a stroke of fate! You don't have to be completely healthy if you are abandoned by the Father-consciousness – but in this respect, modern humanity is not completely healthy –; but you need an act of freely finding the Christ-spirit if you want to come to the Christ.

Two experiences are absolutely necessary: First, the consciousness of the Father, but I would like to say that in the present development of humanity, there is a clouded consciousness of the Father. If I had not acquired the consciousness of the I in the course of the development of humanity, the divine consciousness of the Father would be there; but because the consciousness of the I actually wells up and must well up from that which, is left to itself, is ill in the human being, therefore the divine Father-consciousness is clouded for the present, and one must come to the consciousness of the Christ through a free deed that is different from finding the Father.

These two experiences are not distinguished from each other in Western civilization, as I have already indicated here. Solowjow, in particular, strictly distinguishes the Father-consciousness from the Son-consciousness, which arises from a different kind of consciousness. In the West, the two are so little distinguished that a presentation of the essence of Christianity, which is decisive for many, could even say: The gospels do not belong to the Son, but only to the Father, the Son actually only as the teacher of the Father. - So there is no awareness that one can have two acts of experience: one in relation to the experience of the Father, which is clouded today, and the other in relation to the Son. Now, if one has this experience in relation to the son, one would initially only come to a present encounter with the Christ, and to this present encounter with the Christ, so to speak to the eternal Christ, everyone can come from the subjective relationship of the present. But anyone who rejects the present encounter with the Christ and lives dull, as in the earlier times of humanity, will not gain that inner constitution that leads him to the encounter with the Christ. But he who truly feels what the newer time can give him, comes to this inner deed of the meeting with the Christ and thereby proves that the Christ is there.

But the historical Christ still remains to be investigated. There one must also have the possibility of looking at history from a different point of view than is possible today in the age of materialism for outer consciousness. I must draw your attention to something here that should be strictly observed. This upward shining into higher worlds is usually taken too much for granted. People still do not listen enough to how the one who speaks of the higher worlds must actually speak in a different style than one speaks of the physical world, and not just in a different external style, but in a different inner style. When we live here in the physical world and let this world have its effect on us, we distinguish, for today's consciousness, what is logical, I might say, right and wrong; we also call it true and false. And we test whether something is right or wrong, true or false, according to logical or external principles of reality. But in doing so, we enter into abstraction, into an intellectualistic life. For all logical distinguishing of whether something is true or false moves precisely in abstract concepts, if one only takes external sense perception, in observation or in experiment, as a basis. Nevertheless, with our cognition we still move in abstract concepts. We cannot retain the same abstractness of concepts when we go up into the higher worlds. There everything becomes much more alive and is perceived as something living, not merely as something thought. Therefore, he who beholds the higher worlds must not speak merely of true or false, right or wrong — of course one must do that too! But one must speak, for example, of something that is right here in its reflection in the physical world as something healthy, and of something that is wrong here in its reflection as something unhealthy. One is not quite right when speaking of true and false for the next higher world; one has to deal everywhere with healthy and unhealthy, wholesome or unwholesome. Therefore, anyone who speaks of the higher worlds with reference to abstract logic as if they were the physical world shows that he does not have a real conception of the higher worlds.

Now, however, something very peculiar occurs in relation to the historical development of mankind. If we look at it impartially, it shows us ancient epochs full of wisdom, and if we have a healthy feeling, we will feel deep reverence for the ancient wisdom of these older epochs. If, for example, we consider the reflection of this in the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy, we find that the reasons for which this wisdom was revealed are so profound that one must have the deepest reverence for them. We approach this primal wisdom of humanity differently than the abstract scholarship of today is able to. But this primal wisdom is, as it were, increasingly dulled the further humanity advances in its development, and we see that the greatest dulling of this most original human consciousness, so full of wisdom, comes in the age in which the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. There is no need to take into account the external records, insofar as these records, such as the Gospels, speak literally of the Mystery of Golgotha. One need only look impartially, but now with a higher gaze, at the historical development of humanity to find this primal wisdom becoming darker and darker in the human soul the further back one looks. What was fully expressed in the 15th century is already hinted at in the Greek, in the Latin-Roman epoch. Humanity basically only still has traditions of primordial wisdom; it no longer experiences them, and what is slowly emerging is the full consciousness of the self. In this respect, our external science has actually come up against little of what is to be studied in this epoch, which on the other hand includes the mystery of Golgotha. Enormous problems arise when, for example, we look at the Greek alphabet today, where the letters still have names, alpha, beta, gamma, and follow the path to the later Latin alphabet, where they no longer have names. These transitions, which point deeply to historical developmental states, are not at all taken into account. For example, no attention is paid to what our word “alphabet”, which is still taken from Greek, actually means. If we look into this, and a real linguist will be able to follow up these things, it will turn out that the Greek alpha basically expresses the same thing as is expressed in the Old Testament with the words: “The living breath was breathed into man” - so that in the breath, in the breathing, one will see that which first makes man. When the word Alpha, which is a word, is properly examined, it will be found that That is man! The first letter of the alphabet is nothing other than the expression of the human being. And the Beta is the “house”, and the beginning of the alphabet means: man in his house. — This view of the alphabet was completely lost in later times, when intellectualism developed more and more. Letters came to be used merely as a means of distinguishing external objects. What lay in the revelation of Primordial Wisdom was lost sight of; the “Word” of the Primordial Revelation was externalized, and people no longer understand what was revealed to humanity in the letters — and specifically in the words. In the traditional lodges and orders of today, people do talk about the “hidden word”; but little do people know of what this hidden word had as a reality, how the alphabet itself spoke of the hidden word, and how it has been atomized, divided.

I could, of course, also start from something else to show what a deeply incisive developmental impulse was present at the time of Greek and Latin culture. How Greek culture tried to help itself through a special art to overcome this, I would say, illness that occurred in humanity, is palpable for those who want to see. I would just like to draw attention to one thing.

Today, when people hear about drama, for example, they think: it is something to watch, something that belongs to the luxuries of life. You watch it and then call it beautiful. But the Greeks had the idea of catharsis for the most important thing that takes place in drama, the purification, the cleansing. This was something that not only meant an external, fantastic process, but also clearly pointed to its medical origin. Catharsis is the crisis that one overcomes, and through the tragedy of the Greeks, the soul was brought to the crisis, so that it underwent a purification in the experience of fear and compassion, in that it was surrendered to the effects of these opposing forces through the course of the drama. The Greeks did not think of their art in a banal sense, but rather as something healing. For they still perceived the rule of an ancient wisdom in it. For them, a healthy ancient wisdom still existed, but it was paralyzed in the course of time, and a kind of disease process then occurred. With his art, the Greek wanted to express something, and Nietzsche sensed this. You can read about it in his book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. He said something like the following: There is something in humanity that can be healed. And the therapists, the Essenes, assumed everywhere that there was something in humanity that could be healed. And if the Mystery of Golgotha had not occurred in humanity, we would live today in such a way that I would have to speak as if the Mystery of Golgotha had never occurred, so we could only point to a process of illness in humanity. So that in view of the Mystery of Golgotha, something dawns on us when we apply the concepts of healthy and sick in relation to human history. That is the significant thing: you can apply all concepts in relation to right and wrong, but you come to a point in the course of development where you have to look at things differently. For when you enter the Greek epoch, you enter a time when humanity has become ill, and from which health emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha. Therapists have pointed this out and said: “There arises the great therapist, the savior, who in the literal sense has to heal humanity.” — It is only a matter of delving deeply enough into the course of human development and not stopping at the usual abstract concepts, but grasping historical life with medical concepts, according to the categories of healthy and sick. Then one will understand the necessity of a healing process and will also understand how the “Savior” - it is no other word than the “therapist” - intervenes in humanity. One will then understand how something must intervene in the development of humanity on earth that could not intervene through the forces that were present in humanity earlier. A new impulse from outside had to come to heal humanity.

This is how one can and must look at historical development if one looks only at the configuration of how humanity has developed, without getting involved in the content of the historical documents. Then one comes to the concept of the extraterrestrial Christ, who connected with the evolution of the earth from extraterrestrial regions through the Mystery of Golgotha. This perspective must be adopted if we want to understand history. Those who do not want to apply this perspective to the development of history, according to the concepts of healthy and sick, should simply admit that history remains incomprehensible to them. They cannot understand how that which once lived in the Orient came to Africa and then became Greco-Roman. We see the Greek development, and rightly so, as an extraordinarily healthy one. And why? Because the Greek had the feeling that one has to fight disease and that he wanted to shape his life accordingly. And there is a particularly remarkable harmony between the individual Greek personalities in that they felt: here there is something to fight. And this feeling of no longer feeling and the ever-increasing descent into the abstract, which even makes the gods abstract, is the peculiarity of Romanism and remains its peculiarity. Europe was educated by Romanism until the 15th century, when it came to accepting the cosmic Christ into consciousness; before that, Christ was carried into the Occident through Romanism.

I just wanted to contribute a few things today so that we can gradually come to understand what is written in the Mystery of Golgotha: how we cannot actually stop at something that has developed from ancient times to the Mystery of Golgotha. One then finds that, if one proceeds in this way, there is actually no longer any difference between what certain theologians have in their Jesus-logia and what a secular historian, such as Ranke, has. What certain theologians have in terms of the story of Jesus can no longer be distinguished from what a man like Ranke, for example, presents about it. But everything depends on our being able to see how the Christ, as an extra-terrestrial being, united with Jesus of Nazareth, who was born as a human being in the course of time. It is precisely here that something occurs which has led to the greatest misunderstandings with regard to this necessary path of anthroposophy to the Mystery of Golgotha. It was characteristic of all ancient instinctive wisdom that it did not separate the spiritual and the physical. For if one separates the two, one arrives at an impossible concept of matter in the physical and, in the spiritual, that is, in the spiritual experience of man, one arrives at abstraction, at the lifeless system of concepts. It has only become characteristic of more recent humanity to separate the material and the spiritual in this way. And so anthroposophy leads us back to an understanding of how we have to look at the whole of nature, I would even say, how we look at a physiognomy. We look at a physiognomy in such a way that we think of it as ensouled. We read from it the soul-imbued quality. This was once the case in ancient wisdom, and in the same way, today, the newer, light-imbued wisdom also leads us to a physiognomic view of the world of the stars, for example. This leads to something that allows us to speak of Christ as the being of the sun, although this means just as little that Christ is the physical being of the sun as man is the physical being of the body. But only in this way can it be recognized how something extraterrestrial was able to live in Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in Palestine. But this is shrouded in the greatest misunderstanding, especially among theologians. They even find it 'offensive' that anthroposophy connects the Christ with the sun and with the outer cosmic world in general. Why do they find this offensive? It is extremely characteristic. Anthroposophy says that it leads from the Christ back to the sun. But for these people, the sun is only the burning ball of fog out there; so it is offensive to associate this burning solar nebula with the Christ. But we know that theology has become materialistic, and therefore it can only see the material world in the cosmos. But anthroposophy shows how this material world is spiritualized everywhere. However, theology is unable to detach itself from the material, and therefore it feels offended when anthroposophy speaks of Christ as a being of the sun. From materialism, from the deepest materialism about the world building, precisely this point about Christology is found offensive. Here you can see how materialism permeates everything. It has now taken hold of theology, and because theology has become materialistic, it leads to misunderstandings about anthroposophy. Coming from the ordinary world, we can only be materialists, and when someone from this world talks about Christ in a materialistic way, it is bound to be taken in that way, and that is offensive. At this point, one must point out the materialization of the whole culture, which is only afraid of admitting its underpinnings. But we will not emerge from decline to a new ascent if we do not face these underpinnings quite impartially, fearlessly, without fear. We must get out of what European and Western humanity has brought into this movement of decline in the first place, what has led to these terrible catastrophes. For this, only fearless knowledge of everything that man can learn from the world is suitable. For this it is also necessary to approach the subject in an unprejudiced way, and to discard whatever is really useless from the sphere of intellectualism when entering into the higher worlds.

Many people still say today: Yes, what is communicated from the higher worlds is strange; one must enter into these worlds oneself, otherwise one cannot understand it. — But it is not like that. People believe that it is so only because they absolutely want to abandon those concepts that only apply to the physical world, which we have between birth and death. For example, the belief prevails today, precisely because people everywhere develop everything out of concepts, despite believing that they are being inductive and empirical, that they think they can express themselves absolutely at all. Of course, we have to say: when a person falls asleep, the I and the astral body emerge from the physical and etheric bodies, and the person remains unconscious until awakening occurs. This is a very healthy message for present-day humanity, but it does not apply to the entire development of humanity. If we look back, for example, to the times from which Indian and ancient Persian culture emerged, we find that a different idea was prevalent everywhere, namely that when a person falls asleep, his ego and astral body descend deeper into his physical and etheric bodies than is the case when he is awake during the day. The old Indian did not say: Man goes out of his physical and etheric body with his ego and astral body when he falls asleep. Only the Theosophists try to make people believe that the Indian spoke in this way. He said: When people fall asleep, they go deeper into their physical and etheric bodies. And that is basically quite correct, because the situation is actually the same as if one were to say in an absolute sense that for the earth the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But that is not the case, because for the other half of the earth the process takes place in reverse. You can also call it east and west, but the directions are different. Therefore, it is quite possible that for a certain period of time the I and the astral body plunged deeper into the physical body and ether body, and that therefore the impression was quite different. That is why the Indian speaks quite differently, because the person was in a different state of consciousness, namely in that of which the modern person also has no full consciousness, in his rhythmic and metabolic functions. He has no consciousness of these, because it is quite the case, in terms of consciousness, for the modern person that he dreams his rhythmic functions, but sleeps through his metabolic functions.

Therefore, one can say: It must be understandable that people at different times had to experience different things about something that people today believe they can speak about absolutely; and one only understands the development of history if one also lets the facts speak about these things, not the concepts that one has constructed for oneself. Today, when East and West, Occident and Orient, are confronting each other in such a burning way that a balance must be found, today humanity must be able to go back to these backgrounds; otherwise you can experience as many Washington conferences as you like, they will all end in failure if the fundamental impulses of human development are not taken into account. People today do not yet believe this, but it is true that if one wants to move from decline to ascent, one must address the issues that are most deeply moving humanity. What is demanded here seems impractical today. But people do not realize how impractical that is, which has proven itself as such, which has developed in its extreme, has become impractical from 1914 to 1918 and continues to be impractical. But in addition to all this, one must familiarize oneself with how religious consciousness can be illuminated and deepened by what anthroposophical insight is.

Today I could only sketch one of the paths to the cosmic, extraterrestrial Christ. But you will see how a deeper understanding of history can develop from it later on, but one that regards humanity as a living being. And just as one otherwise speaks of a healthy and a sick being in the case of a living being, so one must also speak of a healthy and a sick humanity if one does not want to stop at materialism. One cannot say that it is difficult to come to the Christ when one sees how the corresponding paths have not been followed. A concrete, realistic view of history will try to approach the Mystery of Golgotha from the most diverse sides. Today, however, since one cannot come up with reasons against spiritual science, everything possible is used to denigrate its bearers: they become personal. And it is indeed - and I say this without rancor - a terrible indictment of those who today oppose anthroposophical spiritual science that they actually refrain from addressing the spiritual science, that they always approach it only from the outside, for example, portray the Christ event and the Christ experience as if anthroposophy rationalized the mysterious, as if it were to approach it in shy awe, in the sphere of ordinary rationalist knowledge. But just think: when you are face to face with another person and look at him, the mystery that every person is to us does not have to be lost just because you not only hear about him but are also able to look at him. The individual human being cannot be measured with rationalistic concepts, so how much less can we do so with that which confronts us as the highest meaning of earthly development: the Mystery of Golgotha! But the mysterious is not lost by being brought to view; and anthroposophy aims to lead from that which is only communicated or believed to that which makes itself understood in contemplation. Nothing is taken away from what constitutes the mystery. The mystery remains, but it is not merely to be 'spoken' of, but is to be presented to contemplative humanity.

Thus today's criticism is rambling, instead of going into what is so literally contained in the anthroposophical literature itself. It is not necessary to get involved in every issue that comes from such quarters, but within anthroposophical circles there should be a strong awareness that the hatred for the anthroposophical movement will increase all the more the more it asserts itself. What they have done so far is quite a feat in terms of opposition; but you can be assured that it will be surpassed. And even if there is as much grumbling as there has been in recent days about eurythmy, then it seems to me that the only thing necessary is to say to yourself: It would only be worrying if there were praise from this quarter. I would then begin to ask myself: What needs to be done differently now? That is something those who want to be in the right way in the Anthroposophical Movement should acquire as a healthy feeling.

What I wanted to present today is something that, in a certain respect, appears to be a supplement to what I was allowed to speak about during my last visit. Of course, that does not mean that it is finished. What I have hinted at today will also help you to make some progress in Christology.

After a relatively long period of time, I am able to speak to you again today. It came about because of the importance of the General Meeting convening today, and the opportunity of my current brief presence in Germany. It has certainly already occurred to you that there must be a connection between my long absence and the nature of the time in which we find ourselves. The relationship between the events of the times and the very slight activity—if it is even possible to speak of such—that I can afford, particularly for the Berlin Branch, must be obvious to you.

Before entering into the order of business for today's session, I would like to make a few preliminary remarks. First, I wish to remind you of certain words I spoke in the early spring of 1914 in a lecture cycle in Vienna, which were intended to point to what then ensued. It was then that I spoke words which have since been printed. The words I uttered at the time indicated that civilized humanity lives in a kind of social sickness, in a sort of social carcinoma or cancer; that the' whole way in which cultural, political, and economic matters are handled is such that it will undoubtedly lead to an outbreak of this creeping cancer, and that it will be bound to change from a chronic condition into an acute one. Of course, many clever people at that time took this statement, which I made out of a grief-stricken heart with regard to the immediate future, to be mere fantasy, an empty paraphrase of a pessimistic mood. At that time, the majority of people the world over naturally preferred listening to the sound of voices like the one, for example, of an official personage in the German Reichstag a short time after, who said that the relationships of the Central European governments to those of the other European countries were absolutely satisfactory, and that one could count on general lessening of tension in the near future. You may remember another remark made here in Berlin at a public session of the Reichstag—that the friendly, neighborly relations with the court at Petersburg were becoming more and more favorable, and that good relations with London existed as well, and so on. These were the words of “practical men,” while those who spoke of the spiritual world had to speak of a sickness, of a slowly growing carcinoma. Actually those who Claim to be practical men still speak the same way today, in absolutely the same way, although the results of their practicality have brought about the events of the most recent years. Such speaking continues, while what is brought forth from spiritual research and from social insight is either thrown to the winds or, as is the case in Germany, attacked. Furthermore, the worst is that what comes from spiritual research is being secretly persecuted and defamed, defamed in the worst way possible. Thus, anthroposophical spiritual science and everything connected with it today belongs among the most defamed matters in the world. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that today there already are a great number of souls who, out of the totality of the principles of spiritual science, have gained a feeling that only out of this science can arise what can save us from general disaster. One must say this today, even if foolish or malevolent people accuse one of vanity or ambition for saying such things.

I can say—and I wish to keep these introductory words brief—that the whole attitude, the whole manner of discussions that I had to take part in during the actual wartime has not been understood. With the year 1914, a time came when considerations in the ordinary sense had to cease and what was supposed to occur through words had to turn into actions. Humanity, however, is used to taking words in the sense of the journalistic style, not in the style that should enter into mankind particularly through spiritual science. Thus, many things have been misunderstood during the so called war years. Something that was of eminent importance to me was overlooked. It was probably known to most of you that before the first year of the war was over, I had a small book published, Gedanken waehrend der Zeit des Krieges (Thoughts During the Time of War).^T1 It sold out rather quickly. If one would have considered the matter from the viewpoint from which, unfortunately, things are still considered today, despite the fact that the distress has become so great, it would have been a matter of course to publish a new edition. I opposed the printing of a new edition for the simple reason that the pamphlet had not fulfilled its task. This pamphlet—you can get hold of it again insofar as it is still available—was a question addressed to the German nation. It was not intended to be received in such a way as to lead one to assume the same tone which a great many members of the Central European countries had adopted during the war, and which is common today where surreptitious, poisonous defamations are leveled against anthroposophy. Nothing at all materialized of the expectation that I had concerning this pamphlet, the understanding that I had expected. A new edition would have been meaningful only if my expectation had been realized. So, it did not appear, but disappeared from public life, and in my opinion had to disappear. The proof of the lack of understanding given by this fact had to be taken very, very seriously. This was misunderstood in the same way many other utterances have been thoroughly misunderstood, utterances that were meant to elevate and ignite people's spirit in order to bring about what should have been made to prevail directly in Central Europe, namely, a re-enlivening of the spiritual life that had been manifest around the turn of the eighteenth century. Spiritual science is basically the revitalization of this spiritual life in the form it must take in modern humanity.

Take everything that is written in the different kinds of newspapers today, in popular literature and even scientific popular writings; take what is written in Koenigsberg or in Berlin, Vienna or in Graz, in Munich or in Stuttgart, and compare it with what is written today in Paris, Rome, London, Chicago or New York—you will find a great similarity. You will find the same keynote in it, the same spirit that must be overcome. On the other hand, if we seek another similarity and compare what is written today in Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg, or Bremen with what such great minds as Herder, Goethe, Fichte and Schiller once proclaimed, then we must say that it is fundamentally different. All the declamations using quotations of sentences by Fichte or even Goethe that have taken effect, all that has been produced in this manner, resembles more what has been written in Chicago, New York, London, Paris and Rome than the spirit of Herder, Fichte, Schiller and Goethe. The tidal wave that has flooded Central European life from the West has also swept away what should have lived an in us. Nothing of the old spirit could be detected in what was prevalent in the last decades. This had to be shown to the world when the catastrophe fell upon Central Europe, and wrenched itself from my soul in the form of my “Appeal to the German Nation and the Civilized World” which I wrote then. What was connected with this could not simply be continued, as it was in the earlier form familiar to you, up till 1914.

At that time I could not appeal on the basis of something which one had to believe one could appeal to after 1918. One could not appeal to what is the proof of the decline of the general civilization—distress. Since 1918, one had to believe that the distress which had come over Central Europe would awaken the souls and make them receptive to the language intended in my “Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World.” Certainly, the fostering of the Anthroposophical Movement could not go on as before. Earlier, one had to render the service which, naturally, always has to be rendered in the Anthroposophical Movement, and which has to be rendered today as well as in all future time: to foster the eternal in the human soul, the eternal which goes beyond birth and death and points beyond the merely sensory world into the supersensory world. Now one had to wait and see whether, from among the sleeping souls of the new civilization, souls would emerge here and there who really would have some understanding of what is meant by spiritual science. One could not yet appeal on the basis of circumstances brought about by the distress. Now, however, after 1918, the time had come when a quite different prerequisite had to be placed before the spiritual eye. Mankind could have realized where it had been led by the prevalence of materialism. For what we have experienced, what we continue to experience and will experience with more impact in the future, is the external karma of materialism in the cultural, political, and economic field. It is the consequence of neglect, because people do not wish to discover in themselves the active strength to foster the spiritual life in their souls. After the publication of the Appeal to the German People, the time came when it was, above all, important to work in a positive manner towards something factual. This arose purely out of the possibilities of life. I had to grasp the first hands reaching out to me, for each moment was precious. The first to reach out to me were from Stuttgart. It was a question of protecting and nurturing what could be fostered based on the initiative of some friends there. If mankind had understood at that time what was at stake, had it not failed even under the lesson taught by distress, it would have been enough to do something like this from one center, for it could have had an exemplary effect. But what happened?

In order that you can see how these matters must be understood, I would like to touch upon something else. Before I traveled in the spring of 1919 from Switzerland to Stuttgart for the first lecture tour, a well known pacifist came to me. Although he was willing to sign my Appeal to the German People, he hesitated and asked for more information about it. He asked me, “What are you counting on in Germany?” I believe he put it like this, “You are counting on the second revolution.” This was in the spring of 1919 and people in many quarters in Germany reckoned with a second revolution after the first one in the autumn of 1918. He believed that what was supposed to come into being in the world through the Threefold Social Organism was only a kind of vehicle, a stepping stone, for the impulses of the second revolution. I said, “No! This is not at all my opinion. First, because I do not believe that those people who might bring about a second revolution in Germany will be able to develop the slightest understanding for the true meaning of the Threefold Social Organism, as long as the old leaders are still active. Secondly, because I do not at all believe in a second revolution. Rather, I believe that this second revolution will consist of a kind of chronic infirmity and will not reach an acute outbreak. What I am simply and solely counting upon is that as many souls as possible will associate themselves with what is born out of spiritual depths, souls who will accept it impartially out of the necessity of the times, quite part from the intentions of the old leaders.” So, I did not reckon with those things that many people thought I was counting on. When I then arrived in Stuttgart, it stood to reason in a certain sense that the broad masses of people were addressed first. The broad masses of the people, though also partly paralyzed by the events of the war, were those who initially wished to hear something. In my innermost soul I knew how matters stood. For I knew that as long as the leaders who remain from the old days have the party leadership and the people firmly in hand—be they leaders of the parties to the right or the left, even those of the extreme left—nothing can be done with the people. But imagine what would have happened if I would have said that I was not in favor of addressing the masses. Nobody had to believe me, but if I had not addressed them, one would have said afterwards, “If only Steiner would have turned to the broad masses, everything would have turned out differently!” When one is dealing with realities, one must also give proof by means of realities. It had first to be proven by realities that out of all the left-wing parties, defamers and phrase-mongers would rise up against what was just beginning by means of the concept of three-foldness to be comprehended by the masses of the people. We were well on the way. One could say that within a few days we had won thousands of people. But it was just this comprehension of three-foldness by the great masses of people that drove the old leaders to their defamations and phrase-mongering. So it came about that from this side, seemingly at first, the ground was pulled from under our feet.

What could be hoped for from the other side? Well, it serves no purpose in regard to these matters to cling to illusions; the one and only thing that can help us in the present is to speak the truth. A leading personality who had come up in the party that called itself, by a strange interpretation of the words, "German Democratic Party," a person who had appeared at one of the meetings held at that time, said to me, “You know, if we were in a Position to let more people capable of explaining matters in this manner speak to the broad masses, then well and good—one could go along with it. But one pair of hands is not enough and we therefore rely temporarily more on firearms, on force. For the next fifteen to twenty years, it will still be necessary to keep the masses down.” This was essentially the predominant attitude of the Bourgeoisie; the other was the activity of the proletariat.

So there really remains nothing else but to take what can be drawn out of the spiritual foundations and to represent it in such a way that more and more people can be found who will receive it into their minds. Back of this, we must have something that was born out of this insight and should have been fostered. Before the war, this building was set up on the border of Switzerland, France and Germany in order to look out from Central Europe into the wide world, in particular towards the West, and received the name it must rightfully have, the name Goetheanum. For, in regard to spiritual matters, we are facing worldwide tasks! Today, we cannot face spiritual matters as we would merely personal matters. To do that would lead us into ruin. This is the reason I had to limit my activity during recent times to southern Germany and Switzerland. Truly, I am longing for times when the horizon of my activity can widen again, but this does not depend on myself alone. It depends, above all, on the understanding that people will show toward this activity. I may perhaps find the opportunity in the next few days to point to a number of things which pretend to be “understanding” and which proceed from certain quarters, which work more in an underground manner by means of counterfeiting of letters, falsifying interviews, by defamations and lies.

For the moment, what I have said was merely mentioned in order to point out the reasons why it was necessary for us to abandon our activity in Berlin temporarily; to indicate the circumstances that made it necessary to appeal also in regard to Berlin to what must be appealed to in this age. Have we not been active anthroposophically for almost two decades over a large territory? Were we not justified in hoping that people would be found that could carry on the work independently? Well, they were found. They were found here in Berlin, too. And with the help of these friends the attempt must be made, first of all, to continue the work in Berlin. For this purpose we have gathered together here. In the General Meeting, we shall have to decide how to continue the work here in Berlin.

• T1. Contained in Aufsaetze ueber die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage; GA #24, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach.

Among the concepts of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that must work toward the future development of man's soul being in the most fruitful, the most intensive, indeed the most necessary way, will be the concept of man's prenatal existence. Let us consider for a moment what will be added in this direction to those concepts and feelings that have for so long held sway in Western humanity. When anyone professing a faith, regardless of what religious denomination, speaks today of eternity, of the immortality of the human soul, he thinks mainly of nothing but living on after death, the continued existence of the human soul. In the future, when the viewpoints of spiritual science will have taken hold of a sufficiently large number of people, one will, above all, speak of the human soul's existence before birth. One will speak of the human soul's sojourn in spiritual worlds before it descended to physical earth existence. Mainly, one will speak of what takes place before birth or before conception, just as one speaks of what happens to the human soul after death. Today, one does not sufficiently realize the significance that such mention of prenatal existence will have for the whole of human life, not only for the inner but also external life.

Let us consider for a moment what this means when we look at the growing child; when we see how, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, the physiognomy of the face assumes its outward form from within, how various features appear, smooth themselves out or recede, and so on. As yet, we really do not realize what secrets of existence we are looking into when watching such a developing human being. How great will be the intimate ardor with which such a developing human being will be viewed when one has the underlying awareness: Before this human being was conceived and born, its soul-spiritual entity was above in soul-spiritual worlds. There, it had experiences by means of soul-Spirit organs, just as man during physical existence has experiences through his physical organs.

We can go a step further into the inner nature of the human soul and, from that standpoint, get some idea of the change of views in this regard. Take the various religious denominations that speak to people today in sermons and doctrine about eternity and the immortality of the soul based on their century-old traditions. One should not speak about these matters from a theoretical standpoint; one should speak from the standpoint of life itself. One should follow the nuances of feeling out of which flow most sermons and theological doctrines about the human soul's claim to eternity. I am not speaking about the content so much as the motives, intentions, and feelings that underlie what is being said in sermons and theological doctrine. It is a fact that, quite aside from what is true, a person can have the feeling, springing from an inner egotism of the soul, that the soul ought not to be destroyed along with the body! It is really an element of soul egotism that desires not to be destroyed. One cannot bear the event of dissolution; one thirsts for a continued existence of the human soul after death. It is this feeling of thirsting for immortality to which sermons and theological doctrines appeal. This gives the basis for what is spoken to people of various religious denominations about the eternity of the soul. One finds believers by making concessions to their hidden inner soul egotism. Actually, one tells such people something for which they thirst, the opposite of which they certainly do not wish to hear. By telling them of the continuation of life after death, one discovers the access to human faith. In no other way would one find this access to faith, if the human soul were not thirsting out of egotism for the soul's indestructibility after death.

Now we know from spiritual science that the human soul does, in fact, retain its existence after death. From the many descriptions that have been given in the course of the work in this movement, we could also see that one can speak with precision about the experiences after death based on the science of initiation.

To begin with, we will not speak about what really lies beyond death, only about the motives that underlie the preaching of the doctrine of immortality. Spiritual science cannot appeal to these motives. In fact, spiritual science will not make any appeal when it is supposed to speak of the human soul's existence prior to birth or conception, for it actually has nothing to do with the soul's egotism. As a rule, people give little thought to how they fared prior to birth or conception, as to what their experiences were before they descended into an earthly body. This leaves them more or less indifferent, and does not stimulate the same longing as does the question of life after death. An interest in this area will only be found in those in whom the desire is aroused to comprehend the human being in general, in whom exists a longing to discover that force in the human soul which, as an immortal force, actually lies at the basis of what we are in the outer physical world owing to our body. In our Western civilization, which is doomed to decline unless new forces are injected into it, we find little inclination and few concepts to which one might turn if one were to speak about this life of the human soul before birth. As you know, the churches view this teaching as heresy; they do not realize that in this they are not really teaching Christianity but Aristotelian philosophy. For when Aristotle's philosophy was included in the Church's philosophy in the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the origin, of the creation, of each individual human soul at birth, or, respectively, with the development of the human embryo in the mother's womb, gained ground increasingly in the philosophy of the Church. Thus, gradually, the belief arose that this denial of the human soul's preexistence was part of the true doctrine of the Church, of Christianity. It was not part of it. To the real practical teaching of Christianity belongs the penetration of the spiritual worlds. Penetration into the spiritual worlds cannot exist without the insight into the preexistence of the human soul.

Western civilization, however, is infected by the various creeds. Things have gone so far that we do not even have the means in our language to express what is the truth in this area. If we still adhere to a religious world concept, or to some kind of rational philosophical world view, we speak of the immortality of the human soul. In that we have this word "immortality" of the human soul, we point to the fact that with this word we actually negate only dying, not birth; for what word could we use with which we could indicate preexistence in the same way that the word "“immortality” points to postexistence? Why should we not use a word like “unbornness” which, in the face of true spiritual knowledge, has as much justification as does the word “immortality?” This can be your best evidence of what has been lost in the West directly through the activities of the various religious denominations: the truth about the being of man. This truth has been lost even in regard to language. And even insofar as language is concerned, we must bring about the awareness that the human soul is eternal, that it exists before birth as much as it exists after death. We need a word for the condition of "unbornness" just as much as for “immortality.” Now, however, when you think of an existence before birth, and turn to really sound logic, logic that makes you capable of thinking something through to its conclusion, ask yourself if you are then still capable of not speaking of repeated earth lives. Of course, if you speak only of immortality, of postexistence, you can believe: Here is one earth life, then follows an eternity of a totally different kind! Logically, you will no longer be able to do that when you speak of preexistence. For, otherwise, you would have to ask yourself: Well, how is it that I now find that the soul is not created at birth? Why should it be created somewhere along the way before birth? In short, you absolutely arrive at repeated earth lives when you speak of preexistence. It is a fundamental fact that never in earthly civilization has one come to the view of preexistence without also speaking of repeated earth lives.

But consider what it will mean for the whole approach to this earthly existence if this teaching of repeated earth lives is not to be proclaimed as a mere theory, if this view finds its way into all the feeling life and also the will life of people, if man experiences himself as a being that has descended from spiritual worlds and has embodied himself in a physical body. Then, you know that here on this earth you are a messenger of the divine spiritual world; you know that this life here is a continuation of a spiritual life. Everything that we bear in ourselves as a sense of duty, as abilities, is illuminated and energized by such an awareness, for we know that the gods have sent us down into this physical existence. Only then will this physical existence receive a task not set by itself, but set for it by the heights of heaven. This is what is special about spiritual science—it does not just speak against the intellect, it must speak to the intellect, for these matters must be comprehended. Yet, insofar as we take up the concepts derived from initiation science, these concepts penetrate the whole of our human nature; they penetrate not merely our thoughts; they penetrate feeling, our emotions; they penetrate our will and give us an awareness of the nature of our whole human condition. The manner in which one places oneself in the world in awareness of this preexistence of the human soul will be especially important for the civilization of the future. This manner will penetrate human beings with the light and with the power that is needed to struggle free from the powers of decline that otherwise will, without fail, drive civilization into barbarism at the beginning of the third millennium.

Indeed, all the segments of life take on special form when one has such an underlying view. You have often heard me speak here of the Waldorf School that was founded in Stuttgart. In teaching and education, this school is in a certain sense supposed to make practical use of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The abstract guidelines that you normally find in pedagogical textbooks, or in teaching regulations approved by the state, are by no means particularly important in the pedagogy of Waldorf School teachers. Instead, the feelings with which a teacher enters the classroom, for instance, are among the especially important things effective there. One of these feelings that is especially effective pedagogically—a feeling that every teacher is permeated with because he has been led into his calling from this aspect—is the reverence for the divine seed that, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, is blossoming forth from within the entity that has come down from the eternal spiritual world into this physical world. The awareness, possessed by the teacher, that, through the gate of the physical body, he is dealing with a being that has descended to him out of spiritual worlds, is the basis of the deep reverence the teacher has for that human being, which, as a soul-spirit being, increasingly takes on form in the physical body. One may or may not believe it today—a teacher who has this reverence for the developing human being possesses a secret power within himself by means of which he teaches and educates quite differently from a teacher who does not have this reverence, and who believes that the human being comes into existence at the moment his physical body is released from the mother's body. For one teaches and educates not only by means of concepts and ideas. Above all, one educates with the mysterious powers and forces that pass as imponderables from teacher to child.

An example can be cited for this that can be mentioned as an especially important one. As a teacher, one may ponder over how one might give this or that child the idea of immortality. Today, of course, the usual way of thinking is that the teacher is the clever one and the child the dumb one. The clever teacher thinks: How do I teach this dumb child something of the idea of immortality? He might say to the child: Look at the chrysalis of the butterfly! Inside is the butterfly; it emerges and unfolds after the chrysalis bursts open. It is just like this in the case of the immortal soul in your body—the body bursts open. The immortal soul is just not as visible as the butterfly, but it is visible to super-sensible perception, and it flies into spiritual worlds. Certainly, one can think up something like that and teach a child the concept of immortality by means of such a comparison. In my opinion, the child will not gain much this way when the idea of immortality is taught to him by the type of teacher who is clever by today's standards. This is because he does not believe in it himself! He only thought it up. When any one of our Waldorf teachers teaches a child the idea of immortality in this way, it is quite different. For he himself believes in this picture; he is permeated with the truth that the chrysalis and the butterfly that crawls out of it were ordained by the gods to represent the picture of the human soul's immortality. He is permeated by the thought: This is the same phenomenon—the emerging butterfly on a lower level, on a higher level the soul that comes out of the body. I did not make up this picture; it has been placed into nature by the divine-spiritual powers themselves. He believes in it with the same fervor with which the child should believe, and this faith is what matters. If the teacher has this belief, then he can also secure it in the child; if he does not have it, or if he has it only as an abstract idea in himself, this idea will not have a fruitful effect. For it depends upon the feelings that flow into the classroom, upon the feelings that are kindled in our own soul out of the knowledge of preexistence.

Only if one takes seriously all that follows from preexistence will one gain an accurate concept of the connection between the human soul and the human body. If you take any handbook of knowledge concerning the soul—one calls this psychology—you find all kinds of theories on how the soul works upon the body, and so forth. You would not become very knowledgeable through these theories, for they are abstract webs of thought, and when you are finished with them you don't know much more than you did before. For, in psychology, all kinds of hypotheses are merely set forth on how the soul affects the body.

If one knows how the prenatal human being incarnates itself in a physical body, then one follows the developing human being in the child quite differently. We find that there are two stages in the developing human being. The first stage is indicated by the change of teeth around age seven. What does this change of teeth signify? It is a much more powerful change in the whole human organism than one usually believes. Today, however, one only observes these things outwardly. When people eventually accustom themselves to consider these things on the soul level in the way it can be done through spiritual science, what will they realize? They will say: Strange! Until the change of teeth the child does not really form solid, contoured concepts; to be sure, the child remembers a lot but does not retain its memories in concepts; actual intelligence does not yet appear. Just observe a child carefully and notice how, during the time when the teeth change, the faculty of actual intelligence increasingly emerges. Today one has no sense of the difference existing between a seven-year-old and a five-year old regarding the development of intelligence. If one would only observe how the soul gradually emerges after age seven—the Waldorf School teachers must observe it, for their whole teaching and education is based upon it—one would immediately understand in which direction one has to look in order to answer the question: Where was the element of intelligence that emerges after the seventh year? Where was it concealed? It was within the body; it was active in the organism. The same element that emancipates itself at age seven and turns into intelligence was within the body, was forming the body, and the culmination point of its activity of shaping the body is reached when the second teeth appear. The power that thrusts itself into being with the second teeth has been active in the whole organism. It is, however, a power that is active in the body only up to the seventh year. After that it has nothing more to do with the body; it then becomes intelligence. It already was intelligence earlier; as such, however, it was at work in the body. Look at what takes place in the child's body up until the seventh year. Next, look at what the child has as intelligence after age seven. You are looking at the same thing. Through birth, intelligence descended. At first it was not active as intelligence, as soul being; it becomes active in this way gradually after the seventh year. Here you have a concrete view of the working together of the soul with the body. Now you are able to see what was mainly at work in the human body until age seven. You do not have the foolish abstract concepts, fabricated and put into our textbooks and handbooks, concerning the interaction of body and soul. You have the concrete views of what works throughout seven years in blood and nerves, in muscles and bones, and then becomes the child's intelligence.

In this way, when one gradually penetrates into what spiritual science is able to give, one comes to know the human being in the totality of his nature, in his soul and bodily being. Now, man stands before us in a completely different way. It is strange—materialistic science aimed at knowing what matter was, and yet could not know anything, for example, of the nature of the forces that are active in the child's body until the seventh year. Now comes spiritual science and teaches how one really comes to know matter; spiritual science penetrates right into the material element. This is the tragedy of materialism—it becomes more and more abstract and no longer teaches what matter really is. What does the modern physician really know of the liver and kidney, of the stomach and lungs—that is, of the material structures? One day when the insights attained through spiritual science are applied to medicine and natural science, when something of what I tried to show in the course held in Dornach this spring⁹⁷ penetrates modern science, one will see that spirit insight is called upon to throw light even into the essence of matter, while the materialist confronts the whole world like a blind man standing before color. Material existence is just what the materialist never comes to know.

A second stage in the life of the human being is puberty; in the male sex it is marked by the change of voice, in the female by changes in the body that spread over the whole organism, not focusing on one organ as clearly as does man's change of voice. In both sexes the changes fall somewhere around the fourteenth year. Once again, this is an essential change in the organism. What is really happening there? What is different after puberty? The whole life of will of the human being is quite changed! Try to compare a nineteen year-old with a thirteen-year-old, directing your attention to the concrete life of will. The whole life of will becomes quite different; otherwise feelings of love could not enter the life of will. Again, a transformation in the soul life! When through spiritual science we investigate what is going on, we come to the following: We increasingly grow together with the outer world, especially in the time between the change of teeth and puberty; we grasp more and more of this outer world; our will becomes more and more oriented and we learn to bring it into harmony with the things and events of the external world. When one really studies the whole complex confronting us here, one finds that during this time the human being acquires for himself the will element, not from within, but through contact with the outer world. It was out of deep intuition that Goethe said, “A talent is formed in the stillness, a character in the stream of life.”⁹⁸

Talent springs from within. Character, that is, the element of will, is formed in the stream of the world, in the exchange between inner and outer forces. The human being always has to defend himself against all that comes toward him from the outer world; the inner being has to react; it has to resist what comes from the outer world. This will developing element, which approaches man through the alternating communication with the external world, is confronted by an inner force from the opposite direction. This force accumulates in the larynx of the male, in the female in other organs. This accumulation, this collision between the outer element of will and the inner will element, is expressed in the transformation of the larynx or similar organs. Here you even see the spiritual of the outer world working on the human being.

Now bring all this together with the views of spiritual science with which you are already familiar. We know that we descend from the soul-spiritual world into the physical world through conception or birth. We know, on the other hand, that with our astral body and ego we enter a spiritual world every time we go to sleep. The spiritual world, which gives us our soul, works upon the shaping of our form until the seventh year, but after that it becomes our intelligence. Now this intelligence is confronted by the will element—actually, from birth onward, but especially so at puberty, because the interchange between them takes place then. This struggle between the external will element and the inner element of intelligence; between that spirituality we sleep through—passing through it from the moment we fall asleep until we awaken—and the particular realm of the spiritual world that we went through before our birth and conception respectively; the struggle between what we have brought along and what we sleep through each night expresses itself in the development of the larynx, in the development of what occurs in the organism during puberty. A spiritual element works with another spiritual element. We go through a spiritual world between falling asleep and waking up. Concealed in this spiritual world is the will that is communicated to us; concealed in our organism is the intelligence that we bring through birth into physical existence. We can understand the human body when we experience it as an outer revelation of something taking place out of the spiritual domain.

Everywhere we look, and especially when we look upon the human being, we find that spiritual forces are the basis of the world. We only begin to understand man when we actually envision the interchange between these spiritual forces. Mankind will take up all of this in the future. Then, humanity will find it incomprehensible how a certain age could once have come to the point of saying: There is the sense world; in it work atoms, molecules, tiny particles whose collision with each ether is supposed to be brought about through certain movements of light or electricity. No, it is not the effects of atoms and molecules; spiritual forces are at work there! Behind all that is perceived by the senses, spiritual forces are at work. The dramatic reversal will be that man no longer will believe he is walking through a mist of atoms and molecules; he will be aware that with every step he is going through spiritual worlds. It is spirit worlds that dwell in him, and spirit worlds that build him up, that transform him. Just as our materialistic faith, the mere postmortem doctrine, has, in its final consequence, led us into what is now happening in the East of Europe, so the teaching of the spirit will lead us in the future into an existence truly worthy of man. But only this spirit teaching, only this, can lead to a real social reconstruction, and not until mankind comprehends this can things improve; they will only get worse and worse.

Certainly, all of you have often allowed a saying by Christ from the Gospel to pass through your souls: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.”⁹⁹ What does this word of Christ mean? It has no meaning for the person who believes in atoms and molecules because he assumes that, prior to this earth existence with its animals, plants and human beings, there was a nebulous formation, and that out of it, the sun and the planets gradually developed; then, along with the conglobulation and constant rotation, plants, animals and human beings eventually originated. Right-feeling people go along with what the famous historian Hermann Grimm¹⁰⁰ said: “Future ages will have difficulty explaining the nonsense of the Kant-Laplace theory, for a carrion bone being circled by a hungry dog is more appetizing than this theory!” This is what a person with healthy feelings says. For when we look out into the world of the senses, what is behind the colors, what is behind the sounds? Not atoms and molecules, but spiritual forces that collide with our own spiritual forces and so form the carpet of color, the network of sounds, and the sphere of warmth that spread out around us. If, then, this is what is in truth around us—I have already identified it in the eighties of the last century in my introduction to Goethe's natural-scientific writings—namely, metamorphosing sensations and behind them a spiritual world, then we shall experience what one would see if one could travel from earth to a distant star and from there look back at the earth. From there, one would not see what is in our surroundings—trees, clouds, plants and animals—one would only behold what is contained within the human skin. What you see in the star is not what the beings of this other star see, for that has no meaning for a strange star. The light that streams toward you from other stars is not a process in the external world; it is a process within the beings that inhabit these stars, just as what is within your skin becomes visible only when earth is viewed from another star. When you grasp this you will no longer say that the world came into being out of a multitude of atoms that conglobulated. Human beings form ideals; what is to become of such ideals if earth turns again into nothing but a heap of atoms? The whole moral world, all ethical, moral and religious ideas that ever arose, would be lost, forgotten and destroyed, if only matter and energy were everlasting. Energy and matter resolve themselves into sensations. The spirit that we bear within us is eternal, and this spirit also appears physically an another celestial body. What exists outside the human skin is in no way present for that other heavenly body. Therefore we can say that a certain nature surrounds us now; we are born again and again; this nature will no longer be there in the future; it will have been replaced by a different nature. Of everything that is present now, only what dwells within the human skin will still exist in future times. It was therefore out of a profound intuitive knowledge that Christ Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away!” He meant, All that you see around outside will pass away, but the words that issue from My mouth will not pass away; they will endure!

Now let us look from this point of view at the lies of today's world. We hear it proclaimed from the pulpits that the human soul is immortal; we hear it proclaimed from the universities that matter and energy are everlasting. Then come the cowardly compromisers who try to fit these two concepts together. It would only be honest if those who believe in the eternity of matter would say that there is no immortality of the soul, and if those who believe in the soul's immortality would deny the eternity of matter. They would then have to confess to the truly Christian saying, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words”—meaning, the content of my soul—“will not pass away!” The two concepts are incompatible; if people had courage, the materialistic university professors would admit that Christianity has no validity for them. Those whose task it is to proclaim Christianity would have to fight against the materialism of the universities for the sake of Christianity. The fact that this is not done, that people try to glue the two viewpoints together—this is the great lie in our time regarding life. Where the attitude of falsehood prevails, its seeds come up; the germ of lying proliferates and creeps into the other aspects of life. It has done so extensively in the course of time because men did not try to appeal along with postexistence to a knowledge that would unconditionally point to preexistence, to a life before birth. All untruthfulness of life, prevalent today in so many areas, springs from the fact that so many wished to speak only of postexistence—something that appeals merely to soul egotism, not to knowledge. The spirit of untruthfulness cannot be halted if it takes hold of the best in us, namely, our innermost conviction.

These matters can only be rightly and fully evaluated, however, in connection with the whole of human life. Throughout the Middle Ages and right into our time, one spoke only of “right” and “wrong.” Everyone, of course, believed he had hit upon the right thing and whatever did not conform with that was wrong. When people spoke of right and wrong they spoke from the standpoint of logic. Logic was the great pride of mankind. It is already hardly the case today. From America, a teaching has come that has already taken hold of philosophy and, in Germany, has assumed an especially grotesque form. This is no longer the logical teaching of true and false; it is the so-called pragmatism, the teaching of what is useful. One believes that something is true, not because one has perceived it logically, but because people like William James¹⁰¹ and others say that true and false are merely other expressions for what is useful or damaging. We notice that something is useful; therefore we say it is right; we note that something is damaging to us; therefore we consider it wrong. In Germany, this has asserted itself as the “as-if” philosophy. There actually exists a thick book on this by a certain university professor, Vaihinger,¹⁰² who taught philosophy for a long time in Halle. This “as-if” philosophy goes something like this: One does not know whether atoms or molecules exist, but it is useful to explain the world as if there were atoms. One does not know whether the good has any everlasting significance, but it is useful to explain the world as if this were so. One does not know if there is a God, but it is useful for humanity—more useful than the opposite—to view the world as if there is a God, and so on. I am only expressing this with a few paradigmatic words. This “as-if” philosophy is the German version of the American teaching that what is useful is true and what is damaging is false.

Beside these viewpoints there existed yet another in all the old cultures. In the late Greek culture, it was already no longer present, but it was still noticeable in more ancient Greek times by those who study this era not in a professorial manner but according to truth. In those times one did not say of a viewpoint in the logical sense that it was “true” or “false”; one said of it that it was “healthy” or “sick.” That signified something! Today we really talk of health or sickness only when we refer to physical man, for in ordinary life we refer to nothing any longer but him. We know that from somewhere in the cosmos come the forces that make us healthy or sick. But when we speak of soul and spirit, we no longer refer to health or sickness; for there we have changed over to abstractions, to mere theory. In the cultures of antiquity, when somebody said something that was correct, one had the feeling that this organized his spirit in a correct sense and he was healthy. When he said something that was awry and what we today abstractly call “false,” people sensed concretely that this came from a sick soul mood. “Healthy” and “sick” were terms that were applicable also to the soul; actually, above all, one felt this way about the soul. Out of this feeling originated a word about which scholars have later written long philological treatises—the word “catharsis” in Greek tragedy, a word that comes out of the Mysteries. According to Aristotle, catharsis takes place in the human soul when it watches a tragedy. Fear and compassion are stimulated in the soul, leading to a kind of crisis, to catharsis, and the human being in turn is purified by fear and pity. Thus, the process that occurs in the human soul when it looks upon a tragedy is described as a healing process occurring in the strengthened soul. There, in aesthetics, in art, you still have the concept of a curative element and of an element that causes an affliction.

We must return to this! We must once more regain the concept that what we now abstractly call “right” comes about because the soul, descending from prenatal existence, gains control over the body and organizes it so that it will submit as malleable substance to the soul forces that make it healthy. This is the truth. It is the sick soul element which comes from a soul that is unable to use its body as an apparatus, a soul that expresses itself obliquely and darkly through its body. We must once again learn to replace the concepts “true” and “false” with “healthy” and “sick.” We must again experience an inner pain that can overcome us when somebody expresses wrong views; we must again sense inner satisfaction over truth. Not until we speak equally of prenatal existence and postmortem existence, however, not until we learn to use a word like “unbornness” just as we use the word immortality, shall we feel that way. The fact that we do not feel this now shows how far we have strayed from the knowledge of that spiritual world from which the human being actually comes.

You will find that those matters I have only briefly summarized today are described in more detail in numerous published cycles of my lectures and books. From such descriptions you can realize what a change it signifies in the whole constitution of the human soul when spiritual science will be the very nerve center of human feeling; when human beings will go about in the world with an awareness of their being such as the one attainable from spiritual science. People today indulge only the egotism of the soul that wishes to cling to a postexistence; they do not want to press onward to a real comprehension of the human soul which had experiences before birth, just as it will have experiences after death. The whole, complete eternity of the human soul is only grasped by one who can not only speak of immortality but, based an insight, of “unbornness,” too. We can believe, because belief always comes from a desire for life after death. We can know of the life before birth and the life after death as two things that are inseparable. Knowledge takes in the total being of the human soul; belief is concerned only with the postmortem existence. Knowledge of the spiritual is what the human being must struggle to acquire, but this is what people today strongly resist. Real knowledge of the spiritual world can only flow out of spiritual science. Out of spiritual science will come a constitution of the human soul that is healthy, not only true, and physical healing will be a necessary consequence of spiritual healing. Then man will not view the earth in the manner of modern geology as a huge mineral globe; he will view it as a spiritual being of which he himself is a member. That is what we must work toward.

This was meant to be the first part of my observations today.¹⁰³

• 97 . Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Science and Medicine, GA 312 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1948).
• 98 . Goethe: Tasso I, 2.
• 99 . See Note #90
• 100. See Note #24
• 101. William James: 1842–1910. American psychologist and philosopher.
• 102. See Note #36
• 103. The second part is unknown.