The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Have you perhaps noticed something, gentlemen?

Mr. Dollinger: I wanted to ask about the fate of human beings. Millions of people died in the great world war. Did they bring this with them into the world as their fate? What does it look like in the spiritual world in connection with world development?

Dr. Steiner: We can also talk about this in connection with other things, because it is absolutely necessary that one does not simply explain things in anthroposophy as people sometimes do. What is said must be scientific. Now, with this in mind, I would like to tell you something that will help us to understand how the great catastrophe, this terrible world misery of so many people, could have been possible at all. Nowadays, people no longer pay attention to how one person is actually connected to another. It is the case that today all people actually stand isolated in the world. Even if, out of habit or some lingering superstition, you know and observe the things I have told you about in the last lesson, you usually explain them wrongly.

Now I want to tell you a simple story that can show you how today no one even considers the fact that one person is connected to another in any way. Once upon a time, the following occurred, which is well documented, like a scientific fact. In one family, a younger family member, an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl, was ill, not so ill that she was bedridden, but she had to lie down again and again. Now, for a while, her mother was with her, taking care of her. She was lying on the sofa, so her mother was caring for her. When she had almost fallen asleep, her mother went into another room and read something out of a book to her husband and other family members. It was in a room quite a distance from the one where the sick woman was lying.

The sick woman now had the following realization. When her mother had gone out the door, she suddenly had the urge to get up. She got up and followed her mother through two rooms into the third room, where she found her reading. She was extremely surprised that they were not at all surprised. The sick woman, who could hardly walk and had just been left asleep, now appeared in the room where the mother only wanted to be for a while because she also wanted to take care of the others. She was a bit strangely touched by the fact that they remained completely calm. Now the mother, who was reading, suddenly said: “But now I have to see what is wrong with my daughter!” — and went out of the room. But the daughter followed. The mother went through these two rooms again and found the daughter lying on the sofa, but terribly pale. She did not speak to her at first. But then, when she spoke to her, the daughter did not answer, she was very pale. So the daughter had always followed her mother and now she saw her mother walking along and she, the daughter, saw herself lying on the sofa. And the daughter was again very surprised about it, first that she saw herself lying on the sofa, secondly that the mother was addressing her. At that moment it is as if the daughter receives a terrible blow, and what is lying on the sofa becomes of a slightly better complexion, and the matter is back to the old one.

This is a well-established story; the event actually took place. But now all kinds of people are coming who want to explain it. Yes, they then explain it as follows, for example: Well, this daughter also has an astral body in addition to her physical body. People talked about the astral body until the 16th century, that is, until four hundred years ago, just as we talk about the nose or the ear. But that is not something that has been preserved to this day; it has been generally forgotten. So those people can talk about the astral body and can say: Well, the astral body went out, walked around the rooms, experienced what the others were reading and so on, went back in and slipped in at the moment the mother addressed the girl.

But, gentlemen, you must realize that when you explain it this way, you explain it as if there were a second physical person inside you, as if there were a circle around you, and as if you could slip out of it and go for a walk like a physical person. It is a strong superstition to explain it in this way. This superstition is very common among learned people today, otherwise things like those of Oliver Lodge, which I have told you, would not happen. It always depends on knowing what really happened there.

Now, what really happened is as follows. The mother is sitting with her daughter and caring for her. Right, something is taking place that is called loving care, and the daughter is very, very comfortable being cared for by her mother. She feels her mother's love. At such a moment, gentlemen, when one feels the love of the other so strongly and is also very weak, the strange thing happens that one no longer thinks with one's own astral body. It becomes dull and the astral body of the other person gains power over one's own astral body. Then it even happens that one begins to think with the thoughts of the other person who is next to one. Now it so happened that while the mother was still caring for the daughter, this feeling that developed was transferred to the daughter in such a way that the daughter felt and thought exactly like her mother. Now the mother is leaving. Just as a ball that I push then rolls away, so the daughter now thinks not with her own thoughts, but with the thoughts of the mother. And while the mother goes through the two rooms, the daughter always thinks with the thoughts of the mother. And while the mother reads aloud, the daughter thinks with the thoughts of the mother.

So the daughter naturally remains lying quietly on the sofa, but she is constantly thinking with her mother's thoughts. And when the mother then becomes restless, going back again, the daughter thinks, she also goes back. And now you need not be surprised that the daughter has turned pale. Because just consider: if you lie as if in a deep swoon for a while, you will also turn pale. Because something like that naturally causes a faint-like state when you think with the thoughts of the other person. And when the mother returns, it has the effect on the daughter that she is shaken and can have her own thoughts again. So you see, the correct explanation in this case is that a person has an extraordinarily strong effect on the other, especially in his spiritual part. But this occurs especially when the person upon whom the effect is being exerted is himself very weak. If he cannot develop strength of soul himself, then the strength of soul of the other person can very easily have an influence on him.

But that is how it is in life in general. Often we do not even think about the great influence people have on each other. Do you think that when someone tells you something and you believe it, that you always have reasons, reasonable reasons, that convince you? That is not true at all. If you like someone, you believe them more than you believe someone you hate. The story is that the soul of one person has an extremely strong influence on the soul of another person. So you have to say to yourself: I have to know how strongly one person influences another. I have to know exactly how things are with spiritual things if I want to talk about them at all.

I will now give you another example, which I am telling you about for a specific reason. Because someone could say: Yes, Dr. Steiner does not believe at all that a person can step out of themselves, he only believes that one person can influence another. — No, I just gave you an example where you could see very clearly how one person influenced another, here the mother influenced the daughter.

Now another example where there can be no question of one person having been influenced. Two students live together in a room. That happens to students all the time. One is a math student, the other is a philology student and understands nothing about math, understands nothing about math at all. But now, one evening, they are working away furiously, as they say in student slang, one with his Latin grammar, the other with his arithmetic problem that he wants to solve and just can't figure out. He can't do anything. The one with the language is doing reasonably well and goes to bed quite satisfied. But the math student doesn't go to bed satisfied, because he hasn't mastered his task. With languages, you usually don't know whether you have mastered something or not. At most, you make mistakes, but you think they are right. In mathematics, however, if you haven't mastered anything, nothing comes of it. That's the difference. Well, they go to bed; so at around half past twelve or twelve o'clock, the two go to bed.

When it is about three o'clock, the math student — the language student has looked at the clock — gets up, sits down at his desk again and starts calculating, calculating, calculating. The language student is extremely surprised, but he has enough presence of mind to wait quietly and see what happens. The other calculates, calculates, then gets up from his chair again, lies down in bed and continues sleeping.

At eight o'clock the next morning, they both get up. The math student says: Gosh, I have a real headache today, like when we had a few drinks the whole evening, and we were at home! The other one said: That doesn't surprise me! Why did you get up during the night and work? - What, I worked? That didn't even occur to me! I just laid in bed the whole night, - says the math student. “But you did get up!” says the other. ‘You picked up the pencil and did the sums, over and over!’ ‘Well,’ says the first student, ‘that's not the point!’ ‘Well, let's have a look,’ says the language student. ‘It must say what you wrote!’ The math student checks. The whole calculation was there, everything he hadn't been able to do that evening was done.

Now you see, there you have an example where there is absolutely no question that the other person did not cheat, because he would not have been able to solve the problem. He was merely a student of languages and, furthermore, he saw how everything went. So the person in question, without knowing it himself, got up and solved the whole calculation. So there is no question of any kind of influence from someone else. The person in question actually got up during the night.

But now, when you explain this, something very strange comes out. You see, as you know, we first have our physical body, then the etheric body, the astral body and the ego body. I call everything a “body”; of course they are not external bodies, but I call these four parts of the human being “bodies”. Now, gentlemen, when we sleep, only our physical body and etheric body are in bed; the astral body and the ego body are outside. We see them around the physical body and etheric body. I have already explained all this to you. This is what happened to the math student. He goes to bed. He can sleep well, so he brings his astral body and his ego body out, but he is still disturbed by the fact that he has not solved his arithmetic problem. If the astral body and the ego body had now slipped into his physical body and into his ether body, then he would have woken up and would have been unable to do anything again, probably not solving the task again. But the astral body and the ego body did not do that at all; instead, the restlessness into which he fell only made him puff. The astral body can puff, it can even puff the skin a little. But that can only happen through the air, not physically, because the astral body is not physical. But it can set the air in motion. And that has a particular effect on the eyes, something on the ears, especially on the nose and mouth. Wherever there are sensory organs, this puff of the astral body has a very strong effect. So the student goes to bed, but his astral body keeps pushing from the outside, but does not enter. But because it is pushing, the physical body with the etheric body automatically feels pushed like a machine to get up. However, the astral body remains outside, because if it had been inside, the student would have become conscious. So he sits down. It does not even occur to his astral body and his ego to enter. Yes, who is doing the calculating now? Now the physical body and the etheric body are doing the calculating, and the etheric body is capable of doing the whole calculation, which it cannot do if the astral body and the ego are inside.

From this you can see, gentlemen, that you are all much cleverer in your etheric body than in your astral body and in your ego. If you could do everything you can do in your etheric body, then you would be clever chaps! Because the whole point of learning is actually to bring up what we already have in our etheric body into our astral body.

So what actually happened to the math student? You know, in the old days there were almost no teetotallers or anti-alcoholics among students, but they usually drank quite a lot. And so the two guys didn't just drink every night, they also sat in pubs a lot, and as a result — through the influence of alcohol on the blood — the astral body was ruined. The etheric body was less ruined. And the consequence of this was that the student of arithmetic would have been able to solve the problem quite well if he had gone to the pub less, but because he had so strongly influenced his astral body, he could not solve the problem while awake. He first had to get rid of the corrupted astral body; then he could sit down at the table and his ether body, which had remained cleverer, solved the arithmetic problem. So we can do with the etheric body precisely what the mind does. We cannot love with the etheric body; that has to be done by the astral body, but everything that the mind does, can be done with the etheric body. So we can say: This example shows us very clearly that there is no influence from another side, but that the student of arithmetic is only dealing with himself.

Now imagine this very clearly: we have (see diagram) the physical body, here the etheric body (yellow), which passes through the physical body. And now, to make it easier for us to see the whole person, I will draw the astral body, which is there at night, outside (red). It is very small at the top and huge at the bottom. Then the I, the ego body (violet). So that's what we're like at night. So actually we are two people at night. You don't have to imagine this as a second physical person here, but it is quite spiritual, what is out there. Otherwise you would fall back too much into materialism if you did not imagine it spiritually. But from this you can certainly have the opinion that man is actually this two-part being in himself, a spiritual-soul part and a physical part with the etheric body. The person who is awake is only through this as he is, that every morning the astral body and the I-body are properly integrated into the physical and etheric bodies (arrows).

Now you might think that this could not always happen properly. There are, in fact, some very strange cases. There was once a girl – such things always happen when they happen of their own accord, that is, when they do not happen through practice. They happen when a person becomes a little weak, for example in young girls who have just reached maturity, in the early stages of female maturity. So there was a girl of nineteen or twenty who had the following experience. She had days when she talked, but those who belonged to the family could not understand anything she said, nothing at all. She talked about completely unknown things. It was very strange. For example, she could say: Ah, good afternoon, I am very pleased that you are visiting me. We saw each other two days ago in... - ah yes, we went for a walk in the beautiful forest. There was a spring there. Then she waited. It was just like on the telephone, you couldn't hear the other person, but then you heard the answer. It was as if she was answering something: “Well, yes, you took the glass and drank.” And so it was that you always heard what the person concerned said in response to something someone else had said. Those around could not see the others. But the girl was in a completely different world and talked in it. It happened, for example, that Well, it's not true, she couldn't move, she just stayed very quiet on days like that. But when she was sitting like that and someone puffed at her, she didn't say, “Why are you puffing at me?” Instead, she said, “It's a terrible wind! Close the window, it's drawing so terribly!” She had completely different ideas about what would happen when someone puffed at her, for example. Well, she stayed like that for a day or two. Then came a few days or a longer period when she was quite calm, knew everything, spoke properly with people, knew nothing of what had happened in these other days. She remembered nothing. When people told her about it, she said she knew nothing about it. It was just as if she had been asleep. But something else occurred. When she was in this other state, she remembered everything that happened in this other state and nothing at all of what happened in her ordinary state. She could see the whole of the life she had led in what others called a dream world.

What was it with this girl? What I am telling you now happens countless times, of course, and sometimes in a gruesome way. You see, I had an acquaintance with whom I worked together for a while. He then became a professor at a German university and one day he just disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone. All the investigations led nowhere in the end. The only thing they could find out was that he had come from his place of residence to the train station and had bought a ticket. But since a large number of people were boarding, they didn't know where he had bought his ticket. He left. He just didn't come back for a very long time. Then it happened that a stranger came into the vagabonds' shelter in Berlin, wanted to be admitted, and when he was asked for his papers, it turned out: that was Professor XY from there and there. He ended up in Berlin in a shelter for the homeless. He came back and was able to resume his professorship quite well. Isn't that right, it automatically continues; it doesn't hurt to have a little break. So he continued to do that. But his relatives – he was even married – continued to investigate what had happened in the meantime. And it was something like this: the person in question had bought a ticket to a certain station, not very far away. He had done all this very cleverly. He then got off, bought another ticket – it was not yet the time when passports were needed – and traveled to a completely different country, then to yet another country, then a completely different route – was stationed in a town in southern Germany – to Berlin, lived in a homeless shelter, was admitted there, knew absolutely nothing about it all, was in a completely different state of consciousness.

What happens to such a person? You see, with such a person it is the same as with such a girl. With such a person, when he is supposed to wake up, the astral body and the ego body do not quite come in, only push from the outside, and then the physical body and the ether body go through all that. Such people behave tremendously cleverly. This is also a well-documented story, similar to one that I myself experienced with an acquaintance.

Another story: A person first buys a train ticket, does the same with it, and travels to a station not far away. Then he has to think of all kinds of ruses; his etheric body does all this. He gets as far as India and stays there for a few years. And then, after he has forgotten everything, he lives on as before.

Yes, you see, these things are really so that one must say: there you see deep into the whole being of man. - For what happened now to the man whom I knew so well, who made his journey through two countries and ended up in the homeless shelter? He had now returned to his college, and had even been appointed to a different college to replace a famous professor. One day I happened to be in the city in question. He no longer associated with me, as indeed happened in general: during the time I was giving anthroposophical lectures, many people who had previously associated with me no longer wanted to associate with me. One day they said: Yes, Professor XY has left again. But this time he did not reappear, but was found dead. He had drowned himself. Yes, what had happened? You see, this had happened: he had again reached the same state where the astral body was just puffing him. Then he remembered the earlier events in his etheric body and was so frightened by them that he committed suicide. So you can see quite a lot about a person's nature when you know how the various parts of the human nature interact.

Now, however, the matter is as follows: there was once a person who also came into such states, and there he told the story in such a way as if he were a completely different person than he was now, so that the other people understood nothing at all. He described how he was active in the French Revolution (the story took place in the 19th century). He described entire scenes. What had happened to him? It was something like the case of those people I told you about. But what had happened to him?

In ordinary consciousness, man does not know very much about what is going on in the astral body and in the ego body, but he still experiences a great deal in them. Now, imagine the following happens. You see, I want to describe to you what happens when a person wakes up. When a person wakes up, this astral body splits first. Here (see drawing p. 112) it breaks off, and one part goes into the head, the other, the lower part, goes into the other body. This also happens sometimes. Now imagine: if the head takes up the astral body and the ego more easily than the lower part, then the astral body can be in the head earlier, but not yet in the lower part. In that case the person starts talking as if he were a completely different person. What is entering then? You see, for a moment the ability to look back into a past life enters. One learns to look back into a past life. But one cannot interpret it properly, one does not understand it, and so one invents something that one has learned in history. The one who was in a different state because his astral body and his ego came into his head earlier said that he was French and experienced the French Revolution. He had learned that, it is just a reinterpretation. But he experienced himself in a past incarnation, in a past life, and he could not understand that right away; so he interpreted it in this way.

You just have to realize that until the 16th century – so only four centuries ago – people talked about such things, even if it was rather foolish and rather vague. It was something extremely important to people. Wherever people came together – not that they told each other ghost stories, but it was the case that they took this just as seriously as the other events of life – they told each other such things and knew that they existed. It is not true that people did not know about this. Today – yes, please, gentlemen, just try it once and tell such stories as I have told you now in your party meetings, you will soon see how you are dismissed – today it is not possible to talk about these things in a natural, reasonable way. They are no longer even mentioned. And scholars talk about them least of all. I will prove to you that they know the least about it.

Now think of one of the most important scientific facts that occurred in the 19th century. A resident of Heilbronn became a doctor. And since the people at the University of Tübingen considered him to be a rather unqualified person, he could not become much, and so in 1839 he allowed himself to be recruited as a ship's doctor and went to Hinterindien with a very full ship. The ship had quite a mishap. It was a rather rough sea and the people became seasick. When they arrived in Hinterindien, almost the entire ship's crew was sick. The ship's doctor was constantly very busy. Now, in those days, if someone had this or that, the usual thing was to have his blood drawn. That was the first one.

Now, a person has two types of veins. In one vein, the blood that squirts out during bloodletting is reddish. Right next to it is another vein. When the blood squirts out of that vein, it is bluish; then bluish blood squirts out. When you bleed an ordinary human child, you don't get the red blood out, of course. The body needs that. You get the bluish blood out. The doctor knows that very well. He also knows where the blue veins run and does not prick into the red ones. So the good Dr. Julius Robert Mayer, who was a ship's doctor, had to bleed a lot. But everywhere he pricked people, the blood that came out was not a bluish color, but a light reddish color. “Gosh,” he thought to himself, “I must have missed again!” But when he did it to the next person and paid more attention, light reddish blood came out again. Finally, he can no longer help but say to himself: Well, when you come to the tropics, to the hot zone, it is not as usual, the blue blood turns reddish from the heat. — Of course, this was something that Julius Robert Mayer considered a very important discovery, and rightly so. He saw something extraordinarily important.

But now we have to make a hypothesis, an assumption. Imagine that, not in the 19th century, but in the 12th century, it had happened to someone. He had traveled somewhere with people. They didn't make such long journeys back then, but the fact that an entire crew almost perished could have happened to anyone. So let's assume that a whole crew had fallen ill at the time, the doctor had bled them and found that the blood, which should actually be blue, was reddish. So there must be some kind of heat. What would he have said? Yes, in the 12th century, he would have said: What is it that makes blood blue? And he would have said, since he knew all the things I have told you, even if only vaguely – because anthroposophy did not yet exist and things were still hazy – he would have said, because he at least had an inkling of the answer: Yes, by Jove, the astral body does not sink as deeply into the physical body as it does in those in whom the blood is completely blue! He would have known that the astral body is what makes the blood blue. But warmth keeps the astral body out. Therefore the blood becomes less blue and remains similar to the red blood. — He would have said: That is an important discovery, because now I understand why the ancient Orientals had such great wisdom. In them, the astral body has not yet penetrated so deeply into the physical and etheric bodies. He would have had enormous respect for the wisdom of the ancient Orientals and would have said to himself: Now the Orientals are only infected by people who have a lot of bluish blood, and it is no longer possible for them to bring their ancient wisdom to light. A ship's doctor from the 12th century would have said that.

A 19th-century ship's doctor knew nothing at all of what I have now told you. What did he say to himself? He said to himself: Well, there is the heat. This causes combustion. A stronger heat causes stronger combustion. So the blood burns more strongly when you are in the hot zone. - And he found the law of heat transformation in force, which plays such an important role in today's physics, a very abstract law. He was not interested in any of the others. He finds the law that plays a major role in the steam engine, for example, where heat is converted into work. And he said: I can see from the fact that red blood comes out of it that the organism in the hot zone simply works harder, therefore generates more heat. - So now Julius Robert Mayer finds something completely mechanical.

You see, that is the big difference. In the 12th century, people would have said: the blood is redder there because the astral body does not sink as deeply. In the 19th century, however, nothing was known about the spiritual, and it was simply said that the human being works like a machine, and the fact is that heat produces more work and thus more heat is transformed in the human organism. Yes, gentlemen, what Julius Robert Mayer did as a great scholar is roughly the way of thinking of all people today. That is the case. But because man can only think and feel in this way about what is no longer spiritual, he has lost touch with other people. And at most, when he becomes ill and weak like the girl I told you about, then he empathizes with other people to such an extent that he even goes with his thoughts to another room. That is, of course, a big difference! Of course, we have come an enormous way and have made great progress, but our humanity has not progressed; it has regressed. We speak of the human physical organism only as if it were a machine. And even the greatest scholars like Julius Robert Mayer speak of it only as if it were a machine.

Yes, gentlemen, if things continue like this on earth, then all thinking will become a chaos. All horrors and catastrophes would occur. Even now people no longer know what they should actually do. Therefore, they approach something with all their might and say: Yes, our reason no longer holds us together, so nationality must hold us together. These nation states arise only because people no longer know how to hold together. And that, gentlemen, that one no longer knows anything about the spiritual world, that is what has actually caused the immense misery – the other is the external appearance – that has caused the immense misery. And to say: People deserve this because they did bad things in their previous life – that is nonsense, of course, because that is not the fate of each individual, but it is the common fate of each individual. But everyone experiences it in this life. Just think of how much misery people experience in their present life. It does not come from a past life. But in the next life, they will suffer the consequences of the misery they experience now. The result of this will be that they will become wiser and that the spiritual world can enter them more easily. So the present misery is already an education for the future.

But something else can be concluded from this. Imagine that anthroposophy had already begun in 1900 and had really become very well known. But people opposed it and did not want to hear about the spiritual world. Now, gentlemen, if you had a schoolboy in the old days who didn't want to learn anything – now they have changed their minds about that; I won't say whether it's right or wrong – then you gave him a good thrashing! Some of them then started to learn after all. It helped some of them. Yes, people didn't want to learn anything spiritual until 1914. Now they have been beaten by the fate of the world, by their common destiny. Now we will see if they help.

Yes, that is indeed the case, gentlemen, you have to see this as a common human destiny! Because what has happened? You see, the girl I told you about was thinking with her mother's thoughts. People have gradually completely given up thinking for themselves and only think with the thoughts of those they have as authorities. People must start again, every single one of them, to think for themselves, otherwise they will, especially if they know nothing of the spiritual world, be continually influenced by it, but in a bad sense. And then one can say: One can really see that what has come over humanity as misery is, I would say, a beating of fate, and one can still learn from it. No matter how many congresses are held, none of it helps. The people who want to support the mark with today's intellect will cause it to fall by half, because this intellect, which is completely of the earth, is of no use, absolutely no use. When a body does not have enough fluid in it, it becomes sclerotic, calcified. And when the soul knows nothing of the spiritual world, then in the end it gets the mind, which is no longer useful. And humanity is heading for this fate if it does not continually receive nourishment from the spiritual world.

Therefore, the only real remedy is that people begin to take an interest in the spiritual world. You see, that is how you have to answer the question that Mr. Dollinger asked. You have to express things a bit radically, but that is how the connections are.

I have to go to Stuttgart next week, but I will be back very soon. I will let you know the time and date of the next lesson.

Question regarding earthquakes.

Dr. Steiner: You probably mean the earthquakes that are happening in America now? Of particular importance with regard to such questions are always those volcanic phenomena that, I might say, do not occur so intensely, not so powerfully at the same time, but which show in detail that something is happening over time in the earth's environment. And here I would like to draw your attention to something else, which is perhaps less noticeable, but which many people can relate to more than these individual phenomena, which of course had a terrible effect on those who were nearby, but which are of less significance for the greater part of humanity. And then you just remember that in the last few years people could talk about the fact that extraordinary weather conditions prevail. We cannot deny that in recent years there have not been any really proper, lasting summers, especially not in our areas. But that is spreading across a large part of Europe and further afield.

Now, when something like this is mentioned, people usually talk about how large icebergs float in the northern seas and how so-called cold spells then emanate from these mighty floating icebergs. You may also remember that during last year's so-called cold spell, it was reported by ships that if they took even a slight northerly course, these huge floating icebergs could be found everywhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

But we must realize that the things that occur in this way do not come from the earth alone, but are connected with the whole evolution of the world. And here we must ask ourselves: What about the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth?

I would like to draw your attention to something that I may have mentioned before, but in a different context, which can be important for us when considering this question. You may have heard that particularly in northern Siberia, in Asia, there are very special conditions in the ground. To give you an idea, I would just like to note the following. If we have the map of Europe like this (it is drawn), here is Norway, here is the north coast of Germany, here it goes over to Holland and so on, there would be Ireland, England, and there we would come over the large peninsula to Asia. There is the border between Asia and Europe. There is Russia. Here we come over to Asia and have Siberia. Over there is the so-called Arctic Ocean. That is just drawn to help you orient yourself. Now, elephant-like animals have been found in this area of Siberia a long time ago, which no longer exist today, and which therefore existed on Earth a very, very long time ago. And you also know that elephant-like animals no longer live up there at the Arctic Ocean. Elephant-like animals belong in much warmer areas. But the strange thing is that these elephant-like animals, which are deep in the ground, in the icy ground, were so fresh that you could still have eaten the meat if you like to eat elephant meat. These animals were in the icy ground just as if someone had wanted to eat the meat and had stored the animals in the ground for that purpose. So these animals in northern Siberia were simply preserved, as they say, their meat was kept fresh, for many, many millennia.

Now, you see, gentlemen, it is impossible that this could have happened slowly over time. Because if the animals had lived up there, simply died and gone into the ground, they would have rotted away long ago, and at most you would have found the remains of bones, as you would find anywhere else. But here you find whole fresh animals. This is only possible if these animals once lived there and an ice wave came very quickly, covering these animals, sealing them in, so that they could be preserved in the same state with the fresh meat for thousands of years. So you can see: there must have been a time when a mighty blast came from the south and blew water up into the ice region. The water froze instantly, and these animals were instantly frozen in this enormous Siberian ice cellar, where they remained for thousands of years.

Now you will all admit, of course, the earth has no reason to suddenly do something like that. Because where should the forces come from in the earth itself, that it could carry out something like that? These things can only come from the extraterrestrial stellar influences. So if you imagine that there is the earth (it is drawn), “since here the southern regions are the equatorial regions – only south in relation to the north, of course – then such a stellar constellation must have existed here once, which simply threw the water up again. So, through the constellation of the stars, through the position of the heavenly bodies, this water was thrown up, immediately froze and buried these animals. You can see from such things that the constellation of the stars has a powerful influence on the distribution of land and water and ice on Earth.

Now, I recently explained to you how volcanoes also originate from that which is outside of the earth, how that which is under the earth is, so to speak, brought out from the interior of the earth. So we can also say that when, for example, the mighty Etna erupts, things are not hurled out from below; rather, a stellar constellation acts from above downwards, and this brings these fiery masses out of the interior of the earth.

From this we see that today very many things interact, and this causes, on the one hand, that we have these cold spells. The cold spells are therefore also caused by the extraterrestrial. The fact that we have these volcanic eruptions and earthquakes also stems from the extraterrestrial. But now one can never fully assess such an occurrence if one is not clear about the fact that man himself is intimately connected with all these extraterrestrial conditions.

You see, you have probably already heard of so-called haemorrhages, where a person's blood no longer takes the right path, so that it spews out of the mouth instead of being distributed throughout the body. This is called a haemorrhage. Such haemorrhages occur particularly easily when a person is at certain stages in life. We must ask ourselves: What is the actual relationship between a hemorrhage and what is happening outside? — Now, if you remember that man does not consist only of his physical body, which we can touch with our hands, but that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-body, then you will have to say to yourself: Of course, we can shed the physical body. It is heavy, it is heavy mass, it is connected with the earth. But the etheric body is connected with the environment. And when we look at things in the human being, it is the case that the moon has a huge influence on the human being. But the moon does not have such an influence on people as it does now; rather, we are led back to very ancient times. In ancient times, the moon had an extremely strong influence on people. People had to do something specific during the waxing moon, something specific during the waning moon, and so on. And in particular, in those older times, the reproduction of the human race was entirely based on the moon. It is so interesting to see how people who still have traditions from ancient times think about these things. They definitely think that it is of great importance whether a person is conceived in the waxing moon or the waning moon, for example. This is a very important thing in ancient traditions. And the moon then also exerts its influence on the whole development of the person, but in such a way that the person carries these lunar influences within them. So it is not that it has a direct influence on the person when there is a full moon or something like that; but we see the moon waxing and waning; that once had an influence on the person, and that has remained and continues. So it is not the current phase of the moon that has a great influence, but something that is similar to the old moon phase and is an old heirloom has a great influence. And so you could say that the moon has a certain influence.

But we wouldn't have any blood in our heads at all if it weren't for the moon. We would all walk around with very pale faces, terribly pale faces, if it were not for the influence of the moon. The moon draws our blood up from our body to our head. That is the influence of the moon, that the blood is willing to go to the head at all. This is extremely interesting. The blood only goes up into the human head because of the influence of the moon. Otherwise, the blood would always go down. Now, when a person becomes so weak in his entire body that he can no longer sufficiently resist these forces of the moon that draw the blood up, the blood rushes too strongly into the human head, and that is how a hemorrhage occurs. We must always have this influence, but when it becomes too strong, the blood rushes too strongly to the human head and that is how blood comes out.

And you see, what the hemorrhage is in the individual human being is something like water bursting out [pointing to Siberia] or erupting from a volcano in the great outdoors outside. Only there it is not the influence of the moon, but the influence of the more distant stars. You must imagine that when we simply develop as human beings, we are continually exposed to other influences. I will illustrate this to you. Imagine once again, here would be the earth (it is drawn), here the moon goes around the earth. I will draw it as it looks. So the moon goes around the earth, and it has its greatest influence on people first. But outside of the moon are the other stars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and then the fixed stars. Now you must be aware that it is different whether, let's say, Mars is behind the Sun or whether Mars has already moved on and is already next to the Sun. When Mars is behind the Sun, it has less effect on Earth because the Sun covers its effect. When Mars is in this position [next to the Sun], it has a stronger effect on Earth. And so it always depends on the position of the stars how strongly the earth is affected. This science of the position of the stars is almost not developed at all today, and so people only look at what is happening on earth, icebergs and so on, but they do not look at the stars.

Now one cannot investigate these things from the earth either, but one must be clear about the fact that one must investigate these things from the human being. These things must be investigated from the human being.

Now I would like to tell you something: if you go through the development of humanity in modern times, you will indeed find huge changes in this development of humanity. We do not want to go back very far, but let us go back, say, six hundred years. If we go back six hundred years – today is 1923 – we come to 1323. You have to bear in mind that if you had lived then, you would not have known that there was such a thing as America or Australia. People did not know any of this, they only knew about Europe and Asia and a small part of Africa, very little of Africa. So six centuries before our time, imagine, people only knew about a small part of the world. And above this earth they saw the moon rise and set, the sun rise and set, the stars, and everything was such that all life took place only in a small space. Yes, gentlemen, in those days people knew little about the earth and had no idea about the movement of the stars. But they knew something about the spiritual influences of the stars. This is connected with the fact that people lived in small circumstances. People got their influence from these small circumstances.

Well, you know, it didn't take long: in 1492, Christopher Columbus of Genoa set out with a small number of ships, and he was of the opinion that one could travel around the world. Christopher Columbus did not want to discover America at all, but he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. Before that, people thought the earth was flat. Now he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. And so he equipped himself with a number of ships. There was resistance, but he still got these ships from the government, equipped them, and believed that he could sail around the world. At least that's what he thought. He said to himself: if we go from Europe over there to the east, we'll find (pointing to the drawing) Asia, down there is Hither India, there is Farther India. — So he knew that if you go over there by land, you come to India. Now he wanted to go around the globe of the earth from Spain and come to India from the other side. That was what Columbus wanted. He wanted to travel around the world because he hoped, so to speak, to make the first practical use of the roundness of the earth. He wanted to travel around and discover India from the other side. Now he set out and came across America, and thought: This is the other side of India. — That is why this area was also called the West Indies, as it is still called in part today.

So you see how, through the thinking of people, the spherical shape of the earth has actually been gradually conquered for knowledge, how it was only gradually realized that one had come to the other side of America and realized that this was not India, but a new country. So 1492, that's only 431 years ago that people discovered America at all.

But the discovery of America means something completely different. And if you want to understand what the discovery of America means, then please consider the following. You see, in 1492, I told you, Christopher Columbus set out first and discovered America. In 1543, Copernicus came on the scene and was the first to put forward the world view that the sun stands still and the earth moves around the sun like the other planets. So what every child learns at school today has only been around since that time. Do you realize how many years that is? It's only 380 years! It is only since that time that people have had any idea at all of what is already taught in elementary school today. Before that, people knew nothing about any of these things. But they thought about it all the more, about what influence the moon has on people. People knew what I have told you now, that the moon drives the blood to the head. People recognized this influence on people.

Now you have to consider what the discovery of America actually means. You see, people talk so thoughtlessly and history presents it that way: discovery of America, people have possessed genius after all! - Yes, gentlemen, but you have to imagine it quite differently. What kind of people do you think lived in America at the time when Columbus came across it? Well, not even five hundred years ago, the copper-red Indians lived over there, and these Indians did not think like you do today in Europe. They knew a lot about the influence of the stars. So there lived in all of America at the time a population that knew an extraordinary amount about the influence of the stars. They oriented themselves entirely to the influence of the stars. And then the Europeans came, civilized humanity. Now, you see, as late as the 19th century, the Indians said that the Europeans always brought something strange with them, something white, with little ghosts on it. But these were very harmful ghosts, terribly harmful ghosts, and the Europeans would use them to conjure the Americans. At least that's what the Native Americans thought. And do you know what it was that the Native Americans feared so much, what they thought made the Europeans such terrible guys who caused so much havoc? It was the books, the white sheets of paper with the letters on them! The Native Americans looked at them, thought they were magic and said: “These people are using them to cast spells on us.

And so the people came together. And then the extermination of the Indians began. But where did the people who exterminated the Indians come from? They came from Europe! And if the people who still lived in Europe in 1323 had come over there, their beliefs would have been much more similar to those of the Indians. Because these people in 1323 in Europe still knew about the influence of the stars. They could have understood each other much better. But the people who came over did not understand the Indians at all, they could only exterminate them. And on the spot where the exterminated Indians were, European humanity developed. You just have to bear in mind that the Americans who developed there are, after all, Europeans. Isn't it true that the ideas that people often have based on what they learned at school are really quite stupid sometimes.

I would just like to point out one thing to you. Today people talk so much about the French. But around Nuremberg, the people are still called Franks today. The French are just the immigrated Germanic people who then adopted the Latin language in a modified form. So everything that is talked about, when one does not know how things came about and rages because it is presented that way in history, is sometimes so boundlessly foolish, so boundlessly stupid. And so it is boundlessly stupid there too. They don't even consider that the people of Europe who migrated to America had developed in Europe over the last three hundred years. The main immigration only happened much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's when America was first settled. And what kind of people came over then? Well, the illiterate ones also came over, but they didn't have much influence. Those who came over and had a great influence were those who had been educated in Europe, especially in science, who had learned the Copernican doctrine, who had completely different views about the stars.

Imagine how this all fits together in world history. On the one hand, the spherical shape of the earth is proven by the fact that one can travel around the earth at all, and on the other hand, that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but that there is space all around and the earth goes around the sun, that the earth is not a plane, that the sun does not sink into the water in the evening, but that the earth goes around the sun.

You see, people do not think about what the actual connection is between the discovery of America, which took place in 1492, and 1543, when Copernicus came up with his new view of the stars. There is a close connection. Don't think that what happened could have happened without the influence of the stars on people. Columbus did not think: “Now I will go over to the West” without the influence of the stars. You only have to consider how foggy it was. He did not know that he was discovering America. He just wanted to sail around the world. It's like a blind hen finding a grain of corn. You can't say that it was his own mind, but that people are driven by influences. And what drives them are the stellar influences. So we also have to ask ourselves: Why did Copernicus think the way he did about the stellar influences? — then we ourselves have to look for the causes in the stellar influences.

We have a time in the Middle Ages - I told you, it was still like this six hundred years ago - when people still have concepts that relate to a very small world. Then suddenly they get concepts that go all around on the earth and all around in the sky. All concepts diverge. Yes, gentlemen, you really have to think a little deeper about what is going on in people. One must penetrate into these things with real science. One must therefore study man. Now I have already told you many things about man. I will now tell you a well-attested fact again, so that you can see how things are.

There was an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who was transferred to Trieste as a secondary school teacher at a certain time, in 1855, and he took a great interest in everything that was going on. At the time, Robert Hamerling was also very interested in how all sorts of swindlers passed through Trieste, but so did some people who produced anomalies, so-called mediums. He liked to visit all such gatherings, but he was not at all superstitious. He really saw how most of these things were fraudulent. But once he thought to himself, when he saw a person with a particularly strange medium: now I want to see for myself. Now Hamerling had known a young girl in Graz, where he lived before coming to Trieste, who died very soon afterwards and from whom he had received a lock of hair. He had this lock of hair from the young girl made into a small wreath, tied it together, pinned it on a small piece of paper and then put it in a little box. He kept this as a souvenir. It had become particularly valuable to him after the person in question had died. He took it with him to Trieste among his other things. Nobody knew anything about it. He never told anybody anything about it – he remembered that very clearly – and never showed the box to anybody. Besides, the circumstances were such that he would not have liked to show it anyway. It was something that embarrassed him a great deal. So he had a secret box, so to speak, that contained this. He took it with him when he went to the meeting to see the medium. And with this medium it was the case that people gave all kinds of objects, which they put in envelopes or boxes; the medium took it in his hand, touched it and then said what was in the box. Now, such things are very often interspersed with fraud; you have to keep an open mind about these things.

For example, I was once at a meeting where a medium was brought in, and the man they call the impresario went around the audience and had all kinds of things written down on pieces of paper. He took these, but stopped walking. The medium was blindfolded. And while he was still standing there – he just said: Tell me, what do I have in my hand? – the medium immediately said what he had in his hand. So if someone wrote down his own name, he gave it to the impresario, who read it and then crumpled up the piece of paper. The medium could not see anything, but then said what was on it. Now, you see, the people at the table where I was sitting at the time were terribly curious – because the people were terribly amazed – and they said that now someone should write something down where the guy was not clever enough, where he could not communicate, because they all believed that he communicated with the medium through all kinds of signs. Well, I wrote down the name Spinoza and a work by Spinoza, the “Ethics”, because people believed that the impresario naturally did not know who Spinoza was. But he took over Spinoza and the “Ethics” just as well, and the medium answered correctly. People were terribly amazed. But, you see, the matter was very simple. The impresario was a ventriloquist and the medium only pretended to answer, while the impresario spoke from the medium's mouth. So one must not be taken in. I must always emphasize that one must not be taken in by these things. That is precisely the difference between superstitious, gullible people and those who can judge these things.

But Hamerling took the little box with him and no one knew anything about it. Then he sent this little box, the contents of which no one knew about, down among the other objects. The medium was sitting in front of a table. He sent up the box. Well, first the other things were determined. The medium did that fairly quickly. And the moment she came to his box, she took it in her hand and flung it away. Now Hamerling thought: now it is the case that this is of course agreed with all the others; with me it cannot be an agreement, the medium does not come to that and flings it away! - So he went and said that he still wanted to know what was in it. The box was picked up again. The medium flung it away again. It was picked up again. Then the medium said, very stammeringly: a lock of hair and a piece of paper! Now, of course, he was amazed. Any fraud was out of the question, absolutely out of the question. Then he asked why she kept throwing it away. She said: because it comes from a dead person. Now, that was even more surprising. So that is a case where – I am not mentioning other cases except those that you can find in the literature, otherwise I could mention hundreds of others – any deception is out of the question. And what is the underlying cause? The medium must not know what is there at that moment, but must seek it out from the unconscious. There is a very specific influence at work here.

I once told you that sometimes the influence of buckwheat groats down in the cellar can still be felt on the third floor. Do you remember how I told you that? Such an influence, which only manifests itself in the head, is the underlying cause. And the medium then says what is in there – why? Because the medium is a person in whom the blood is more subject to the influence of the moon than in other people. It does not have to be so strong as to cause a hemorrhage – it could also occur in a medium who is not subject to giddiness – but the blood is drawn to the head more than in other people. This results in a strong influence, and this kind of influence can be present.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, the powerful influences of the stars, of course, they are constantly affecting people. And everything that Europe has experienced together with America and the whole earth for four hundred years is under the influence of the stars. But what is this star influence like? Well, gentlemen, you have to imagine the following. Imagine that here is the Earth (it is being recorded). There was the piece of earth that people used to know only. Somehow the stars are above it, I am of course only drawing it schematically for you. People are under the influence of these stars. This is the time before the discovery of America. People have firmly established ideas. If you look at the pictures and portraits of the old councilmen, you will see that people have their fixed ideas and that they stand with both feet firmly on the ground. This is because in those days there was a constellation of stars where the stars were very close together. Since then, we have had a different star constellation. When the earth is there, the stars are, so to speak, much more oblique, of course again drawn very schematically. If you were to draw it in detail, each one would naturally stand out, so to speak. You will say: But the fixed stars have not changed? — But they have changed too, although not to such an extent. So you can see from this: the spaces between them became larger in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. The concepts have dissolved. And now there is again a time coming when the spaces become smaller, when the stars again contract. This is only very little with the fixed stars, but it is still the case. Even when one records the fixed stars, one sees that the fixed stars have to shift. And now men are exposed to the fact that they have acquired ideas through the influence of stars that were far apart. But now they have to get concepts under the influence of the stars that are close together again. There is a completely new star constellation in the world. This can be seen if one has lived awake from the previous century into this century. You see, I was born in 1861, so I consciously experienced the time in the seventies, eighties, nineties and now the 20th century. Yes, in my childhood it was quite different from today! In my childhood people simply thought quite differently than today. Everything has changed now, and in one area in particular it has changed completely. When I was a little boy of twelve, I didn't have much money back then to buy books, but every year we were given a school program; it contained the most important physical terms of the time. Well, I spent a lot of time chewing over those. They were hard to grasp. Even back then, I had to learn differential calculus to understand the concepts. But I know what the physical concepts were back then.

But today it is quite different. When someone studies physics at university today, he learns something completely different from what we learned as boys. And from what happened then, we can see that the physical concepts have disintegrated. Today, no physicist knows which concepts to use. In the past, we spoke of space and time as two different things. Today, the physicist speaks of four dimensions, taking the first, second, and third as dimensions of space and the fourth dimension as equivalent to time. Most people have no idea what teaching is like today. People who are outside of schools still live with the concepts that I learned as a boy. But in actual physics today, they are already talking about something completely different. This shows that the concepts have become completely mixed up. Today, the physicist knows least of all what he is supposed to do. Everything has become mixed up.

Yes, gentlemen, it shows you in the human mind that there is a different star constellation. For the story is that today's people all have more blood in their heads than people through all the centuries have had in their heads, because the moon is supported by the stars, which in turn are closer together. So if you study human evolution, you find that a wave of blood has gone up to the head through the star constellation. But this wave is not only happening in man, but on the whole earth. And it is this same influence that once threw the cold from south to north and buried the mammoths, which are still fresh meat in Siberia today, as if in a large ice cream factory. Just as it was thrown up then, just as blood is driven up into the head by the moon, so today these volcanic eruptions are thrown up by the stars. Thus we have today the effect of a star constellation coming from the other side of the Earth. It passes through North America, through Greenland, and throws cold air over here, so that today, as a result of the star constellation, large masses of cold air are continually being thrown from west to east.

And now I have told you: If you go to Italy, you only need to light a piece of paper on certain parts of the ground and it will smoke from below. It is not that the earth throws up the smoke, but that I make the air above warm and thin, causing these vapors to rise. Now the star constellation throws these air masses from west to east. We are exposed to them here, which is why we now have this climate. Here it goes from west to east. But this causes the ground below to throw out its masses, its fire masses. First they were thrown out over America by the huge volcanoes and the huge earthquakes. Now it is moving further and further east. Etna and Vesuvius are all beginning to erupt because the wave is flowing over there, and down below it is becoming elastic. It is not pushed up from below, but is brought to the surface by the star constellations. In the human being, blood is pushed into the brain, and on Earth, masses of air are thrown over and fiery masses of gas are thrown out from under the Earth and transported to other places. It is the same story. It all starts with the stars.

If people understood why they think differently now, they would also understand why Etna is spitting fire. But for that to happen, the human being must first know that he is not something that can be considered in isolation, but must be considered in connection with the whole universe. That is precisely it. And people have completely forgotten how to consider things in the universe. It is really quite interesting how animals, in this respect, as I have also told you before, are much cleverer than humans. Animals usually even migrate before a volcanic eruption or something like that occurs, while people stay put. Why do animals migrate? Yes, when the other influence comes, the other star influence, then it is like this with the animal: the animal is built so that it has its legs there (see drawing $. 138), its backbone, the vertebrae, its head there. When the stars move across it, the entire spine is continuously exposed to the stars, vertebra by vertebra exposed to the stars, and they belong together, they belong so closely together that we have 28 to 31 vertebrae in our back and the moon takes 28 to 31 days to go around. It is so closely related.

But man walks upright. With him only the head, this little piece of the head, is exposed to the starry sky. He has his spine lifted out. So that with man only the blood is exposed to the influence of the stars, not the nervous system. But with animals the nervous system is exposed to the influence of the stars. That is why the animal notices the influence of the stars much sooner than man and migrates when earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. Man stays put. The mere fact that the animal can migrate and thus shows us that the star influence is acting on the animal, that in itself is proof that we are not dealing here with random waves coming from the earth, but that the star influence is acting from outside. That is what shows us this whole interesting connection with the whole universe. Man is not merely an earthly creature, but man is a being placed in the entire world of the stars.

Now, of course, this also leads us to understand that after people have forgotten their old knowledge of the stars, they have to get it again. So, I would like to say: It is indeed the case that with anthroposophy, we have to give humanity what it needs in a new way, otherwise humanity will remain confused. Because the stars, which are arranged more closely together, no longer fit the concepts from other times; only the concepts that anthroposophy can bring fit again.

Now I have already been given four questions today. We will see if we can make progress next time. I may have to be away on Wednesday. I will let you know when we will have the next session.

How does one come to see the spiritual world?

If you continue the train of thought from last time, you come to the following. When I was young, very young, there was a great stir when a traveling hypnotist performed with people. Now, one does not need to give such people special praise for bringing extraordinarily serious things to the public in a theatrical way, and I certainly do not want to sing the praises of Hansen, who in the seventies and eighty years ago, in the last century, in a theatrical way, gave performances on a subject that at that time had not yet been dealt with at all by science, that science knew nothing about. But since then, science has taken hold of this subject precisely under the influence of Hansen's theatrical performances.

Now I would like to tell you about an experiment that Hansen performed in front of an astonished audience after it had been forgotten for a long time. He took two chairs, placed them at a certain distance (I will draw them), and then hypnotized a person simply through the influence of his own personality, as they say. He first brought the person to a sleep-like state – but in a sleep-like state that is much deeper than ordinary sleep – then he could take this person and lay him down so that the head was on one chair and the feet on the other. Now you know that if this happens to a person who is fully conscious, he will fall down between the two chairs. This person did not fall down between the two chairs at first, but remained lying stiff as a broomstick where he was. But that was not enough. Hansen, who was a rather corpulent, heavy person, now went and stood boldly on the person's stomach. So there stood the heavy Mr. Hansen on top of him. The man did not move, but remained lying there like a plank, even though Mr. Hansen was standing on him.

So this is something that can definitely be done, that has been done many times since then, and that science no longer doubts, whereas it used to know nothing about it and had to be taught about it by the not very likeable Mr. Hansen. You see, a person in this state is said to be in catalepsy.

When something occurs in such a way that someone can lie there like a wooden board and even stand on it, and it happens temporarily under the influence of another personality, well, then it is just an experiment, then it is not so particularly bad. But we can say that in a small way this condition is found in life. It is found sometimes. Of course it then actually only occurs to the person who can make medical observations. And it occurs to a person when they fall into a very specific illness that is called a mental illness.

For example, there are people who, while they were previously very determined people, useful in their jobs, suddenly think as if all their thoughts have been frozen. It may happen that a person regularly went to work every morning, say, at eight o'clock. He got up at the right time and so on. Suddenly he likes it very much in bed. He always wants to get up, but he can't find the will to do so. And when fear does take effect – he has the clock lying next to him, it is a certain time – and he has finally got up, he cannot find the will to have breakfast, then again not to leave. He finally comes to always saying to himself: I can't, I can't – and finally behaves like a stick, cannot make up his mind. And this goes so far that he falls into a kind of state that can be seen in his body: he is rigid. While he used to move his arms quickly, he now moves them slowly, and while he used to run like a jack-in-the-box, he now finds it difficult to take one step after the other. The whole person becomes rigid and heavy. This is something that sometimes occurs as an illness in people as early as adolescence.

It is the same condition, only not so strong and only that it does not occur all at once, but very slowly. Of course, when a person begins to become cataleptic, you cannot put him on two chairs and stand on them or sit on top of him, but he becomes so that he can no longer properly control his body.

That is one state. But Hansen also demonstrated other experiments to the people, which were always imitated in the past, but which have also attracted the attention of science since that time. Before they were brought to the attention of science by the dilettante and actor Hansen, they had not been studied. These conditions consisted of the following: Hansen would have someone from the audience come forward. Foolish people have said that he discussed it beforehand, but that is nonsense, of course. He just recognized the right personalities from the audience who could be used for this. It doesn't work equally well with everyone; he had developed an eye for who was suitable. Now he had a person come out of the audience and again his personal influence took effect. He stood there, placing himself firmly on the ground with his own legs, which were very thick. He had a look that made you think that when he went in at the front, he would come out at the back, a piercing look, as they say. And he always had his eye like this, you see (it is drawn): when he looked at a person, his eye was open like this, so that the white at the top and bottom remained visible. While usually the eyelid extends over the white, so that the white above and below the pupil cannot be seen, with him it was so that the gaze was particularly fixed, as one says.

Now, this made a huge impression on the person he had chosen as his victim; he was already beginning to lose consciousness, as they say. He lost consciousness, but something very strange happened. Hansen then said: “You cannot move from the ground now. Your feet are glued to the ground! He tried it out, he couldn't move, couldn't take a single step. He just couldn't, he remained standing. Then Hansen said to the appropriate victims: 'You must kneel down now!' He knelt down. 'Look, an angel is appearing up there.' He folded his hands, made a terribly ecstatic face and looked up at the angel. Hansen did all this with these people, whom he had chosen as victims. Of course, he chose people who were somewhat weak-minded, but he was able to do these things to them and then do them in front of the whole audience. His things were not frauds – many people also claimed that he was a fraud – but they were things that have since been imitated at the scientific institutes and are therefore considered.

He also did the following, for example. He took a chair and sat it down to the one who was in such a state that he had no thoughts of his own, but only the thoughts that Hansen put into his head. Now Hansen stood there and said, “Here is an apple!” - “Isn't it? Apples are very good, apples are tasty.” Now he took a potato, gave it to the man, and he bit into it with enormous pleasure and ate the potato as if it were an apple. So Hansen could not only persuade people to see an angel, but also to persuade them that a potato is an apple and is eaten as an apple. Then he took water, for example, and said: “Now I'll give you a particularly sweet wine!” - Oh, you could see how he enjoyed the sweetness! - Hansen made such attempts. That was the other kind of experiment.

What did he do to the people on whom he experimented? He killed the will. He had no will at all. With the people he treated as I said last, he only influenced their thoughts. They had to think only as Hansen thought; when he said, “This is an apple,” and so on, according to Hansen's taste, and when he said, “This is an angel,” they followed Hansen's thought and saw the angel.

Yes, you see, Hansen could do a lot more. For example, he did the following: he had someone come forward from the audience whom he thought was a particularly suitable victim, and he hypnotized him first, that is, he made him so that he had no consciousness of his own, that he took in all the thoughts that Hansen fed him. Now he said: Now ten minutes will pass. I will wake you up after ten minutes. Then you will go to the man sitting over there in the corner and take the watch out of his pocket like a thief. Now he woke the first one up – Hansen was meanwhile doing all kinds of things with everyone – he got restless, got up, went over to the man sitting in the corner and took the watch out of his pocket.

Now, you see, of course you use Latin names. The Latin language, as I have already told you, is always used for logic; and those experiments that I described to you first are called hypnotic experiments, and these, where he is already awakened and does the same thing afterwards – post means after – they are called posthypnotic experiments. Since then, we have spoken of hypnosis and posthypnosis and know that a person can enter into such states.

These things point the way to a deep insight into human nature, for it has actually been found that these posthypnotic suggestions can be extended much further. If someone is hypnotized deeply enough and told, “After three days you must do this or that,” he will do it, provided he has the right personality. These experiments have been done.

Now, of course, these things do not occur with such intensity in real life. But, as I have shown you with the person who can no longer move, they do occur, albeit in a weakened form. The other state also occurs in real life. You will have met not only people who are completely paralyzed and no longer know what to do with themselves, who are in a sense cataleptic, but you will also have met people who suddenly start - while they used to be quite level-headed people - to become very talkative people. You can't keep up with them; their thoughts bubble up, they prattle on and on like a wheel. They are just like people who eat a potato for an apple, except that in the one case Hansen is the one who has influence, while those who have their thoughts so quickly, who let their thoughts bubble up, are dependent on their own belly. Because that is the interesting thing, that your own gut – I have told you a lot about how the liver and so on think in the gut – thinks much faster than the head. And when a person's head becomes so weak that it no longer offers the necessary resistance to these thoughts coming from the gut, no longer makes them slow enough, then these thoughts bubble up. So they are hypnotized by their own gut.

That is the strangest thing in life: man has these two opposing organs, the head and the belly. Both think. But it is true: the head thinks slowly and the belly thinks quickly. The head thinks much too slowly and the belly much too quickly, but you know: if you mix very thick and very thin, you get a middle state. It is the same with people: the states of the head make the states of the stomach slow and the states of the stomach make the states of the head fast, and in this way they balance each other out.

You see, the world's processes are based on the fact that opposite states interact. In this respect, what we call science today still has a tremendous amount to learn. I will tell you something right away. Suppose you have a reasonably normal human being. When this person reaches about 72 years of age — you can calculate that, I have already drawn your attention to it — he has lived 25,920 days. That is 72 years. That is how many days a person normally lives. And if you measure a person's breaths, you will find that he takes just as many breaths in a day. So a person, if he lives normally and his organism is not destroyed beforehand – because otherwise he cannot live to be 72 years old; if you don't live to be 72 years old, you are destroyed by something – lives as many days through breaths in a day. This is how a person lives. He lives in such a way that every day, from sunrise to sunrise, he takes 25,920 breaths, and that during the ordinary course of life he lives to reach the age of a patriarch for 25,920 days.

Yes, but what does that mean: we live a normal life that reaches the patriarchal age, 25,920 days? What does that mean? - It means that we go through 25,920 days and nights with the Earth. We go through this, we can experience it 25,920 times. What does the Earth do when it gets dark and light? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is precisely the important thing, which Goethe already sensed and which we can say with certainty today: when it begins to get light, the Earth draws the forces of light, the world forces, to itself at the place where we are. It is different in the other hemisphere, where it is the other way around, but it is the same process. So the earth and everything in the earth breathes in light; when it is night, it breathes out again. What we do with the air in the short time between inhalation and exhalation is what the earth does in a day.

So you see, the earth is terribly much slower than we are, terribly much slower. We take as many breaths in one day as the earth does in our entire lifetime. You can see that from this. But if you look more closely, something special comes out in humans. Man breathes in such a way that the blood needs the breath. The blood is produced in the intestines, that is, in the abdomen; the abdomen therefore wants to breathe so quickly. We can therefore say: human breathing is connected to the abdomen.

You see, if you really look at the head from a scientific point of view, as our science is now doing, only through the stomach, then it is the case that the head always tries to reject breathing a little. Respiration also goes to the head. The head wants to breathe in such a way that it only takes one breath a day, and it constantly slows down our breathing. The head only wants to breathe in such a way that it inhales and exhales once a day, while we inhale and exhale in about four seconds. The head actually wants to slow down the breath, make it much slower. So that we can say: cosmic breathing is actually carried out by the head; only the breathing rushes constantly from the body up to the head, quickly, and the breathing moves slowly from the head to the body. So you have a person who gets his will inhibited, who becomes rigid, what happens to him? The breathing in the abdomen is not in order, and the very slow head breathing wants to spread over the whole body. Now the guy is lying there and Hansen is standing on it. The head breathing wants to control the whole body: it becomes rigid. But if someone chatters and chatters and chatters, then the head breathing no longer wants to do the right thing, and the fast body breathing comes up, and he chatters. Then, as they say, you don't get hypnotized, but your thoughts escape.

Now you can say – really, you can say that: But actually the world is stupidly arranged, because we are in constant danger of becoming fools, either because our head breathing is not right in relation to our body breathing or our body breathing is not right, That is a bad thing. Because of these things, we are constantly exposed to the danger of becoming fools. You can say: Gosh, how stupid the world is set up! But I will tell you something else, gentlemen.

Consider, for example, woman, the female. Insofar as the female is human, it is natural for her to have a faster bodily breathing and a slower breathing of the head. The slower breathing is the cosmic breathing. But the woman only breathes with her head. The rest of her body breathes faster. They just go at it at random. But suppose the woman becomes pregnant. What happens then? You see, for a certain small part of the body in the uterus, the head breathing is introduced into the rest of the body's breathing through the fertilizing substance that comes from the man. So that now the woman, while she is pregnant, has a slow head breathing, but also a slow breathing in the lower abdomen. Slow head breathing mixes into the body breathing, so that now the human being has head breathing twice as a result. And what develops? The head first. So what has entered the body through fertilization? You see, cosmic breathing, which we otherwise only have in our heads, has entered. The human being takes in the whole world in the breathing process. So fertilization actually consists in the human being taking in the whole world through the breathing process. What happens during human fertilization is actually that, while otherwise the human body always has only human bodily breathing, for nine months cosmic breathing is implanted, which otherwise the human being has only in the head.

In this way you can see the relationship between the human being and the whole universe. At the point where the human being comes into being, in the mother's womb, the mother only wants to breathe in such a way that one breath takes the whole day. In this way, the mother slows down the processes there so that she can not only live, but also form a new human being. Because of what otherwise carries out these slow processes with the head, we live through our head for our lifetime of 72 years. If we say that a human being normally lives for 72 years and if we see that it takes nine months to develop a new human being, then it is no wonder that a new human being develops in nine months, because a human being lives for 72 years, we just compress the 72 years into breathing, and a new human being emerges. But this is something that allows you to see so deeply into the whole of nature that you can also get the basis for different thinking.

Now look at the earth and the plants inside it. So let's say we have the root of the plant, we have the stem of the plant with the leaves, and we have the flower up there. If you look at the root, it is completely surrounded by salts in the ground. There are salts everywhere (drawing p. 226). These salts are heavy. So the root is completely immersed in the 20th layer of heaviness. But heaviness is a very peculiar thing. It is overcome. If you were to take the severed heads of people, they would still have quite a weight. The human head is heavy. Or if you finally take a pig's head in your hand, it is heavy. When you carry the head on you, you do not feel how the head is attached and is heavy, because the heaviness is overcome in the head. But in the same way, heaviness is also overcome in the plant. If the plant were to feel the heaviness in the leaves, it would not grow upwards, but downwards. But now the plant grows upwards, it overcomes heaviness. But by overcoming gravity, it becomes accessible to light. The light works within it, and the light comes from top to bottom, against gravity. Thus the plant ascends more and more towards the light, becoming more and more, whereas as a root it was embedded in the salts of the earth, now exposed to the sun with its light. Through its exposure to the sun with its light, fertilization takes place in the plant (see illustration); the ovary with the germ is formed, so that through the effect of light the new plant comes into being. With plants, this can be seen quite clearly. That which I have called cosmic breathing in the human being, which is implanted through fertilization, is brought to the plant every year through the light, so that the plant grows from heaviness to light and thus to fertilization.

We will therefore say: what must first be observed in man through thought, so that one knows that cosmic breathing is entering, that a little head is emerging at a certain point in the interior of the human body – we see that too every year when we look at the plants. The outer world comes from the infinite space in the form of light and brings the cosmic into the plant, and the earth is fertilized by the cosmos in its plant world. This is extremely interesting. When you look at a plant blossom, you can say to yourself: the cosmos is fertilizing the blossom. The other is only an addition, that the dust comes across and so on; that is just an addition, because in the physical everything must proceed physically. But in reality it is the light that comes from the cosmos and fertilizes the plant blossom, that lays the germ for the new plant.

Yes, gentlemen, but can you not see what is actually happening? What is actually happening cannot be seen because it is small. But you can sense it! Let us now look at what is happening in the plant in a completely different way. Let us assume that here is the earth (see drawing $. 228). Don't look at a plant, but look at the earth as in the distance - from a mountain perhaps, where it is best to see - the fog rises, as they say. There the fog rises. The fog consists of water. If you were to look at the plant, the story would not be entirely dissimilar, it would be something similar. If you were to look at such a plant, you would see – if you just sat down for a long time, the whole spring, and always observed – that at first it is deep, then it rises, and divides into leaves. But the mists also disperse when they rise. So there, in the plant, it is only the solid salts that rise up to the flower. Now look down at the earth: there, only water rises, not solid parts, as when it becomes a plant; but the water rises. When the plant reaches a certain place up there, it is fertilized by the universe. When the water that rises here in the form of fog reaches a certain place, it is also fertilized by the universe. And what happens then? Yes, gentlemen, there is a flash! That doesn't always happen, but when fertilization occurs and things are as explicit as they are in summer – otherwise lightning also occurs, but it is invisible – the water here is fertilized by the universe through light and warmth. The same thing that happens in the plant happens up there and is visible in the flash. And when the fog up above has been fertilized, it falls back down as fertile rain. So when you see a fog cloud rising, it is actually a—very thin—huge plant; it opens its blossom up above in the universe, is fertilized, contracts, and the fertilized water droplets fall back down in the rainwater.

Now you have an explanation for lightning. People believe that there is something like a giant Leyden jar or giant electrical device up there; but that is a misconception. In reality, the water of the earth is fertilized out there so that it can carry out its processes on earth again. And what happens in the plant happens only much deeper because the plant is more solid; up here near the blossom, when it is the right season, little sparks happen that you just don't see. But these little flashes lead to fertilization. So in the appearance of fog and rain, you have the same phenomenon that occurs in the plant during fertilization. And that then goes right up to the human being, where the cosmic breathing, the breathing of the world, which otherwise is only in the head, occurs in the lower body of the human being.

Now take the cataleptic person. What is the case with him? Yes, gentlemen, if one were to examine the cataleptic body, one would find that it has become particularly salty. It has become similar to a plant root, especially in the head. When our head becomes as salty as a plant root, we become foolish through the stiffness of the head, which then only extends to the rest. So when you see people who can't bring themselves to leave, who can't even raise their hands to get out of bed in the morning, they've got too much salt in their heads, they've become too similar to the plant's root. When you see people who just keep talking and talking, they've become too similar to the plant's blossom. Because when you talk, you're actually only talking about part of what you know. But those who chatter on and on always want to say everything they know. They actually always want to create a whole human being, because it is their gut that is talking. And when the gut draws in and absorbs the world, it becomes the head. But it happens too quickly, like with the gut, like with human breathing.

So we can say: Hansen made the people, who he laid on two chairs and then stood on, too similar to a plant root in their heads. There you can see the relationship between the human head and the plant root. You can even make the whole head similar to a plant root. And the people he persuaded to eat a potato like an apple, he made similar to a flower. There you can see the similarity of the belly man, that is, the lower body man, to the flower. What Hansen demonstrated to the scientists is still being done today, but people have not yet come up with an explanation that leads into the whole universe.

So now we can also answer the question of whether nature is really so stupidly designed that we can become fools, either through incorrect head or abdominal breathing, sometimes cataleptic through head breathing, sometimes talkative through having flight of thought and not being able to use our will. Now, to the person who thinks this is so extraordinarily foolish and says that if he had made the world, he would have made it somewhat differently, then we would not have to be exposed to the danger of being able to be fools in two directions. if that were not the case, if we could not also produce head breathing in the human being's belly, which occurs when we become rigid, then humans could not come into being at all, then fertilization would not be possible, then there would be no humans on earth!

So you see, the danger that we become fools is connected with the fact that we can come into being at all. If somehow nature had had the intention of not letting people come into being, well, then, no, then there would be no need for fools to come into being either. But because people had to come into being, there must also be the danger that fools could come into being. So one thing is connected with the other. There is no reason to grumble about nature when you see how things are connected. You could also say: Gosh, it's stupid that 2 x 2 = 4! — I wish it were 6; then I would have more. But that doesn't work! And it is also not the case that a person is on earth at all without the risk that the person will become foolish. You just have to see through these things correctly. But then you will also be able to see things correctly everywhere.

Then one will say, when one looks at lightning: Is lightning only up there? Oh no, it is all around us throughout the summer, fertilizing the plants, over the meadows, over the forests, everywhere there is lower lightning. And in the end it is lightning that always goes on in us. Internally we are completely permeated by the same phenomena that we sometimes see when it flashes, and our thoughts are a flashing within us. Of course, what once appears as a mighty flash of lightning runs very weakly in our thinking. But now you will also be able to say to yourself: It does make sense to say that when I look at lightning, the thoughts of the world appear to me, because that is the same as what is in me. You just have to look at things not superstitiously, but scientifically.

You see, it is interesting, after all, that at the end of the 19th century, science had progressed so far that it did not even pay attention to such important things, that a charlatan, a swindler like Hansen, had to come and show people these things. Only then did science begin to take notice of these things. But from this you can see that in the last third of the 19th century, science was not as advanced as people always say. Of course, in the external fields, people made great discoveries at that time, they found X-rays and so on, but in the internal human field, they did not at all demand to know anything proper, and still do not demand it today. Therefore, our science cannot be applied to the human being and is of no help to the human being. You can establish as many universities as you like today: if you go there, what works in the human being will not be explained to you. But at the same time, it is not explained to you what the actual process of plant fertilization is either. And with the rising fog and descending rain, the matter is explained as if it were not really much different from cooking on the stove: that the vapors rise and then fall again. That is simply not the case. Instead, as the vapors rise, they enter an area at the top where they are fertilized by the universe, and lightning is proof that they are fertilized. And then you can see the fertilization, which also happens otherwise.

But the thing is that it has a great significance. Take the year. In a year there is winter and summer, as there are day and night in twenty-four hours. And in a human life there are 25,920 days. If you now take 25,920 years, you get the time when the earth was not yet, and when it will not be again. We are now a little beyond the middle, so the earth has existed for about 13,000 years; then it will perish again, after about 11,000 years or so. Just as man lives 25,920 days, the earth lives 25,920 years as it is now. It changes; it was once young and is now growing old. And that is extremely important to know: every year the waters must be exposed to the universe, at some point, at some place on the earth, the waters must be exposed to the universe every year, otherwise the earth would not be able to live. The earth lives with the universe as we live with the air. If someone were to take the air away from us on earth, we could not take our 25,920 breaths a day. If someone were to take away the sun, and with it the light, the earth could not live. So the earth lives through the whole universe, as we live through the air around us. — So you can really say: We walk on the earth; the earth walks in the universe. We breathe on the earth; the earth breathes in the universe.

You see, you could create a very strange science. You know, the human head is round (he draws it) and, if you are not yet very old, you have hair here. Now there are creatures living in this forest – well, that's not desirable, but it does happen. Let us assume that they use the scales here to form a place where the cleverest of them always come together and teach the stupid ones; that would be a lice university on the human head itself. Well, you can assume that. What would these clever lice teach the stupid ones? They would teach: the head is something inanimate, because we walk around on it. The inanimate scales form. If you dig a little deeper, you come to the inanimate bones. —- That's what the clever lice would explain to the stupid lice at the lice university up there. They would explain the human head in much the same way that we at our universities explain the earth. These lice professors – excuse me, I mean, of course, those who are at the head – would know nothing of the fact that the human head is alive; they would therefore expound a geology of the head and declare the head dead. Yes, but, gentlemen, that is what they do in our schools! They declare the earth dead. They know nothing of its breathing. Because at this lice-infested university, you would never learn that a person breathes; nothing would be explained about human breathing. It would be explained: the human being is dead, the human head is a dead ball. And if head lice did not come into any relation with body lice, head lice would never learn anything about the body at all.

And so it is: If people on earth do not come into contact with other higher beings, they will never learn that the earth also sends its waters out into space as a body and is fertilized, breathes and is fertilized. Yes, we can really get an idea of how the science of the earth is constructed from there, from the head - from the idea of what would be presented as a science at this head university. That is how it really is! And you can see from this that it is necessary to go beyond that which can be seen from a limited point of view. One must go beyond it.

And what comes out is a real spiritual science that proceeds just as scientifically and can therefore also explain those things that Hansen brought to science back then.

Well, gentlemen, we are not yet finished with this hypnosis question and with the other. I will discuss these things a little next time, because they have to be compared with how they relate to ordinary sleep. And what happens when a person sleeps, what happens when a person becomes cataleptic – because in ordinary sleep you cannot lie on two chairs and let yourself be stepped on – the difference between sleep and hypnosis, the difference between catalepsy and thought transfer, I will explain further to you next Wednesday at nine o'clock.

Well, gentlemen, if you still have something on your minds today or want to ask something, I ask that you do so.

Question: One of the wonderful things about being human is having a conscience. When you have done something, you think about it. And even if you no longer think about things that have happened, you still know that you have a conscience. It would be interesting to ask whether conscience can be killed in such a way that you can forget it. The way humanity is today, one would actually have to assume that conscience has been killed in a large part of humanity.

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that is actually a big question, but it is related to what we have just said in the previous lectures. I have tried to explain to you in turn how the human being, who consists of matter, also contains an etheric body – that is, a body of a completely different nature that cannot be perceived or seen with the ordinary senses – then an astral body and an ego organization, we could also say: an ego body. The human being has these four parts.

Now we have to imagine what a person actually becomes when they die. As I have often told you, when a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed. The astral body and the I go out and are then no longer in the physical body and etheric body. But when a person dies, then, of what the person has, the physical body is discarded. It is then a truly physical body; the other three parts, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, then go out. I told you that the etheric body remains connected to the ego and the astral body for a few more days. Then it also separates, as I have described to you, and then the person lives in what is his ego and his astral body. As he now lives on and on, he lives in the spiritual world that we are actually exploring through spiritual science in this life on earth. So that we can say: Now we know something of a spiritual world here on earth; then we will be inside.

But after some time we come back down to earth. We pass through a spiritual world, just as we pass from birth to death in earthly life, and then come back down again. We take on the physical body given to us by our parents and so on. That is where we come down from the spiritual world. So before we came here to earth, we were spiritual beings, let us say. We have descended from the spiritual world. You see, gentlemen, that is an extraordinarily important fact for man to know that he comes down from the spiritual world with his ego and with his astral body. Otherwise it cannot be explained at all how it is that man, when he grows up, somehow speaks of the spirit. If he had never been inside the spiritual world, he would not speak of the spirit at all.

You know that once upon a time people on earth did not talk as much as certain people do today about life after death, but people talked a lot about life before they came down to earth. In ancient times, people talked much more about what happened to a person before he took on flesh and blood than about what happened afterwards. In ancient times it was much more important for people to remember that they were souls before they became human beings on earth. Now, I have spoken even less about the development of humanity on earth, but today we will talk a little about this development of human beings on earth.

If we go back in time about eight to ten thousand years, we would find a rather desolate life here in Europe. There is still a rather desolate life in Europe. In contrast, about eight thousand years before our present time, there was an extraordinarily developed life in Asia. In Asia, we have (it is drawn) here a country, it is called India. There is the island of Ceylon, up above would be the mighty river, the Ganges, up there is a mountain range, the Himalayas. In this India, which is in Asia, and also a little above it, lived people who, as I said, had a very highly developed spiritual life eight thousand years ago. Today I call them Indians. At that time the word Indian did not yet exist. But today we call it India, and that is why I use this expression. If you went back and asked these people, 'What do you call yourselves?' they would say, 'We are the sons of the gods!' because they described the land where they were before they were on earth. There they themselves were still gods, because men in those days, when they were spiritual, called themselves gods. They would also have said in answer to the question, what do you become when you fall asleep: When we are awake we are men, when we fall asleep we are gods. Being gods only meant being different from when we are awake, being more spiritual.

These people had a particularly high culture, and for them it was not so important to talk about life after death, but about life before one was born, about this life among the gods, as they said.

You see, there are no external records of these people. But of course these people lived on – you know, there are still Indians today – and in much later times they wrote great poetic works that are called the Vedas. Veda is the singular, Vedas the plural. Veda actually means “word”. They said to themselves: the word is a spiritual gift, and what people wrote in their Vedas was what they still knew from the other world. In those older times they knew much more, but what can still be studied externally through books today is what is in the Vedas. That was written much later. But in what is written in the Vedas, which was written down much later, you can see that these people still knew firmly: Before man descended to earth, he was in a spiritual world.

Now, if we go back about six thousand years to our time, we already have a less highly developed culture here. Culture is declining in India. What scholars today still describe as ancient Indian culture has already declined from its original height. But a culture is developing in the north (it is being drawn) – that is Arabia, of course – but in the north, up there, a culture is developing in the place that later became Persia. That is why I called it the ancient Persian culture. A completely different culture is developing there. It is quite remarkable. You see, if you go back to these ancient Indians, who lived two thousand years before these people, then you find everywhere among these ancient Indians that they actually value the earthly world very little. They always think that they came into the earthly world from the spiritual world. They knew this very well. They did not value the earthly world at all; they valued the spiritual world. They said they felt like outcasts, and what was on earth was not particularly important to them. And here, six thousand years before our time, in the land now called Persia, there came for the first time a certain appreciation of the earth. Earthly life was respected. This earthly life was respected to such an extent that people said to themselves: Yes, light is very, very precious, but the earth is also very precious with its darkness. And so the view gradually developed that the earth is just as precious and that it fights with heaven. And this battle between heaven and earth was developed over two or three thousand years as a concept that had particular significance for these people.

Then, if we go back about three or four thousand years, we come to a land where Arabia extends into Africa, where the Nile flows: Egypt. The Egyptians and also those who were actually sitting over there in Asia, more towards the west, and more towards Europe, they received the Earth even more willingly. And so, if we go back three or four thousand years, we find that these Egyptians, who were the third type of people, so to speak – Indians, Persians, Egyptians – these people built these huge pyramids. But what they did above all was this: they harnessed the Nile. They canalized the Nile, which every year floods the land with its fertile soil, so that these floods could benefit them in all directions. To do this, they developed what is known as geometry. They needed it. Geometry and the art of surveying were now being developed. People grew to like the Earth more and more. And you see, to the same extent that people grew to like the Earth, they became less aware that they had come from a spiritual world. I would say that they forgot more and more about it because they grew to like the Earth more and more, and to the same extent it became more important to them to say to themselves: 'We live after death'.

Of course, we have seen that life after death is assured to man, but people in the past, before the Egyptians came, did not think about immortality at all. Why? Because it was a matter of course for them. When they knew that they came from a spiritual world and had only accepted the physical body, then they had no doubt at all that they would arrive in a spiritual world after death. But in Egypt, where people thought less about their stay in the spiritual realm before their life on earth, the Egyptians were very afraid of dying. This huge fear of dying is actually not much older than three or four thousand years. The Indians and the Persians had no fear of death. So one can actually prove that the Egyptians had this terrible fear of dying. Because, you see, if they had not had this terrible fear of dying, then today these Englishmen and the others could not go to Egypt and then exhibit the mummies in their museums! Because in those days people were embalmed with all kinds of ointments and other substances. They placed and preserved them in the coffin as they looked during their lifetime. People were embalmed and made into mummies because it was thought that if the body is kept together, the soul will remain present for as long as the body has on earth. The body was preserved so that the soul would not suffer any harm. You see, that is the fear of dying. So with all their might, the Egyptians wanted to achieve immortality through earthly matter. But these Egyptians still knew an extraordinary amount, which was later completely lost.

And the next people that particularly stand out to us are in the north of Egypt, in Greece, in present-day Greece. But ancient Greece was very different. You see, the Greeks had almost completely forgotten about life before birth. Only a few people in particularly high schools, which were called mysteries, still knew about it. But on the whole, in Greek civilization, the spiritual life before birth had already been completely forgotten, and the Greeks loved earthly life most of all. And that is why a philosopher emerged in Greece, his name was Aristotle, in the 4th century BC. You see, now we are getting close to the Christian era. Aristotle was the first to put forward a view that had not existed before. He put forward the view that not only is the body of a person born when a child is born, but also the soul of a person is born. So in Greece, the view first emerged that the soul of a person is born with the body, but that it is then immortal, so it goes through death and lives on in the spiritual world. Only Aristotle then put forward a peculiar view. Aristotle had actually forgotten everything that was wisdom in ancient times, and he then put forward the view: the soul is born at the same time as the body. But when a person dies, the soul remains in such a way that it has only had this one earthly life behind it. It must then look back forever only on what the one earthly life is.

Imagine what a terrible view that is! So if someone on earth has done something bad, they will never be able to make amends for it, but will always have to look back and see the image of what they have done wrong. This is Aristotle's view.

Then Christianity came. In the very first centuries, Christianity was understood a little. But when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and Christianity took root in Rome, it was no longer understood there. It was not understood.

Now there were always councils within Christianity. The high dignitaries of the church came together and determined what the great flock of believers should believe. The view was formed that there are shepherds and sheep, and the shepherds then determined at the councils what the sheep should believe. At the eighth of these councils, it was now determined by the shepherds for the sheep that it was heretical to believe that man had lived in the spiritual world before his birth. So the old views of Aristotle became Christian church dogma! And as a result, humanity was virtually forced to know nothing, not even to think about the fact that man came down from the spiritual world with a soul. They were forbidden.

When materialists say today: The soul is born with the body and is nothing but physical – then that is nothing more than what people have learned from the church. That is precisely why people today believe that they go beyond the church when they are materialists. No, people would never have become materialists if the church had not abolished the knowledge of the spirit. For at this eighth general, ecumenical council in Constantinople, the spirit was abolished by the church, and that remained so throughout the Middle Ages. Only now, through spiritual science, do we have to realize again that the human being was also there as a soul before he was on earth. That is the important thing, that is the most important thing.

Anyone who follows the development of humanity on Earth clearly sees that originally the knowledge existed that people, before descending to Earth, are in a spiritual existence. This was only gradually forgotten and later even abolished by a council decision.

Now we must only realize what this means. Imagine, people who lived up to the Egyptians, so in ancient millennia, they knew: Before you walked around on this earth, you were in the spiritual world. Yes, they did not just bring down from the spiritual world some kind of general, vague knowledge, but they brought down from the spiritual world the awareness that they had lived with other beings. And from that they also brought down their moral impulses. What I should do on earth, I see from the way these earthly things are, these old people said; what else should I do, I just need to remember what was before birth. They brought down their moral impulses from the spiritual world. You see, if you asked people in those ancient times: What is good? What is evil? — then they said: Good is that which the beings among whom I was before I was on earth want; evil is that which they do not want. But each individual said that to himself. Now, gentlemen, that has been forgotten.

In Greece, there was now something very strange. In Greece, they have forgotten so far that there is a life before birth, that Aristotle said: The soul is born with the physical body. - So people had no idea that they had already lived before birth. But they sensed something in themselves from this life. Whether you know something or not, that has no influence on reality. I can always say: there is no table behind me, I don't see any table [hitting the table on my way back], but the table is still there, even if I don't see it. Life before birth remained, and people felt it within themselves. And that is what they started to call conscience in Greece. In Greece, the word conscience first appeared around the 5th century BC. Before that, the word conscience did not exist. So the word conscience comes from the fact that people forgot about prenatal life, pre-earthly life, and what they still felt of it within themselves, they gave a word to it. And since that time it has remained so. People feel prenatal life in themselves, but they say: Well, that's just the way it is; it arises down there somewhere and then it shoots up - but they don't pay any further attention to it.

You see, that was good for the church. Because what could happen now from the church? Yes, gentlemen, in the past, when everyone knew that they had lived as a soul before they descended to earth, people said: What we know of our previous life, of our life before birth, is moral. - Now the Greeks only felt conscience. And then later came the church, which now administered conscience. Isn't that right, it took over and said: You don't know what you should do. The sheep don't know, the shepherds do! And it made rules and administered conscience.

You see, it was necessary that the spirit was abolished at a council, because then what was left of the human spirit as conscience could be administered. And then the church said: No, nothing existed in man before he was on earth. The soul is born with the body. Anyone who does not believe this is of the devil. But we, as the church, we know what it is like in the spiritual world and what man has to do on earth. — That is how the church took possession of conscience.

This can still be proven in detail. Because, you see, that still played a role well into the 19th century, sometimes in a quite dreadful way. For example, in the 1830s and 1840s in Prague there was a man named Smetana. This person was the son of a Catholic church servant, who was of course a devout Catholic. He had the feeling that one has to believe what the church prescribes; one knows from the spiritual world what the church prescribes. Now he had a son. The people at that time were somewhat ambitious and sent their children to grammar school. But in the grammar schools that were in Prague in the last century, you didn't actually learn very much. Basically, you learned very little. So young Smetana was educated at grammar school. And that was just the way it was: the one who was supposed to learn anything at all then became a priest. So young Smetana also became a priest. In those days in Prague, and also in the rest of Austria, priests were employed as teachers in the higher schools as well. And so it happened that when he himself had to teach, he read somewhat different books than those prescribed for him by the church as a priest. Yes, through this he gradually came to doubt, namely about a dogma. He said to himself: What is it actually so terrible that a person should be born, spend his life on earth, then go through death and now, if he was a bad guy, should only look at it forever - the church even painted that with the necessary pictures - what he did as a bad guy on earth and should never have the opportunity to improve!

Now, you see, this man, Smetana, lived in a religious house. But when he became a teacher, it became a little too cramped for him in the religious house; so he moved into a secular apartment and read more and more – there were no anthroposophical books available at the time – the books of Hegel, Schelling and so on, which at least gave something, a beginning of something reasonable. In this way he became more and more doubtful about the so-called eternity of punishment in hell, because according to Aristotle, a bad person goes through death and must live eternally in his wickedness. But the doctrine of the eternity of the punishment of hell arose from this, and was then established by the church in the form of a council. This doctrine is, of course, not a Christian one, but is that of Aristotle. It is not true at all that the doctrine of the punishment of hell is a Christian doctrine; it is from Aristotle. But that was not clear to people.

But this Smetana realized it. So he started teaching something that was not quite in line with the teachings of the Church. It was in 1848 that he taught something that was not quite right. At first he received a terrible warning, a huge letter written in Latin, in which he was told that he should now return repentant to the fold of the church, because he had caused enormous offence to the shepherds by teaching the sheep something that was not prescribed by the shepherds. He replied to this first letter, written in Latin, saying that he thought it hypocritical to say anything other than what one is convinced of. Then a second letter in Latin arrived, which admonished him even more seriously. And when he no longer answered this, because it would have been useless, it was announced one day in all the churches in Prague that a very important celebration was to take place because one of the lost sheep, who had even become a shepherd, had to be excluded from the church.

Among those who had to distribute the notices everywhere that this important celebration was to take place was the church servant, old Smetana, the father. He had remained a devout Catholic. You can now imagine what it means that the whole of Prague has been summoned to condemn Smetana's son, to condemn him to be forever excluded from the church and so on, and that his father had to carry the leaflets himself! Yes, the church was never as full in Prague as it was on that day. All the churches in Prague were full to bursting. And from all the pulpits it was proclaimed that the apostate Smetana was being excommunicated.

The consequence of this was – of course, the germ of consumption lay in the Smetana family – that first the sister died of grief, then the old father died of grief, and after that Smetana himself died of grief, of suffering, after a short time. But that was not the point, was it, but the point was that Smetana no longer proclaimed the story of the eternity of hellish punishment, as he understood it.

This is all connected with the development of the idea of conscience in humanity. For that which man retains of his pre-earthly life lives in him and speaks in him as conscience. And from the standpoint of conscience one can say: Conscience cannot come from the material substance of the earth. For just imagine, let us say, someone has a terrible craving. There have been cases of this. Then it is the substances in his body, the substances of the earth, that push and nudge him to have this craving. Then conscience tells him: But you must fight these cravings. Yes, gentlemen, that would be just as if conscience also came from the body as if someone were to walk backwards and forwards at the same time. It is nonsense to say that conscience comes from the body. Conscience is connected with what we bring down from the spiritual world from our pre-earthly life when we descend to earth. But as I have explained it to you, the awareness that conscience comes from the spiritual world has been lost for earthly people, and for people like Smetana, whom I told you about earlier, it only dawned on him again in the 19th century through this terrible thing of hellfire. Conscience belongs to the person themselves. A person carries their conscience within them. What use would all the conscience in the world be to you if you were to pass through death and then realize for all eternity what a bad fellow you were? You couldn't help yourself. Having a conscience wouldn't mean a thing!

So that one can say: If that is the human being (he is drawn), then conscience lives in the human being. Conscience is that which he has brought with him into earthly life from the spiritual world. Conscience says within him: You should not have done that, and you should not have done that. The earthly person says: I will do that, I desire that. Conscience speaks differently because it comes from the eternal human being. And then, when the human being has discarded the physical body, only then does he realize: You yourself are what has always spoken in your conscience. You just didn't notice that during the time of earthly life. Now you have gone through death. Now you have become your own conscience. Your conscience is now your body. Before, you had no conscience. Now you have your conscience, with which you continue to live after death.

But to the conscience one must also ascribe a will. You see, all the things I have told you have come true. The Greeks had forgotten the pre-earthly life. The church had raised to dogma that one may not believe that there is a pre-earthly life. The conscience has been completely misunderstood. All this had been fulfilled. And now, of course, there have also been great scholars. But these great scholars in the Middle Ages were, of course, under the impression that there can be no such thing as a pre-earthly life. The church forbids believing it.

In this conflict stood, for example, a man like Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 to 1274. As a Catholic priest, he had to comply with what the Catholic Church prescribed. But he was a great thinker. And with regard to what I have told you today, he had to say: When a person dies, he only has the contemplation of his earthly life, always and forever, never otherwise. He contemplates that. So what does Thomas Aquinas do? Thomas Aquinas attributes only reason to man for all eternity, but no will. Man must contemplate this after death, but he can no longer change it. Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest Aristotelians of the Middle Ages precisely because he said: If a person has done something bad on earth, he must look at it forever; if a person has done something good, he looks at the good forever. - So only the knowledge, not the will, was attributed to the soul.

That is not true. It is true that after death you see what you were in terms of good and evil, but that you retain the will, the full strength of your soul, to change that. So, of course, when you look at your life, you see how it was, then you live in the spiritual world and see what should have been different. Then the urge comes by itself to go back down to make the necessary improvements. Of course, mistakes will be made again, but then the following lives will always follow, and the person will achieve the goal of complete human development.

What Thomas Aquinas was still obliged to do in the Middle Ages, to believe only in knowledge and not in the will, still afflicted people in the 19th century as much as it did Smetana. It is to be attributed to this that other people came along in the 19th century who were furious about knowledge. This all originated in the dogma of the punishment of hell; only people did not see through it. Schopenhauer, for example, was filled with rage at the realization and now attributed everything to the will. Yes, but if you now ascribe everything to the will again, then this will is too stupid and foolish. Therefore, Schopenhauer attributed the whole creation of the world and everything to the foolish will. And those people who have thought about it have experienced terrible inner conflicts, just as Smetana experienced in Prague. There have been many such cases; this is just an excellent example of which the difficulties have been written down. There have been many such people.

And so we must be clear about this: Man has his conscience as an inheritance from his pre-earthly life. It is the spirit that speaks in conscience. That which we already were before we were man on earth has entered the flesh and speaks in conscience. And when we have laid aside the body, then the soul will continue to speak in conscience after death, but not unconsciously, but having a will and having to make amends, having to be active.

You see, that is the difference between anthroposophy and everything that is contained in Christian dogmatics today, for example. In Christian dogmatics, this inner power of the human soul, which can create, is not known. Rather, the human being dies and can only look at what he has created in one earthly life, because in that one earthly life the soul is born with the body. So if you want to present it schematically, you have to say: If this is a human being's one life on earth (upper drawing, circle), it also begins with the soul, and when the person now dies – there is birth, there is death – then his soul life expands into all eternity. I don't want to go to the second board with my drawing anymore, because that is too expensive, I would even have to have a third one! Only knowledge, only the intellect, is destined to do nothing but contemplate the evil of earthly life for all eternity, because the intellect is born with the physicality of earthly life. The first materialist was actually the one who established this dogma, was actually Aristotle.

Now, anthroposophy finds that there is not only one earthly life, but also successive earthly lives. A person always has something left over from the previous life, which he does not know exactly, but which is within him: that is conscience. Now he lays down the body, in his conscience he lives on. There (lower drawing, red left) is now basically only conscience until the next birth. Now (middle circle) there is conscience again in the form of a voice that speaks; now (red right) it lives in the outside world, is there again. And the human being is actually the one who always creates his new lives on earth. Of course, this is something that particularly annoys the doctrine that does not want to grant anything to the human being at all, that wants to look at everything as if the human being were a creature. He is not a mere creature, but there are creative powers in him. And that is precisely the difference between anthroposophy and the other views: anthroposophy's research brings out that these creative powers are in man, man is also creative. He is not only created, but he is creative. And one of the most creative things in him is precisely his conscience, because that is what remains for us as a sacred inheritance from our pre-earthly life and what we carry out again when we pass through death.

This is precisely what modern science still has from the Church, and it is precisely on this point that one should really see very clearly. Because the thing went like this: From over there in Rome, only that which was logical on one side and materialistic on the other came. Then the modern peoples adopted that. But in the German language, sometimes a remnant of the old has remained in a completely different way, only you don't recognize it again. That is very strange. In this you can see how man is connected with the great events.

If you look at these countries up in Asia today – Siberia – they are actually areas that are very sparsely populated, but they were once heavily populated. The rivers were much, much mightier then. Siberia is a land that has gradually dried up and risen, and people then moved west, across to Europe. This is due to the elevation of Siberia. And in this way, many ideas that were present in Asia came to Europe by a different route, and these ideas live on in European languages. Therefore, one must say: The further west one goes, the less this notion of conscience is present. But the very word conscience shows that the people who formed the word conscience had a feeling that there is something in man. And what does the word conscience actually mean? We have just said what it means: It is the inheritance from what is pre-earthly life, what remains in humanity. But what does the word conscience mean? When you look at life on earth and say to yourself: the events that will happen in two or three years are uncertain, but that a person has a spirit within them that was there before their earthly existence and that remains after their earthly existence, that is certain. And the word conscience is also connected with certainty, and it is the most certain thing there can be. So that in the word conscience is already indicated that which is eternal in man. It is very significant that conscience contains something different than, for example, 'conscience' or something similar in Western languages. Conscience is that which is 'known together' on earth: con-science – that which is accumulated from earthly knowledge. But that which lives in man as conscience and is designated by the word conscience is the most certain thing there can be, something that is not vague but completely certain. And it is absolutely certain that man on earth not only believes in life after death – an opinion held by Aristotle and the church faithful – but also develops a will to shape it better and better, to shape the earth better and better again and again out of the spirit, that therefore the will also lives after death, as does knowledge. With Thomas Aquinas, only knowledge had life. Now we must realize that the will has life. You see, gentlemen, it is indeed so: one does not need to belittle someone who centuries ago in his time was a great 249

great scholar, such as Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, because he taught in his time what was taught in his time. But it is quite another thing if Thomas Aquinas taught what could only be taught in the 13th century than if, as is currently happening in Paris, a Thomas Society is founded to teach the same teach the same as was taught in those days, just as Leo XIII. commanded for all priests and scholars of the Catholic Church in the 19th century to say only what Thomas Aquinas taught in the 13th century. Today, Thomas would not say that either! And these two things confront each other in the world, something like the Thomas Society in Paris, which wants to lead people back again, and anthroposophy, which teaches the present, that which a present human being is. And above all, when you look at something like conscience, it is important that it leads you to the eternal in man. But the eternal cannot be properly understood if one does not also look at the pre-earthly life, if one only looks at that which actually arose only since the Egyptian period as the post-earthly life, as the so-called immortality.

You see, gentlemen, it was only three or four millennia ago that people began to talk about being immortal, that they do not die with the soul as the body dies. But before that, people said that they were not born as a soul either, as the body is born. They had a word meaning that we would have to call 'unborn' today. That was one side. And immortality is the other side. Not even the languages today have a different word than immortality! The word unbornness must arise again. Then one will say: Conscience is that in man which is not born and does not die. Only then will one be able to truly appreciate conscience. For conscience has meaning for man only when one can truly appreciate it.

Well, then, on Saturday at nine o'clock, gentlemen.

Good morning, gentlemen! Well, have you thought of any more questions? If not, then I would like to bring up something that follows on from the previous point, so that you can see how one can find evidence from all sides, so to speak, that the human physical organism, that is, the human physical body, is permeated by the soul. Today, let us look at the blood circulation in the human body from a certain point of view. As you know, blood flows through the veins of the human body. The blood goes from the lungs, where the blood vessels are and where it absorbs oxygen during breathing, to the heart. From the heart to the rest of the body, it is red the whole time. As it passes through the body, it turns , becomes bluish in color as it passes through the body, then returns to the heart and lungs as blue blood, is turned red again by oxygen, and so the blood circulates, as it were, throughout the body.

Let us assume that the blood flows through the body in a circle. Now let us visualize a very simple circulation of a liquid. Imagine a round tube (see illustration on p. 252). For the sake of clarity, we will put a red liquid into this round tube. Of course, if we have such an external tube, then we need some kind of pump somewhere if we want to set this liquid in motion. So let's imagine that we have some kind of pump here (arrow) that sets the red liquid in motion. If I leave it open at the top, the liquid will naturally squirt out. But I don't want that, so I'll put a tube on top. And now I'm going to set this liquid in motion so that it swirls around continuously. You can imagine that, can't you? — The liquid is driven around. Now imagine: if the liquid here is driven around by a pump, then some of the liquid will rise at this point (above). But when we move it around, it only goes a little way. If I put a lot of force into the pump, the liquid here will go up a little further; if I push gently, it will go up less. So I can measure the pressure in the swirling liquid by this height of the liquid.

You see, I can do something similar with human blood. If I insert a tube like this into a vein somewhere, the blood will rise a little way up it. So I can insert a tube into any vein – not into all of them. Imagine that I have some artery, for example in my arm, into which I insert a small ampoule-like tube. The blood flows from the artery a little way into the tube, passes through it and flows in it. This tube is now also such that, depending on the person, it has either a higher or lower blood level. There are people in whom the blood rises very high in the tube, and in others it rises less. It follows, therefore, that people have different blood pressures, because that is the pressure that is exerted and that is shown in the tube. So it is not true that if the blood presses a little harder on the veins, the blood rises higher in the tube, but if it presses less hard, it rises less high.

The materialists now imagine that man also needs such a pump to keep the blood circulating. But what I have drawn for you is only an external instrument. In fact, man has no such pump anywhere in his body, and the heart is not a pump either. Man has no pump, but the blood moves through something quite different. That is what we want to realize today. But first, let us realize that this column of blood, through which we measure blood pressure, is of varying height. In a healthy person, it always has a certain height. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that in a healthy person between the ages of thirty and fifty, this liquid is about 120 to 140 mm high. If this column of liquid is only 110 mm high in an instrument set up like this – you could call it a manometer – then the person is sick. If it were 160 mm, then the person would also be sick. If it is 160 mm, the blood pressure is too high; then the blood in the body presses too strongly. If it is only 110 mm, then his blood pressure is too weak, and the blood pressure is too weak. So you can see that we always need a certain blood pressure in our body. The blood must push with a certain strength. So we are completely filled with our blood pressure. If we climb a very high mountain, the air outside becomes thinner, and because the outer air becomes thinner, the pressure from within becomes very strong. Then the blood squirts out through the pores. That is mountain sickness. So you see, we have to go around in the world with a very specific blood pressure.

Let us first look at people who have low blood pressure. People who have low blood pressure become extremely weak, tired, pale, and their digestion suffers greatly. Such people become inwardly weak and cannot properly perform physical functions, and as a result they gradually decline. So low blood pressure makes people tired and weak and sick.

Now let us look at people who have high blood pressure. Sometimes very peculiar symptoms occur. You see, if you put something like this, which you insert into the skin – it has to be pointed at the front – if you insert it and you have high blood pressure, then you can be sure that, little by little, the kidneys of a person with high blood pressure will become unsuitable. The kidneys begin to form their vessels, that is, their veins, everything that is in the kidneys, in a way that is not supposed to be. They calcify, become swollen, and degenerate, as they say. They no longer have the form they should actually have. So that if you cut out the kidneys of people who had high blood pressure after they die, the kidney looks like a completely degenerate kidney.

Now the question is: where does all this come from? - Precisely this connection between blood pressure and kidney disease is completely unclear to the materialistically thinking person. You have to be clear about this: our astral body, of which I have told you as the supersensible body of man, lives in the pressure that we have within us, in this blood pressure. It is not true at all that the astral body lives in some kind of substance, in some kind of material, but it lives in a force, in the blood pressure, and the astral body is healthy when we have the right blood pressure, which in middle age is 120 to 140 mm. When we have the right blood pressure, then when we wake up our astral body enters our physical body and feels well. It can expand in all directions. So if the blood pressure is correct, about 120 mm, then the astral body expands in the blood pressure correctly, and when we wake up, the astral body can enter all parts of the physical body. And while we are awake, with this so-called normal blood pressure, the whole astral body is expanded everywhere.

You see, the astral body is what makes our organs always have the right shape and form. Gentlemen, if we were always asleep, that is, if the astral body were always outside, as it is in sleep, then our organs would very soon become fatty. We would not have proper organs. We need the astral body to stimulate the etheric body so that we always have healthy organs in the right shape. So the astral body must always find the right blood pressure so that it can spread.

Let us assume that when a person enters a room, it is not filled with air but with carbon dioxide. When a person enters such a room, they would fall over; they would not be able to breathe. In a body like that, where there is no proper blood pressure, the astral body and the ego cannot live. They have to keep coming out when you fall asleep. Let us assume that there is insufficient blood pressure. If there is insufficient blood pressure, the astral body does not properly enter the physical body when waking up. Then there is little astral activity in it; then the person feels something like a continuous fainting spell in their body. So if the blood pressure is too low, the person always feels something like a slight fainting spell, and as a result he becomes weak and his organs cannot be formed in the right way, because they always have to be newly formed. I have told you: every seven years the organs have to be newly formed. - Then the astral body must always be able to be active.

Let us assume that the blood pressure is too high. Yes, if the blood pressure is too high, what happens then? You see, I once told you that if the air had a different mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, our lives would be in trouble. There is 79 percent nitrogen in the air, and the rest is essentially oxygen. So there is little oxygen in the air. If there were more oxygen in the air, we would be old people by the age of twenty. We would age quickly. It also depends on the astral body whether the physical body ages early or late. If the blood pressure is too high, the astral body likes it inside the physical body. That is precisely its element, the blood pressure. It sits very deeply inside. And what is the result? The result is that at the age of thirty we already have kidneys that we should only have at the age of seventy. We then live too fast due to the high blood pressure. Because the kidneys are such sensitive organs, we develop degenerative kidneys early on. The thing about aging is that the organs become calcified more and more. Now, if the blood pressure is too high, then the sensitive organs calcify too early, and a kidney disease like the one that occurs with high blood pressure is actually a sign that the person has grown old too soon, that he has already made these sensitive kidneys in his youth as they should actually be in old age.

Now, you see, gentlemen, this whole explanation that I have given you shows you that in his physical body, man has something like a soul, which I call the astral body, that goes out at night. And so you can also say: Man lives in the forces that develop in his body. He lives in the forces, not in the substance, not in the material.

Therefore, we can see everywhere how materialistic science is quite powerless when faced with such an occurrence as I have just explained to you. It does not get to the bottom of what is going on. You will find it everywhere in the books: if someone has high blood pressure, there is always a risk that the person has kidney disease. But how it is actually connected – that's what it says in the books – we cannot explain. In reality, however, it means nothing other than: we do not want there to be something supernatural, something spiritual, something of the soul in man. We do not want that.

But without that, you just can't explain things. And that is what actually makes people today basically stand before the whole world not knowing what to do or how to react. Because actually, gentlemen, the external things that occur today, the increasing misery in the world, which will become much, much stronger in the near future because people absolutely do not want to take in anything spiritual with their thoughts - because first you have to know the matter - this misery comes from the fact that people simply do not want to engage in knowing anything about reality. And one cannot know about reality if one does not respond to the spiritual. In the course of the nineteenth century, it has come about that people have actually only been taught about external things. That they would have grasped something of the soul, of the spiritual, was no longer considered at all. And so people today go around and actually have no idea how the spiritual and soul actually exist in the world.

You see, gentlemen, something very important has happened as a result. When a lot of time has passed and people have then struggled through the force of circumstances to look at things spiritually again, then these people in the future will say: Yes, at the beginning of the 20th century something tremendously important in human history took place. Everything that can be told today about old wars is nothing compared to what actually took place among us. It is sometimes quite incredible how people do not even realize that all the wars mentioned in history books are actually trivial compared to what has happened from 1914 to the present day. What has happened in history is nothing compared to what has happened among people during the time in which we live. And you see, in order to understand what is at issue here, you have to look deeply into what really is. But people today do not do that.

For example, I have drawn your attention to the fact that the potato only came to Europe at a certain time. Yes, if you ask today what people eat most, they will say potatoes! And if you see hunger starting somewhere, the first thing you do is think about how to get potatoes. Today, people actually accept potatoes as if they had always been there. Yes, gentlemen, if you had lived five centuries ago, you would not have eaten potatoes at all in Europe, because they did not yet exist! You would have eaten something completely different. But if you know that everything depends on the spiritual, then you also know that eating potatoes or not eating potatoes depends on the spiritual. And as it is with the potato, it is with many other things. So terribly much has changed in the last few centuries of human history, and all the beating about the bush in theories, that is all of no value. Because one can still put up such beautiful theories: Rousseauist theories, Marxist theories, Leninist theories, whatever you want, they are all thoughts thought up, with which one can do nothing when one knows nothing. Thoughts only have value when you know how to use these thoughts. All these gentlemen who have put forward these beautiful thoughts were in reality ignorant through and through. And that is the characteristic of the present time, that people are actually ignorant through and through. They want to present theories to people about how to make the world a paradise, and they don't even know how the human body is affected when a person eats potatoes. That is what is so terribly important to people today, that people have no desire to know anything. Of course, the masses can't do it because the masses are persuaded that What the gentlemen at the universities know is already the right thing. And so they then found adult education centers and now they also want to know what the others know. But it is precisely those who should know something, who devote themselves to knowledge by profession, who in reality know nothing at all. And that is why people talk about all sorts of things today, but basically don't know anything.

Now, of course, it is not just the potato, there are many other factors, but I only mention the potato because it is a very stark example. A tremendous amount has happened in the last few centuries, which, I would say, has now come to a kind of discharge at the beginning of the 20th century, so that an enormous amount has happened. And today we want to point out something that has happened and that is extremely significant.

You can say: When the lungs are inside the human being (see drawing), between the lungs is the heart, then in these ancient times the knowledge of the lungs went up into the head. That is the secret of knowledge, that the human head cannot actually do anything. The head does not really know much about the world, it only knows the inner being. Gentlemen, if we only had a head and not eyes and not ears, but only a head closed on all sides, then we would know a great deal about ourselves, but nothing about the outside world. And the most important thing that comes into us from the outside world is air. Air now also stimulates the head, already through our nose, but it also enters very thinly through our eyes, through our ears, everywhere. It is the air that sets the head in motion. So that one can say: If you go back very, very far in these millennia, of which I told you last time, six to eight thousand years, then people practiced breathing a great deal in order to gain knowledge. They knew that they had to force the air into their heads in a different way, and then they would gain knowledge.

Today, people only know that if they gasp for air, it invigorates them. But these ancient people knew that if they sucked in the air in a special way, if they looked at the tip of their nose, then the nasal muscles were compressed, the air was sucked in in a very special way, and then knowledge arose in the head.

But you see, it remained that way until the Middle Ages, indeed until very recent times. Then, four hundred years after the birth of Christ, people stopped knowing anything. Knowledge disappeared. But they still had memories in the books. That is precisely the difference between ancient times and the times that begin around the 8th or 9th century BC: In ancient times, people had heads for knowledge, and in later times they had books for knowledge. That is the difference. You know, the old educational institutions, which were called mysteries, did not care about writing down all knowledge, but trained people so that they could read in their heads. Whatever was out there in the wide expanse of the universe, a true scholar could read in his head. You could say that his head was a real book, but not in the same sense as we say it today about a bluestocking. Rather, his head had become, through breathing, a vessel from which wisdom could be drawn.

Then came the times when people's heads were no longer of any value. People still wore them, but they were empty, and everything was written down. There were still very, very many written records of the old wisdom several centuries before and at the time of the birth of Christ. These things were burned by the church, because they did not want this old wisdom, which people had drawn from their heads, to somehow reach their descendants. You see, this old wisdom was actually terribly hated by the church, it was eradicated. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, wants to give the human being a head so that he is not just an empty vessel. But that is something that the church actually hates terribly. Well, you can see that it doesn't like it very much! Gentlemen, it should again be possible for people to know something that you cannot find in books at all today, because the old knowledge has disappeared and been burned, and the new knowledge that people have written in books is only about external things.

Now, everything that people thought up until the 19th century is actually only the inheritance of ancient times. It is, if I may express it this way, inspired by the lungs. Lung knowledge, you could say. The head is inspired by the lungs, by breathing: lung knowledge.

You see, in the 19th century great scientific discoveries were made, but no thoughts were found. All the thoughts were taken from ancient times. In fact, thoughts have only existed in ancient times of mankind. The 19th century made great external discoveries, but it only thought with the old thoughts. So that was still the old lung knowledge. And it is very amusing that one could say: Yes, you modern scholar, you look down on the old Indian who sits down, crosses his legs and looks at the tip of his nose to get thoughts about the inside. You no longer do that, but you use his thoughts, which have been written down, to find the X-rays and so on! — It is also true that all this was discovered with the help of ancient thoughts.

Over the course of the 19th century, however, the lungs have become completely incapable of providing anything to the brain. The lungs of the human being underwent a major transformation in the 19th century, and what has become much more important than the lungs in the course of the 19th century is really what we call the kidneys, those organs that are closely related to the activity of the heart. The impulse has passed from the lungs to the organs that lie more towards the bottom in the human being, and as a result, humanity has come into such a huge confusion.

You see, the spiritual world still pays attention to the lungs, so to speak. When people had lung knowledge, they breathed in the air and through breathing in air they received inspiration for knowledge. Today people depend on getting their knowledge through the inspiration of the kidneys. But the kidneys do not give anything to the head independently. You have to make an effort, as I described to you in 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. There you must first say: Yes, when people still had the stimulation from the lungs for their head, they could attain knowledge because spiritual still flowed into the lungs. Spiritual flows into the kidneys only unconsciously, so that people cannot know anything about it unless they go through such spiritual things with full consciousness, as I have described in “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?”

What happens if people do not want to go through such things? Yes, gentlemen, then the lungs remain in such a state that they give no stimulus, and people are completely dependent for what they can know only on their belly, on their kidneys. And so, in the course of the 20th century, in the time in which we live, the transition from lung knowledge to kidney knowledge has occurred. Lung knowledge still had a spirituality. Kidneypowered knowledge has no spirituality for people unless spirituality is added.

So there has been a huge change in human beings. This change has taken place in the two decades that we have lived through. Nothing so important has ever happened in human nature that the whole apparatus of knowledge has slipped down from the lungs into the kidneys. And because the astral body found nothing in the kidneys, today there is confusion, a materialistic confusion in everyone's mind.

What would you say if you really wanted to describe the reality of why there were so many people in the 20th century who didn't know their way around the world, who didn't even know what to do, so that in the end, when people admitted it, they ended up sliding into this huge war? What actually happened there? The one who wants to find out what happened there has to describe the time before a little. You see, gentlemen, in the Middle Ages and later, an awful lot of people went to a certain place of pilgrimage, to Lourdes, or to places of pilgrimage that were modeled after it, because the clergy had persuaded them that they would get well if they went there, if they had the water of Lourdes. Well, only the name has changed; in the 19th century, the clergy persuaded people that they had to go to Lourdes to get well; in more recent times, doctors have persuaded people that they have to go to Karlsbad or Marienbad or Wiesbaden or some other place. What has all this actually amounted to? It has actually all amounted to the doctors telling people: Yes, my dear patients, your renal system is not in order; you have to drink as much Wiesbaden or Karlovy Vary or Marienbad water as possible – after all, it all goes through the kidneys! – you have to push through that. So that actually the state of health of many people consisted in their abandoning their kidney function in the winter, and the kidney function actually did the thinking for them; in the summer, on the other hand, they needed to go to Karlovy Vary or Marienbad or Wiesbaden because they couldn't actually do without mental stimulation – but they didn't want it – and that's where they improved their kidney system again. Little by little, this story, where only the abdomen was actually ever cured, has become a superstition. Isn't it true that what it should have been about was taking an interest in spiritual activity and spiritual stimulation. That is what one should have sought, because with no spiritual stimulus at all, the things that are out of order in the kidney area cannot be put right. And the situation in the 20th century was such that all the people who should really have thought through the soul, only thought through the kidney.

You see, what is important is to really find out how things are connected in reality. Then we will know how to educate young people, then we will know that it is quite impossible to teach young people only what we teach them today. Then we will know that we must use the beautiful years of youth, of childhood, to teach young people something quite different. But the 19th century became proud of the fact that it knew nothing of soul and spirit, and the consequence of this was that this giant kidney disease, which still lurks in the world today, emerged. So the future will one day say: What made humanity so befuddled at the beginning of the 20th century? An unnoticed kidney disease! — That is what strikes the heart today. And two things can be done: we can let things continue as they are, and then the doctors will indeed have a lot to do. People will become increasingly incapable of thinking rationally. They will become increasingly tired. They will think less and less about making progress through solid, sensible organization. What has actually flourished to a very great height today, this whole nonsensical activity, will reach the highest point. People will become weak, and doctors will examine the urine; they will find all kinds of wonderful things in it, won't they: protein, sugar and so on. They will only find that the kidney activity is out of order. Because if you find all these beautiful things in the urine, the kidney activity is out of order. And they will find: Yes, it is strange, the world has never produced as much sugar and as much protein as it does now! But no one will know what the connection is. At most, it will occur to some clever industrialist to use some of the sugar that is being produced in the industrialist's factory. That is the one way.

The other way is this: We must stop talking about all these external arrangements for the time being and reform the spiritual life of humanity, reform above all the school life, the spiritual life of humanity, and instill proper spiritual thoughts into people. Then people will find out how to live properly in the external world. For only when people have proper thoughts can we hope that they will be able to live in the right way in the external world.

But, gentlemen, this cannot be achieved by simply continuing the activities that have been pursued up to now. The issue here is to radically rethink. And the world will not become better through any external means, but only by beginning to know something. You see, the materialists imagine that they know so much about matter. But they know nothing about matter. That is precisely the strange thing, that the materialists know nothing about matter. The materialists say: Where did misery come from? Yes, misery, that has come from economic conditions, for example.

Yes, you see, that is just the same as when someone says: Where does poverty come from? Poverty comes from the poverty! - Not a different word. Economic misery is just another word for what we have. It is just beating about the bush, because of course people have created economic misery, and people experience economic misery because of what they are. Today, an enormous number of people simply have the urge to become, let us say, profiteers. But all this arises from the fact that the subordinate human organism, which is becoming decisive today, needs spiritual stimulation. The materialist merely tells people: Yes, this subordinate organism is important! But it is only by getting to know it in the spiritual that one can understand why it is important. And so materialism can measure blood pressure quite well, but it does not know what too low or too high blood pressure means, that too low blood pressure means: the astral body and the ego go too little into the physical body, and too high blood pressure: the astral body and the ego go too deeply into the physical body.

And indeed, it is the case today that blood pressure has slowly but surely become too high throughout the history of mankind, and people today suffer from high blood pressure. It is true: when a person wakes up today, he lives under too much blood pressure; then, so to speak, this too much blood pressure snaps at the astral body and the ego. The consequence of this is that the astral body and the ego enter completely into the physical body. This must be made good again by the human being receiving spiritual stimuli, by him really devoting himself to the spiritual with some interest.

This is not done by learning anthroposophical theories. If one merely learns anthroposophical theories, then that is just the way one learned to read in the 19th century, the way to memorize thoughts in an external way. That is not enough. What a person takes in must become such that it permeates him inwardly.

You see, gentlemen, when you go out into the fresh air from a stale atmosphere, you feel an inner joy. So you should have an inner joy, an inner interest, when you come out of all the stuff that is called knowledge today and into the fresh air of the soul, which in turn tells you about the spiritual. This inner joy, this deep interest, is what is needed for the spiritual life. And by permeating himself with interest, the blood that has become too heavy - after all, the blood has become too heavy in all people today - is lightened again. The kidneys become spiritualized, and the result of this will be that it will become better in the world when people again want to know something of that which has been taken from them for centuries. That is what must always be repeated, what I must say to you in all forms, because it is essential that we face the truth and not be blinded by what is pseudoscience. Therefore, I wanted to add a few things today to what I have told you in the previous lectures. There is still much to be said about these matters, but they will become clearer and clearer.

Now we have to take a short break in the series of lectures. I have to make a trip to England and will let you know when we can continue.

But that is what I wanted to make clear to you today, how the great events in human history are actually connected with what man is inwardly, and that one must start there, that therefore humanity must first be enlightened, but enlightened about realities, not about empty phrases. That is it.

The origin and significance of cults, nutrition issues.

Gentlemen, have you perhaps, during the long period in which we have not been able to give lectures, been able to come up with any particular questions that you would like to discuss?

Questioner: I would like to ask whether today's cult, with its actions, still has a relationship to the spiritual world and how the various cults of different peoples relate to each other.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, gentlemen. It is interesting to consider how a cult comes into being and what it seeks.

Perhaps I might take this opportunity to tell you something that is currently of interest to us, in that it ties in with my last trip to England. The course in Penmaenmawr was held near an ancient place of worship, on the west coast of England in Wales, where there is an island off the coast called Anglesey, and there are still ancient places of worship on the surrounding mountains. They are in ruins and can only be seen, I would say, in ruins today, but from which, if you know anthroposophy, you can clearly see what they actually meant to be there.

You see, it would be just as if one were to go out here to these mountains and find such places of worship up there. There you find them, so to speak, everywhere on the mountains, and mainly where the mountain has such a flat area at the top, where there is a hollow, a plain at the top of the mountain that is slightly deeper. These old places of worship were then located there. Today they are piles of rubble, but you can still clearly see what they looked like. The smaller ones consist of stones that were probably once carried by the ice to the place in question, but were also dragged to the place where they were needed. These stones were placed in such a way that they form a kind of rectangle, next to each other (see following drawing). When I look at it from the side, it looks like this: there is a capstone that covers the whole thing up there. These are the small ones. The large places of worship consist of stones of a similar kind (see drawing below), which are placed in a circle, exactly twelve of them. This is a cult that was probably practiced in its heyday three to four millennia after our time there, at a time when the population was not very dense, a very sparse population, and at a time when there was hardly anything other than some agriculture and livestock farming. In this population, writing and reading were completely unknown in the heyday when this cult was practiced. So writing and reading were not even considered possible!

Now one can ask what this cult actually meant. I say to you explicitly: reading and writing did not exist in those days. Now you know that if you want to make crops flourish in the most favorable way possible, you have to sow them at different times and do one thing or another with them at different times. And with the cattle, one must also take into account the different times for mating and so on. This depends on the connection of the earth with the whole environment of the world, of which I have often told you. Now, today we have our farmer's almanac, we look it up, we know what day of the year it is, and people then forget that it does not depend on human will. You can't set the days as you please, but you have to set the days as they follow from the stars, as they follow from the position of the moon, and so on. Now, today the calendar maker proceeds in such a way that he calculates it according to the old traditions. You have calculations that you can use to calculate when this or that day is. This is calculated because people once determined it according to the position of the sun. Today, you can also determine it according to the position of the sun, but the people who generally follow such things do not follow the position of the sun or stars, but simply what is calculated, according to the calendar. Now, that was unthinkable in those days because reading and writing did not exist at all. Such things only came later. So that takes us back, as I said, three to four thousand years before the present time. And reading and writing in these areas hardly takes us back more than two to three thousand years. These are very old conditions, and the reading and writing that existed back then was, of course, not at all comparable to what we have today. In any case, the majority of the population did not know it.

If you look at such a circle up on the mountain, you can imagine: the sun seems to go around – we know that it is stationary, but that is not true, you can say that because that is how things are – so the sun goes around in a circle in space. As a result, it casts a different shadow from each of these stones, and you can follow that shadow throughout the day. You can say: When the sun rises in the morning, there is the shadow, now it goes a little further, there is the shadow, and so on. But the shadow also changes over the course of a year because the sun rises at a different point each time. This changes the shadow. It became like this in March, a little later like this. And the wisdom of the scholar or priest, as you will, of the Druid priest, who was appointed to observe these things, consisted in his being able to judge this shadow, so that he could know: when the shadow, let us say, falls on this point, then this or that must be done in the spring in the fields. He could tell people that. He could see that from the position of the sun. Or if the shadow fell on this point, then the bull had to be led around, the animals had to be mated, because that had to be on a certain day of the year. So the priest could tell from these things what had to happen throughout the year.

But in fact the whole of life was actually determined by the course of the sun. Today, as I said, people do not think that they themselves do this because they find it in the calendar. But in those days one had to go to the sources oneself, had to read the matter from the universe, so to speak.

At a very specific time, let's say in the fall, for example, it was determined exactly what had to be done with the fields; the so-called bull festival was also set at a certain time of the year based on the information provided by these people. Then the bull was led around; otherwise it was kept away from the cattle and so on. The old festivals were also set up according to these things, but they are definitely related to such things. An order like this is called a Druidic circle today. This dahier (reference is made to the drawing) is a dolmen or table 23 Kromlech. The strange thing is that the stones are standing like that and are covered on top, so that there is shade inside.

Well, you see, gentlemen, people know that sunlight is sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker, because they feel it in the way they sweat or freeze. But what people do not know is that the shadow is just as different as the light. Depending on the light, the shadow is different. But today people have given up the habit of determining the difference of the shadow. The old people have first of all acquired the ability to determine the differences of the shadow. But in the shadow one sees the spiritual. The rays of the sun do not only have a physical, but they also have a spiritual. And in there the Druid priest observed the spirituality of the sun's rays, on which it depended whether one should cultivate this or that plant better in a certain country, because that depends on the spirituality that is carried down from the sun to the earth. And in addition, the effects of the moon were extremely well observed in this shadow. The effects of the moon, for example, have a great influence on the mating of cattle, and this was used to determine the time of mating. So that actually the whole year has been divided according to these solar observations.

If you were to dig under one of these cromlechs, you would also find that it was also a burial place. These things were set up in particular where people were buried at the same time. This again has the significance that, in fact, when man has left his body, this body has a different composition than anything else. The soul, the spirit, has lived in the body throughout the lifetime. When the body disintegrates, it has different properties from those found in the rest of the mountainous area. And these forces, when they flowed up there, made it possible to see properly in the shade. These people were familiar with completely different natural forces than those known later.

And when you see at some mountain site - which, by the way, is more pronounced across the country, I saw this in Ilkley, where the first course took place during the English trip - individual stones high up, but in such a way that the place was well chosen – from such a high vantage point one could see the whole country from afar – then one finds such signs, swastikas, with which so much mischief is being made in Germany today. This swastika is worn by people who no longer have any idea that this was once a sign that was supposed to indicate to those who came from afar: There are people who understand these things, who see not only with their physical eyes, but also with their spiritual eyes – I have described these spiritual eyes as lotus flowers in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – and they wanted to draw attention to this: we can see with these lotus flowers.

So here you see a cult that essentially consisted of people wanting to get the spiritual from the world around them for their social circumstances, for their living conditions on earth. This can still be seen in the objects today, and that is why this area is extremely interesting. These were the last of such places of worship, because after that people moved back to the west coast, because then those people came from the east who had spread writing in ancient times. This first writing is called runes. The letters were formed by putting sticks together, so quite differently than in modern times. And that is when the subject of what is now described as Norse mythology first arose: Wotan, Thor and so on. That came later, and it came because the writing was transplanted there.

When I speak of the shadow, there is no need to be terribly surprised, because an animal can see something in the shadow. You just have to pay attention to how a horse behaves strangely when it is standing somewhere on a street in the evening where there is lighting, and it looks at its shadow on a wall. You just have to know that the animal, the horse, does not see its shadow the way we see it. We have eyes that look straight ahead, a horse has eyes that look sideways. This means that it does not see the shadow as such at all, but it perceives the spiritual essence in the shadow. Of course people say: the horse is afraid of its shadow. But it is really the case that it does not see the shadow at all, but it perceives the spiritual essence in the shadow. And so these primitive people also perceived differences in the shadows throughout the year, just as one perceives differences in the heat of the sun and in the cold. This is a cult that was practised there. And you can see from what I have described that such cults, which originated in ancient times, were necessary. They were there because they were needed. They replaced everything that could be read later, because at the same time it was the way people interacted with the gods. People prayed less, but they communicated what flowed into life, what had a relationship to life, a meaning.

Now another cult, which you can still find in many places, especially in Central Europe. There you find such cult sites, there you find certain images. These images show a bull, and on top of the bull sits a kind of rider with a so-called Phrygian cap, with a kind of revolutionary cap. This was adopted from there later. And then you see on the same image below a kind of scorpion, which is biting into the genitalia of the bull. Then you also see how the one who is sitting at the top plunges a sword into the front of the bull's body. And when it is like this, with the bull (it is drawn), the rider at the top, the scorpion here, the sword that plunges, then you see how the starry sky is formed above it. Above, the starry sky spreads out. These are again the so-called Mithras cults. The first are the Druid cults; and what I am now describing are the Mithras cults. While the Druid cults are in the west on the coasts – we also find them in other areas, but I just told you about the area where I was able to examine them myself – these cults are found from Asia across the whole of the Danube, that is, through present-day southern Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Bavaria, the areas of the Odenwald, the Black Forest and so on. Once these cults, these Mithras cults, had spread. And they meant something very specific. Because, you see, why did people put a bull there in the first place? That's the first question we have to ask.

I told you: in spring, the sun rises in a certain constellation, today actually in the constellation of Pisces. – Astronomers still show the constellation of Aries. But that is wrong, in reality it is the constellation of Pisces. For a long time, for two thousand years, the sun rose in the constellation of Aries, even earlier in the constellation of Taurus. And so people said: The sun always rises in the constellation of Taurus in spring, when growth begins. And they associated what lives in the human body, not in the head, but in the rest of the human body, namely what is associated with growth, with the fact that the sun's rays are changed, that the constellation of Taurus is behind them. And that is why they said: If we want to describe the animal-like person, we have to draw the bull, and the actual person, who is ruled by his head, only sits on it. - So that the bull represents the lower animal-like person, and the one who sits up there with the Phrygian cap represents the higher person. But the whole is actually only one person, lower person and higher person.

And now people said to themselves: Oh, it is bad when the lower man is in control, when man gives himself entirely to his animal instincts, when man only follows his passions that come from the belly, from sexuality and so on! The higher man must rule over the lower man. That is why they expressed it this way: This one, who rides, has the sword and thrusts it into the loins of the lower man. That is to say, the lower man must be made small in the face of the higher man. Furthermore, the scorpion is there, biting into the genitals, to show: if the lower man is not made small by the higher man, is not controlled, then the lower man also harms himself, because the forces of nature come over him and destroy him. So this whole human destiny between the lower and higher man was expressed in this image.

Above it was the starry sky. It is very significant that the starry sky was spread out. The sun rises in spring at a certain point, so it rose at that time in the constellation of Taurus. But it advances a little bit every day. This advance is twofold. First, the vernal point advances. The sun rises a little further away from the point where it rose the previous year, so that three thousand years ago the sun rose in Aries, even earlier in Taurus. Today it rises in Pisces in spring. This way it gradually comes all the way around. Over the course of 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around. But it also goes around every year, so that the sun does not rise in the vernal point on the following day – it only rises on March 21 – and on the following day it rises a little further away from this point, and so on. Throughout the year, it also goes around all the signs of the zodiac in the zodiac.

Now those who had to serve the cult of Mithras had to observe when the lower man, the animal man, was more difficult to control: when the sun was in the constellation of Taurus, when it particularly drives towards the forces of growth. When the sun rises in the constellation of Virgo, say in October, more towards December at that time, the lower human being was not so strong, the rule did not need to be so strongly developed. The population had no feeling for these things, but those who observed the Mithras cult had to know this. And so those who practiced this Mithras cult could say: Now it is difficult to rule the lower man, now it is spring; now it is easier, now it is a certain time in winter. And so in the cult of Mithras, man himself was used to get to know the seasons again, as well as the whole course of the sun and moon through the constellations. The Druids used more the external signs, the shadows; here in the service of Mithras, more the effect on man was used. And so this cult of Mithras was also completely connected with life.

So there were the most diverse cults. Of course, one must be clear about it: if one wants to observe such things as were observed with the Druids, one needs very specific areas of the earth. — One can still see that today. If one lives there in Wales — the course there lasted a fortnight — then one has a constant rapid change between, I would say, small cloudbursts and sunshine. It changes by the hour, so that you have a completely different air than here; it is always more filled with water. When you have such air, as it is where the Druids were, then you can make such observations. In the areas where the Mithraic cult spread, one could not have made such observations because the climate was different. There one had to take the observations more from the inner life of man. He was more sensitive to such things. And so the cults were different depending on the region. This Mithraism was widespread in the Danube regions, in Bavaria, as far as here in Switzerland, probably less here, but probably also in older times. Now, this Mithraism was still widespread long after Christianity emerged in these regions. The last remnants were still found in the times when Christianity was spreading, especially in the Danube regions, for example. There you can still find these images today in caves, in rock caves. Because these observations and cults were practiced in rock caves. There was no need for the external sunlight, but rather the peace and quiet inside the rock cave. The spiritual effects of the sun and the stars also go into this.

Once I have explained these two cults to you, you can see the meaning of cults in general. There were the most diverse cults. The Negroes still have their cults today, which are simpler, more primitive, but which also show in a simple way how one wants to get to know the spiritual environment of the universe. Then, at a certain time — this time lies again about one and a half to two millennia back — something emerged from the most diverse cults, which were particularly in Asia and Africa, from all these cults, so to speak, where they had merged. A piece was taken from this cult, another piece was taken from that cult, and from the melting together of the most diverse cults, especially the Egyptian and Persian cults, the cult arose that you know today as the Catholic cult. It was melted together from all of this. You can see how it was melted together when you look at the altar, for example. You need not go very far, you will still see today that the altar is something like a gravestone. Even if there is no corpse under it, it is still similar in shape to a gravestone. Just as people in ancient times knew that forces emanate from the corpse, so it was retained in this form.

You will find in Catholic churches the strange fact that the relationship to the sun and the moon is indicated. You will know from Catholic churches what is placed on the altar on particularly festive occasions (drawing $. 282): the monstrance, the so-called Santissimum. Yes, gentlemen, that is nothing more than a sun, and in the center of the sun is the host, conceived as the sun, and here below is the moon, a sign that this cult comes from a time when people wanted to directly observe the sun and the moon as I have shown you for the Druid cult. Only people have forgotten this. When writing and its associated practices spread, they no longer looked at the great outdoors. They looked at a book – and after all, the Gospel is also just a book – and they looked at the sun and moon signs that are in the Holy of Holies, in the monstrance on the altar.

And so, through all the details of Catholic worship, one can see how it leads back to the ancient cults, which still had their connection to the great universe. Of course, this has been completely forgotten. It was the case that in the first three or four centuries AD, people everywhere still knew a great deal about the actual meaning of the cult, because at that time the present cult was formed and spread more from Rome and was put together from the most diverse individual cults. But here around, for example, and especially in the Danube countries, the cult of Mithras was still known. It was considered to have a connection to the universe. Therefore, in the first centuries, what was left of the old cults was systematically eradicated, and only those cults remained that were no longer considered to be related to the universe. And so, isn't it true, people look at the Catholic cult today and attach great importance to the fact that it is not understood, that they do not see that it was once related to the sun and the moon. Because religion and science were one in ancient times, and art was part of it.

Of course, a time came when people said to themselves: Yes, but what is the point of all this? It's for nothing! You can read about the festivals and the times when this or that should happen in the calendar! — It's for nothing, people said. And then came the cult storming, the iconoclasm, then came Protestantism, the Protestant principle, which started against the cult. One now understands why, on the one hand, all the people once stood up for the cult and later all the people turned against the cult, when one bears this history in mind. At the time when I told you that the Druid cult held sway, yes, gentlemen, the enthusiasm sometimes shown today, let us say, for this or that movement, it is all nothing compared to the great enthusiasm that held sway among the people for their Druid cult in those days! They would all have let themselves be stoned and beheaded for this Druid cult. But why? Because they knew that without knowing exactly what is going on in the universe in an orderly way, one cannot live at all, one cannot celebrate the festival of Taurus at the right time, one cannot sow one's grain, one's rye, at the right time.

Later on, this was just forgotten, and that is why people said: Yes, something must have a purpose in life! – and went against it. That humanity at different times behaves so very differently towards these things can only be understood from the fact that such events have taken place, that the matter has been completely forgotten and that today one can only see in these, as they are called, symbols, what actually happened. Where symbols are, there is only the weakest understanding, because where there are realities, one does not need symbols. When one sets up the altar as with the Druids, in order to really observe the sun, one does not put up a picture of the sun!

Yes, that is what has led, for example, to the fact that certain cults, except for the Catholic cult, have preserved themselves with great rigidity to this day.

You see, this Druid cult was a pure farming and cattle-breeding cult, as it was in its heyday, because life consisted of farming and cattle-breeding. Later, in such areas where farming and cattle-breeding used to be the only ones, where this cult was particularly justified, the one that became more of a craft arose. When the Druid cult flourished, everything was agriculture and cattle breeding, and people covered themselves with animal skins and so on. All the crafts - there were no machines - were of course still the same: what the individual made himself was based on what others made. If he had time, he made what he needed to wear or as an object, for example, he made his knife out of a hard stone that he worked, and so on. The times for agriculture and livestock farming were important; he wanted to find out from his gods when he had to take the necessary measures. But then craftsmanship became more important. Now, you see, gentlemen, the craft, of course, has no greater relationship to the starry sky than agriculture and livestock. But on the other hand, the habits had remained, and so a kind of cult was established for the craft, which was taken from these old cults that had a relationship to the sky. And one of these cults, which has remained the most rigid, is the freemason cult. But it consists of pure symbols. In reality, no one really knows what these symbols refer to. Especially when they began to build man-made structures, they applied what they were accustomed to doing in this cult to the construction of works of art. And in architecture, if you want to be very precise, it actually makes a certain amount of sense. You model the forms of the building on what the stars express and so on, if you really want to build. And so the Masonic cult emerged. But when the Masonic cult emerged, people no longer knew what the individual symbols meant. And so the Masonic cult today consists of nothing but symbols, and people don't even know what the symbols refer to, they talk the most confused stuff about the things. You can say: The more the cults are practiced, the less one understands of the things. — And so the understanding of the cults that are most practiced in the present has actually been lost everywhere.

But surely these ancient people needed a cult for their lives in the outside world. If today we want to have a cult again - and we are indeed working on a renewal of Christianity, in Germany there are already individual churches under the direction of Dr. Rittelmeyer - yes, if we are going to create a cult today, it must again have a somewhat different meaning than the ancient cults. For the old cults were effective, and today we simply know from calculation when a day falls, when March 21 is and so on, from ordinary astronomy. The ancients could not do that. In ancient times they had to point to this shadow, as I have described to you. But today something else is necessary. Today it is necessary that people can come to understand something at all about what exists in the spiritual universe. No astronomy, nothing tells people today about what is going on in the universe!

People fall prey to the greatest fallacies. For example, they point telescopes out into the starry world. Now they point the telescope in a certain direction at a star. Yes, gentlemen, I turn the telescope, the instrument, and in another direction I see another star. And on the other hand, it is calculated that the stars are so far away that this can no longer be seen clearly, but only calculated in terms of light years, according to how fast the beam of light travels. One calculates how far the beam of light travels in one year. That is a distance that is even more difficult to express in figures than when you pay for a midday meal in Germany in German currency. That is difficult enough to express! But to express this, how fast a beam of light moves, what a long way it covers in a year, this number goes into the billions. Therefore, one does not speak of it, but one only says: A star lies so far away that the light would take so and so many light years. Yes, gentlemen, now I point my telescope in that direction, I look into it and see the star. It needs, let's say, 300,000 light years to get here; the light needs that long. But the other star, it may be far back, it may need 600,000 light years. Then I look there, but I don't get the present form of the star at all, but a past one. And when I look there, what I see is not really there now. The star still appears to me, but I only see what it used to be, because the light took 300,000 years to get here. So I see an object that is not really there, that took 300,000 years to become visible there!

So you see, when you look around with the telescope, you don't really see the true shape of the starry sky! That is one thing. The other thing is this: people believe that where they see the stars, there is something. But the truth is that there is nothing there, that where you see stars is where the ether ends! This does not apply to the sun and the moon – to the sun it applies to some extent, to the moon not at all – but it does apply to the stars: there is nothing there! There is a hole in the universe. It is remarkable how anthroposophy and real science almost converge here. When we founded our institutes in Stuttgart, I said: One of our first tasks is to prove that where there is a star, there is absolutely nothing, that nothingness shines. Because there is something all around, you see a kind of light where there is nothing. Well, actually we are rather poor people with our research institutes, and the Americans are rich. Since that time, news has come from America that even with ordinary science it has been discovered that there is actually nothing where there are stars.

So anthroposophy works with the most advanced science. Only through anthroposophy can things be better judged. I am telling you these things because you can see from them that people really know nothing about the universe. They judge everything in the universe wrongly. And where does that come from?

You see, gentlemen, that comes from a very specific cause. Imagine: there is a human head, there is the brain. When a person perceives something external, for example through the eye, he perceives the external, needs the brain to do so, so that he can have the perception. But inside the brain there is a small brain, just back there (see drawing). It is built quite differently from the large brain. This little brain is constructed very strangely. It is as if it is made of leaves when you cut through it. So it sits back there.

This small brain does not perceive anything from the outside. The large brain, which I have colored green in the drawing, is what we need to have external earthly impressions. The small brain does not perceive anything from the outside. But when a person becomes inwardly absorbed, when he proceeds as I have described in my books, then this small brain begins to be particularly active, and one feels inwardly how seemingly this small brain becomes larger and larger, as if it were growing. And so it grows, and you feel as if you were standing under a tree. That is why the Orientals depict Buddha under the bodhi tree. He still knew this cerebellum as an organ of perception. This is being rediscovered today. This little brain begins to be active when you become inwardly absorbed in the human aspect. But then you perceive not the external material, but the spiritual. Then, with the little brain, one begins to perceive the spiritual again, and in the spiritual one begins to perceive laws and so on. Today, these must be brought into a cult. Precisely the innermost part of the human being must be brought into a cult today, because the human being, with his inner being in his little brain, separated from the great brain, has the path, has the organ that leads out into the spiritual world.

Today, we can at best stand at the beginning of how to build a cult from the inner being of man. Then this cult will contain inner truths. Just as one knew through the Druid cult when to crown the bull, to set the bull festival, to lead the bull through the community, so that reproduction is regulated in the right way, so one will know — precisely when one sets up a cult in this way, which now develops the spiritual perception that is maintained by the cerebellum — what one has to do in social human life. Before that, people will only speculate, they will only think up all kinds of things, they will do it as they do in Russia. When it is admitted that one must first know in a spiritual way what has to happen in humanity because it flows from the universe, then one will also have a real social science for the first time, which in turn will be wanted from the environment of the universe.

So you have to learn to think. And as soon as you see something like the destroyed rocks lying around today, so that you can only see from the traces what once was, like on the island of Anglesey or in the other places in the coastal areas there , in Penmaenmawr, where the course was held – yes, when you come across such things, you see: much has been lost in humanity, but it is needed, and today, especially in spiritual terms, new insights are needed. Work must be done with new insights.

That is what I wanted to answer your question. I believe that from this you can understand how a cult was just as necessary as a knife that was needed for survival, and how the uselessness of the cult later led to it being eradicated and then continued without being understood.

I will let you know next week when I can have the next lesson – I have to go back to Stuttgart these days, but I will be back in the next few days.

Good morning, gentlemen! Since our last meeting have you thought of any question you would like to ask me?

(A question was asked as to the effects of absinthe, also a question as to the difference between bees and wasps.)

Dr. Steiner:

In asking his question the gentleman in the audience, as an expert bee-master, draws attention to the differences between the life of the bees and that of the wasps. There is much that is similar here, and I have recently described the life of the wasps to you. The life of the bees much resembles it, but, on the other hand, in the bee-hive there is a very special and remarkable life. How can we account for this?

You see, this cannot be fully explained without the faculty of spiritual perception. That the life of the hive is extraordinarily wisely organised no one who has ever observed it can deny. Naturally, no one can say that the bees have the same kind of intelligence that men have, for we certainly have the instrument of the brain, whereas the bees have nothing of the kind; thus the universal world wisdom cannot be drawn into their bodies in the same way. But influences coming from the whole surrounding universe do, none the less, work with immense power in the bee-hive. Indeed, one can only arrive at a right understanding of what the life of the bees truly is, when one takes into account that the whole environment of the earth has a very great influence upon the life of the colony. This life within the hive rests upon the fact that the bees, to a much greater extent than the ants and wasps, work so completely together, so arranging their whole activity that everything is in harmony.

If one would understand how this comes about, one must say: In the life of the bee everything that in other creatures expresses itself as sexual life is, in the case of the bees, suppressed, very remarkably suppressed; it is very much driven into the background. For you see, in the case of the bees, reproduction is limited to quite a few exceptional female individuals—the Queen bees—to a very few chosen individuals, for in the others the sexual life is more or less suppressed.

But it is love that is present in the life of sex, and love belongs to the realm of the soul; and further, through the fact that certain organs of the body are worked upon by forces of the soul, these organs become able to reveal, to express love. Thus, because all this is driven into the background in the nature of the bees, and reserved for the Queen bee alone, the whole otherwise sexual life of the colony is transformed into those activities which the bees develop among themselves.

It was for this reason that in olden times, wise men who had a knowledge of all this quite different from the knowledge of men today, that these wise men related the whole wonderful activity within the hive to the life of love, to that part of life which they connected with the planet Venus.

If we describe the wasps and ants we can say they are creatures which, in a certain sense, withdraw from the influence of Venus, whereas the bees surrender themselves entirely to Venus, unfolding a life of love throughout the whole hive. This life will be filled with wisdom; you can well imagine how wise it must be!

I have already told you various things about the reproductive process and the unconscious wisdom contained in it. This unconscious wisdom is unfolded by the bees in their external activity. What we only experience when love arises in our hearts is to be found, as it were, in the whole bee-hive as substance. The whole hive is in reality permeated with love. The individual bees renounce love in manifold ways, and thus develop love throughout the whole hive. One only begins to understand the life of the bees when one knows that the bee lives in an atmosphere completely pervaded by love.

On the other hand the bee is quite especially favoured by the fact that, in its turn, it feeds upon just those parts of the plants which are also wholly pervaded by love. The bees suck out their food—which they then turn into honey—exclusively from those parts of the plants that are centred in love; they bring, so to speak, the love-life of the flowers into the hive.

Hence one must say that the life of the bees must be studied by making use of the soul.

This is much less necessary when we study the ants and the wasps for we shall see that here, though they withdraw themselves to some extent, still they do surrender themselves more to sexual life. With the exception of the Queen, the bees are actually beings which, as I would like to put it, say to themselves “We will renounce the individual sexual life that we make ourselves ‘bearers of love.’” Thus they have been able to bring what lives in the flowers into the hive; and when you begin really to think this out rightly, you will reach the whole mystery of the bee-hive.

The life of this sprouting, budding love which is in the flowers is there too, within the honey. You can also study what honey does, when you eat it yourself. What does the honey do? When honey is eaten it furthers the right connection in man between the airy and the watery elements. Nothing is better for man than to add the right proportion of honey to his food. For in a wonderful way the bees see to it that man learns to work with his soul upon the organs of his body. In the honey the bee gives back again to man what he needs to further the activity of his soul-forces within his body. Thus when man adds some honey to his food, he wishes so to prepare his soul that it may work rightly within his body—breathe rightly.

Bee-keeping is therefore something that greatly helps to advance our civilisation, for it makes men strong.

You see, when one realises that the bees receive very many influences from the starry worlds, one sees also how they can pass on to man what is fitted for him. All that is living, when it is rightly combined, works rightly together. When one stands before a hive of bees one should say quite solemnly to oneself: “By way of the bee-hive the whole Cosmos enters man and makes him strong and able.”

[In connection with a paper read to the work-people by Herr Müller]

Good morning, gentlemen! I will add just a few remarks to the statements made by Herr Müller—remarks which may perhaps be of interest to you, though naturally, as far as the present day is concerned, the time has not yet come when one could really apply these things in practical bee-keeping. For the moment, on this side of practical bee-keeping, very little, or perhaps not even anything much can be said, since Herr Müller has already given you a beautiful account of the way things are managed nowadays.

If you listened to him attentively it must have occurred the to you that this whole question of bee-keeping has something of the nature of a riddle. Obviously, the bee-keeper is first of all interested in what he has to do. Everyone must, in reality, take the greatest interest in bee-keeping, for in fact, more in human life depends on it than one usually thinks.

Let us look at it in a wider sense. As you have heard in the lectures Herr Müller has given you here, the bees are able to gather what is already present as nectar in the plants. They really only gather the nectar, and then we men take away as honey a portion of what was collected for the hive—on the whole it is not a very large portion. We might say that what man takes away is somewhere about 20%—roughly speaking.

But in addition to this the bee, by means of its bodily structure and organisation, can also take pollen from the plants. Thus the bee gathers from the plant something that exists there in very minute quantities and is difficult to procure. Pollen is collected by the bees, with the help of the minute brushes attached to their bodies, bees in the very, very small quantities in which, relatively speaking, it is available; this pollen is then stored away, or consumed in the hive.

In the bee we therefore have a creature before us that collects a substance extremely delicately prepared by Nature, and having done so, makes use of it in his own household.

Now we will go a step further, to something very seldom noticed because one does not stop to think about it. Having transformed the food by means of its own bodily substances into wax—this the bee produces out of itself—the bees now makes a special little container in which to deposit its egg or in which to store up food supplies. This special little vessel is, I should like to say, a really great marvel, It appears to be hexagonal when we look at it from above; looked at from the side it is closed in this way. (Diagram 1 and Diagram 2.) Eggs can be deposited there, or food can be stored. Each vessel lies next to another; they fit extremely well together, so that this “surface” by which one cell, (for so it is called), is joined to another in the honey-comb, is exceedingly well made use of—the space is well used.

When the question is raised how can the bee instinctively build so skilfully formed a cell, people generally answer: “It is done that the space may be thoroughly well used.” That is true. If you try to imagine any other form of cell there would always be spaces, everything is joined together so that every part of the surface of the comb is completely made use of.

This certainly is one reason, but you see it is not the only reason. We must consider how the little larva which lies within it is entirely isolated, and one must not by any means believe that anything exists in Nature that is without forces. This six-angled, six-surfaced dwelling has certain forces within it; it would be quite another matter if the larva were to occupy a round one. In Nature it signifies something quite definite that it lies within this six-surfaced little dwelling-place. The larva receives the forces of the form later it feels in its body that it was once in this hexagonally-formed cell, in its youth when it was quite soft.

The bee is afterwards able to build similar cells out of the same forces which it thus absorbed. There lie the forces through which the bee afterwards works, for what the bee makes externally lies in its environment.

This is the first thing we must notice. Now there is another very remarkable fact that has been described to you. In the hive there is a variety of cells. I think every bee-keeper can well distinguish between the cells of the worker-bees and those of the drones. This is not a difficult matter, is it? It is still easier to distinguish between the cells of worker-bees and drones and those of the Queens, for the latter have not at all this form, they are more like a sack. The Queen cells have no such shape, they are more like a kind of sack; also there are very few of them in the hive. So we must say: The worker-bees and the drones (the males) develop-in hexagonal cells, but the Queen is developed in a “sack.” She is not at all concerned to have hexagonal surroundings. (Diagram 3 and Diagram 4).

Then we must consider something else. You see, the Queen for her development, i.e. until she is a complete full-grown insect, needs only sixteen days. She is then fully matured. A worker bee requires about twenty-one days to mature, which is a longer period. One might say that Nature bestows much more care on the development of the worker-bee than on that of the Queen.

But we shall soon see that quite another reason comes in question. The worker-bee then, needs twenty-one days, and the drone, the male—which will finish its task soonest of all—needs twenty-three to twenty-four days. The males are killed when they have fulfilled their task.

We have quite a new situation here. The different kinds of bees—Queens, workers and drones—all need a different number of days for their development.

Well, let us consider these twenty-one days needed by the worker-bees. There is something very special about this. A period of twenty-one days is not without meaning for what happens on the earth. Twenty-one days are equal to the period of time during which the Sun, approximately speaking, revolves once upon its own axis.

Now think, the worker-bee takes just that period of time for its development which the Sun takes to turn upon its axis. The worker-bee experiences one revolution of the Sun, and because it has experienced one complete revolution it enters into all the Sun can give.

If it wished to go further it would always meet only with the same Sun-influences, for if you picture to yourselves here the worker-bee, [Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard.] (Diagram 5) and here the Sun at the moment when the egg is laid, then here we shall have the point exactly opposite the Sun. The Sun revolves upon its own axis once in twenty-one days; then it returns again and the first point is again here. If this were to continue, only such Sun-workings would be there as had once been there already. So the worker-bee by the time it is fully developed has experienced all that the Sun can give. Should the worker-bee continue to develop it must leave the Sun and enter the earth development; it will then no longer be having a Sun-influence in its development because it already had this, and has tasted it to the full. Now it passes into the earth development, but only as a perfect insect, as a matured creature. I might say—the worker-bee occupies herself only momentarily with this earth-development, and has then finished with her Sun-development, is entirely a creature of the Sun.

Now let us look at the drone. The drone, I might say, considers the matter a little longer. It does not think itself quite ready after twenty-one days, so before it is fully matured it enters the earth-development. The drone is thus an earthly being, whereas the worker-bee is entirely a child of the Sun.

How is it with the Queen? The Queen-bee does not even go through the whole of the Sun-revolution, but stays behind and remains always a creature of the Sun. For this reason the Queen is much nearer to her larval state than the others; the drones (the males) are the farthest removed from the larval state. The Queen is thereby able to lay eggs. In the bees it is clearly to be seen what it signifies to be exposed to the earth-influence or to the Sun-influence. As you know, it depends entirely on whether the bee completes, or does not complete its Sun-development, that it becomes either a Queen, a worker or a drone. The Queen lays eggs, and it is because she remains always under the influence of the Sun and receives nothing from the earth that she is enabled to do so. The worker-bee goes a little further and develops for another four or five days; it tastes the Sun to the full. But then, just when its body becomes firm enough it goes over, just for a moment, as I said, into the earth-development. Thus the worker-bee cannot return again to the Sun, for it has already thoroughly absorbed its influences. Consequently the worker-bee cannot lay eggs.

The drones are the males; they can fertilise; this power of fertilisation comes from the earth; the drones acquire it in the few days during which they continue their growth within the earth-evolution and before they reach maturity. So we can now say: in the bees it is clearly to be seen that fertilisation (male fecundation) comes from the earthly forces, and the female capacity to develop the egg comes from the forces of the Sun. So you see, you can easily imagine how significant is the length of time during which a creature develops. This is very important for, naturally, something happens within a definite time which could not occur in either a shorter or a longer time, for then quite other things would happen.

But there is something further to be considered. You see, the Queen develops in sixteen days. Then the point which stood opposite to her in the Sun is perhaps only here; [Drawing on the blackboard.] (Diagram 5) the Queen remains within the Sun-development. The remaining part of the Sun's course is gone through by the worker-bees, but they too remain within the Sun-development; they do not really pass out of it to the earth. And so, you see, they feel themselves entirely akin to the Queen because they belong to the same Sun-influence; the whole host of the worker-bees feel themselves related to the Queen. They say:—“The drones are betrayers; they have fallen to the earth. They no longer belong to us; we suffer them only because we need them.”

For what are they needed?

As you know, it sometimes happens that the Queen is not fertilised; nevertheless she lays eggs. The Queen need not necessarily be fertilised to lay eggs. Then we have what is called “virgin-brood.” This also happens with other insects; the scientific name for it is parthenogenesis. But only drones can emerge from these unfertilised eggs; no workers and no Queens. Thus when a Queen is unfertilised, worker-bees and Queens do not hatch out, only drones; such a colony is naturally useless.

You see, in “virgin-brood” only the opposite sex is produced, not the same sex. This is a very interesting fact, and an important one in the whole household of Nature—namely, that fertilisation is necessary if the same sex is to come into being (this applies to the lower animals of course, not to the higher ones). With the bees it is the case that only drones emerge where fertilisation has not taken place.

This fecundation of the bee is indeed a very special affair; there is nothing like a marriage-bed to which one retires, it all takes an entirely different course. It takes place openly, in the full sun-light and, though this may seem very strange at first, as high as possible in the air. The Queen-bee flies as far as possible towards the Sun to which she belongs. (I have already described this to you), and that drone alone which can overcome the earthly forces—for the drones have united themselves with the earthly forces—only that drone which can fly the highest is able to fecundate the Queen up there in the air.

The Queen returns and lays her eggs. So you see, the bees have no marriage-bed, they have a marriage flight; they must strive as far as they are able, towards the Sun. One must have, is it not so, fine weather for this marriage flight which really needs the Sun? In had weather it cannot take place.

Now all this shows you how closely the Queen remains related to the Sun. When fertilisation has taken place, then worker-bees emerge from the worker-cells; first the little larva appear, as Herr Müller has so well described, and then after twenty-one days develop into worker-bees. In the sack-like cells a Queen develops.

Now if we are to go further, I must tell you something you may naturally receive with some doubt, for it needs exact study. Nevertheless, it really is so. I will link this further matter to the following:—The worker-bee now mature and ready, sets out on its flight, visiting the flowers and trees to which it attaches itself by the minute hooks on its feet. (Diagram 6) It gathers both nectar and pollen. The pollen is carried on the body where there is a special contrivance for depositing it; the nectar it sucks up with its tongue. A part of the nectar is used for its own food, but the greater part is retained and this, on its return to the hive, the bee spits out. Actually, when we eat honey we eat the spittle of the bee; we must be quite clear as to this, but it is a very clean and sweet spittle.

Thus the bee gathers all it needs for food, for storing, and for further elaboration into wax, etc. Now we must ask ourselves, how does the bee find its way to the flowers? It finds its way to the flowers with absolute certainty, but one is quite unable to explain this by merely observing the eyes of the bee. The worker-bee (the drone has somewhat larger eyes), has only two small eyes, one at each side, and three quite minute ones on the forehead (Diagram 7). The drones have rather larger eyes. But when one studies these two eyes of the bee, one discovers that it sees very little with them, and that with the three minute frontal eyes it sees, to begin with, nothing at all. That is the strange thing that the bee does not find the flowers by sight, but by a sense more like the sense of smell. It finds its way to the flowers by a sense which is between taste and smell, on its flight it already, as it were, tastes the pollen and the nectar. From far away it tastes them, so the bee has no need to use its eyes at all.

Now make for yourself a clear picture of the following.

Think of a Queen-bee born in the realm of the Sun, and not having tasted the Sun's working to the full, has remained, so to speak, entirely under the influence of the Sun. The whole host of the worker-bees, though it has completed the course of the Sun's revolution, has not actually passed over to the earth development. These worker-bees feel themselves united with the Queen, not because they were under the same Sun, but because they remained within the Sun-development; this is why they feel themselves so united with the Queen. In their development they did not sever themselves from that of the Queen. The drones do not belong to them; they have separated themselves.

But now the following happens. In order that a new Queen can come into being, the marriage flight must have taken place. The Queen goes out into the Sun. A new Queen comes into being. At that moment a most remarkable thing happens to the whole host of the workers who feel themselves so united with the old Queen. Their tiny little eyes begin to see when the new Queen is born. This they cannot endure; they cannot endure that that which they themselves are, should come from elsewhere. The three minute frontal eyes, these three very small eyes of the worker-bees, are built up from within; they are permeated with the inner blood and so on, of the bee; they were never exposed to the external working of the Sun. But now the new Queen is born from out of the Sun, and brings Sun-light with her own body into the hive; now the bees become—I should like to say—clairvoyant with their little eyes. They cannot endure this light of the new Queen. The whole host of them prepares to swarm. It is like fear of the new Queen, as though they were dazzled. It is as though we were to look at the Sun itself.

That is why the bees swarm. And now one has once more to re-establish the colony on the basis of the majority of the worker-bees which still belong to the hive—that is, to the old Queen. The new Queen must find a new people. A part of the population of the hive has of course, remained behind, but these are those born under different circumstances. The reason why the bees swarm lies in the fact that the workers cannot endure the new Queen who brings in a new Sun-influence.

Now you might ask, “Why should the bees feel so sensitive towards this new Sun-influence?” This is indeed a very strange thing. No doubt you know that it is sometimes not at all pleasant to meet a bee; it may sting one. If one is so large an animal as man at the worst one gets an inflamed skin; all the same it is rather unpleasant. Smaller animals may even die from the sting of a bee. This is due to the fact that the sting is really a tube in which a kind of piston moves up and down, which is connected with a poison bag. This poison (very disagreeable to one who has to experience it) is however, of great value to the bees. It is by no means pleasant for the bee to have to part with its poison, and in reality it only does so because it cannot bear that any influence from outside should approach. The bee wants always to remain within itself, to stay within the sphere of its own substance. Every external influence is felt as disturbing, as something to be warded off by its poison. But this poison has at the same time quite another significance, for in the minutest quantities it continually passes over into the whole body of the bee; without it the bee could not exist at all.

One must understand in studying the worker-bee that it is unable to see with its small frontal eyes, and that this is due to the fact that the poison continually permeates these frontal eyes. The moment the new Queen appears with her new Sun-influence, this poison is harmfully affected. It ceases to be active, and the small eyes suddenly begin to see, for the fact that the bee lives its life in a perpetual twilight is due to the poison.

If I were to describe to you in a pictorial form what the bee experiences when a new Queen slips out of her sack-like cell, I should have to say: “The bee lives always in the twilight, and finds its way about by means of a sense between taste and smell; it lives in a twilight congenial to it. But when the new Queen appears it is exactly like when we walk in the twilight of a June evening, and the little glow-worms are shining.” Even so does the new Queen shine for the swarm, because the poison does not work strongly enough to keep the bees in their twilight seclusion from the world. It keeps within it even when it flies out, because it is then able with its poison to keep within itself. It needs the poison when it fears something from outside may disturb it. The whole colony desires to be entirely within itself.

Indeed, in order that the Queen may remain in the sphere of the Sun she may not dwell in an angular cell, but within a circular one. There she remains within the Sun-influence.

Here we touch upon something that makes bee-keeping so extremely interesting for everyone. For you see, in reality, things go on in the hive in exactly the same way as in the human head, only with a slight difference. In our head, for instance, the substances do not grow to such dimensions. In the human head we have nerves, blood-vessels, and the separately situated round-shaped cells which are always to be found. We have these three varieties of cells in the human head. The nerves consist of separate cells which only do not grow into independent beings because Nature encloses them on all sides; in reality, however, these nerves would like to become little animals. If the nerve-cells of the human head could develop in all directions, under the same conditions as those of the hive, then the nerve-cells would become drones.

The blood-cells which flow in the veins would become worker bees; and the single free cells which are, above all, in the centre of the head and go through the shortest period of development, may be compared with the Queen bees.

So in the human head we have the same three forces (Diagram 8) as in the hive.

Now the workers bring home what they gather from the plants, and work it up in their own bodies into wax, of which they then build the wonderful structure of the combs. The blood-cells of the human head however, do the same thing. From the head they pass into the whole body. When you look for instance, at a bone, at a piece of bone, you will find hexagonal cells everywhere. The blood that circulates through the whole body carries out the same work that is done in the hive by the bees. It is similar with the cells of our muscles which, once more, correspond to the wax-cells of the bees, but these cells being softer, dissolve more quickly, so it is here less noticeable. A study of the bones shows it very well. Thus, the blood has the same forces as those of the worker-bee.

One can even follow their development through the course of time. The cells which you find first developed in the human embryo, and which subsequently remain unchanged, are those that already exist in the early stages of embryonic life. The others, the blood-cells, come into existence somewhat later, and finally the nerve-cells are developed—just as with the bee-hive. Only man builds up a body which obviously belongs to him; the bee also builds up a body, but for the worker-bees, this body is the honey-comb—the cells. This building of the comb corresponds to what happens within our bodies,—namely, that the blood-cells in reality do this out of a kind of wax—but here it is not so easy to prove.

We ourselves are made of a kind of wax, just as the honey-comb forms the marvellous structure we find in the skep or hive.

So this is how it is. Man has a head, and this head works upon his great body which is actually a “bee-hive” and contains in its relationship between the albuminous cells (which remain round) and the blood, the same connection that exists in the bee-hive between the Queen and the worker-bees. Our nerves are continually destroyed; we continually use up our nervous system. We do not immediately kill our nerves—as the bees kill the drones—for in this case we should die every year, but, none the less, our nerves get weaker every year, and it is through this gradual weakening of the nerves, that man really dies. We are then no longer able to experience our body rightly; a man is actually always dying from the wearing out of his nerves.

When you look at the head—which represents the hive—you find that here all is well protected. If one injures one's head, it is a serious matter; the head cannot bear it. Equally, what happens through the presence of the new Queen—who is there by reason of the marriage flight—is something the bees cannot endure; they prefer to go away rather than remain with her.

This is why bee-keeping has always been regarded as profoundly significant. Man takes away from the bees—perhaps 20% of their honey—and one can justly say that this honey is extremely valuable to man, for with his ordinary food he gets very little honey because honey is distributed in such very small quantities in the plant-world. We get only minute quantities of honey into our bodies in this way.

We also have “bees” within us, namely, our blood, which carries the honey to the various parts of our body. It is honey that the bee needs for producing wax, out of which it then makes the “body” of the colony.

As we grow older, honey has an extremely favourable effect upon us. With children, it is milk that has a similar effect; honey helps us to build our bodies and is thus strongly to be recommended for people who are growing old. It is an exceedingly wholesome food; only one must not eat too much of it! If one eats too much of it, using it not merely as a condiment, one can make the formative forces too strongly active. The form may then get too rigid, and one may develop all kinds of illnesses. A healthy man feels just how much honey should take. Honey is particularly good for older people because it gives the body the right firmness.

One should also adopt the plan of giving just the right quantity of honey to children suffering from rickets when they are nine to ten months of age, and continue this honey diet till the age of three or four years. Rickets would then not be as bad as it is, for this illness consists in the body being too soft, and collapsing. Of course, in the very first weeks children ought only to be given milk; honey would at that age have no affect. Honey contains the forces that give man's body firmness. These things should be understood.

So one can say that much more attention should be given to the keeping of bees than is usual.

The following is also possible. In Nature everything is wonderfully inter-related. In Nature the laws which man is unable to penetrate with his ordinary intelligence are the most important. These laws work—do they not?—always with a perfect freedom. This holds good for instance, with the proportion of the sexes on earth. This is not always the same, the number of men and women is not always, but only more or less an equal one; it is approximately equal over the whole earth. This is brought about in the wisdom of Nature. If it should ever come about—I believe I have already told you this—that men were ultimately able to determine the whole matter arbitrarily, then everything would fall into confusion. If in any country the population has been decimated by wars it will afterwards become more numerous. In Nature, every need calls forth the working of opposite forces.

Now, when the bees seek nectar from the plants, they naturally take this from plants which have also other uses—which give us fruits and so on. But the remarkable thing is that fruit-trees thrive much better in places where bees are kept, than in places where there are no bees.

When the bees take the nectar from the plants Nature does not remain idle, but produces more fruitful plants. So man not only benefits by the honey the bees make, but receives more from the plants visited by the bees. This is a law of great importance, and one we can well understand.

Observing things in this way, one is able to say—in the whole inter-relationship of the bee-colony—of this organism—Nature reveals something very wonderful to us. The bees are subject to forces of Nature which are truly wonderful and of great significance. One cannot but feel shy of fumbling among these forces of Nature. It is becoming increasingly obvious today that wherever man clumsily interferes with these forces he makes matters not better, but worse. He does not make them worse all at once, for it is really so that Nature is everywhere hindered, though notwithstanding these hindrances Nature works as best she may. Certain of these hindrances man can remove, and by doing away with them can make things easier for Nature. For example, he seems actually to be helping Nature when he makes use of bee-hives which are conveniently arranged, instead of using the old straw skeps.

But here we come to the whole question of artificial bee-keeping. You must not think that I am unable to see—even from a non-anthroposophical point of view—that modern bee-keeping methods seem at first very attractive, for certainly, it makes many things much easier. But the strong holding together—I should like to say—of one bee-generation, of one bee-family, will be impaired in the long run.

Speaking generally today, one cannot but praise modern bee-keeping; so long as we see all such precautions observed of which Herr Müller has told us, we must admire them in a certain sense. But we must wait and see how things will be in fifty to eighty years time, for by then certain forces which have hitherto been organic in the hive will be mechanised, will become mechanical. It is not possible to bring about that intimate relationship between the colony and a Queen that has been bought, which results naturally when a Queen comes into being in the natural way. Only, at first these things are not observed.

Of course, I by no means wish that a fanatical campaign in opposition to modern bee-keeping should be started, for one cannot do such things in practical life. To do so would be rather like something I will now tell you. It is possible to calculate approximately the time when there will be no more coal in the earth. The coal supply of the earth is exhaustible; one day it will come to an end. Now it would be quite possible to limit the amount of coal taken out of the earth, so that the supply would last as long as the earth itself. One cannot say that we ought to do so, for we should have a little faith for the future. One says “Well, of course we rob the earth of its coal, that is we rob our descendants of coal, but they will be able to invent something else so that they will not need coal any longer.” Naturally, one can say the same about the disadvantages of modern bee-keeping!

Still, it is well to be aware of the fact that by working mechanically we destroy what Nature has elaborated in so wonderful a way. You see bee-keeping has at all times been highly valued; in olden times especially, the bee was held to be a sacred animal. Why? It was so considered because in their whole activity, processes reveal themselves which also take place in man himself. If you take a piece of bees-wax in your hand you are in reality holding something between blood, muscle and bone, which in man's inner organisation passes through the stage of being wax. The wax does not however become solid, but remains fluidic till it is transformed into blood, or muscles, or into the cells of the bones. In the wax we have before us what we bear within us as forces, not as substance.

When men in olden times made candles of the bees-wax and lighted them, they knew that they performed a wonderful and sacred action: “This wax which we now burn we took from the hive; there it was hardened. When the fire melts it and it evaporates, then the wax passes into the same condition in which it is within our own bodies.”

In the melting wax of the candle men once apprehended something that rises up to the heavens, something that was also within their own bodies. This awoke a devotional mood in them, and this mood in its turn led them to look upon a bee as a specially sacred creature, because it prepares something which man must continually work out within himself. For this reason, the further back we go the more we find how men approached the bees with reverence. Of course, this was when they were still in their wild state; men found it so, and they looked upon these things as a revelation. Later they brought the bees into their household.

Quite wonderful riddles lie concealed in all that happens with the bees, and by much studying of them one can learn to know what happens between the head and the body in man.

I have now told you a few of those things I wished to speak of. On Wednesday we shall have our next meeting, and perhaps many questions will have arisen. Something may occur also to Herr Müller.

Today I only wished to make these remarks which, after all, are beyond doubt, for they are founded on real knowledge. But, there may still be much that can be made clearer.

Good morning, gentlemen!

Has anything occurred to you that you would like to ask me? (An article was read from the “Schweizerische Bienenzeitung” of February–March 1923 entitled “Do Bees perceive colours invisible to Man?”)

DR. STEINER.

I will say a few words on this subject. You see, these experiments made by Forel and Kühn show so plainly how thoughtlessly experiments are carried out today. One can naturally not imagine anything more absurd than such an interpretation of these experiments as is given here. Think for a moment that I might do as follows: I might take a substance—there are such substances—specially sensitive to ultra-violet rays, i.e., to colours lying beyond the blue and violet; for instance I take barium platino-cyanide. I exclude all the other colours, let us say, I exclude red, orange, yellow, green, blue—then the indigo would come in and the violet—these also I exclude (Diagram missing.) (Diagram missing.) Now I make a screen; I shut these off in the spectrum; then I have here the so-called ultra-violet rays which are invisible to man. If I now add this substance, this barium platino-cyanide (which is a white powder) then it begins to shine, In a darkened room we see nothing; now we let in these rays, screening them as they come in, allowing therefore, only the ultra-violet rays to enter, which become visible when I introduce barium platino-cyanide. Then one sees it. Then it lights up. Thus, according to this article, I must state that barium platino-cyanide is able to see with some kind of eyes because it shows an activity. But very much the same thing happens if one experiments with ants. Suppose that instead of barium platino-cyanide I take ants; then I exclude the light. The ants run towards the sugar; in the same way barium platino-cyanide lights up. I then say (according to this article) that the ants see the ultra-violet rays. But they need to see them just as little as the barium platino-cyanide needs to see in order to shine. All one can really say is, that given a certain substance it produces an effect on the ants. More than that one cannot assert. The scientists concerned are as thoughtless as it is possible to be and make statements that are pure phantasy.

The only thing one can say is this,—that through the sense-organs (once more, according to this article this is proved by the fact that no effect is produced if the eyes of the ants are varnished) that through the sense-organs an impression was made on these insects. It is characteristic that the scientist applies to ants and wasps what he has observed with bees—and vice versa. This only shows how thoughtlessly these experiments were carried out.

Now, one can add the following: you see, when one proceeds further [drawing on the black-board.] to the so-called ultra-violet rays—here you have red-orange, yellow, green, blue—then indigo would come in, and the violet—the ultra-violet rays. On the other side, the infra-red rays.

We have here the ultra-violet rays (on the right hand side) and these have the peculiarity (so he himself expresses it in the article) that they produce strong chemical reactions. Whatever is introduced here (into the sphere of the ultra-violet light) is strongly affected chemically, with the result that if I now put an ant here it will at once experience a strong chemical reaction. It feels this; that is true. It feels this effect above all in the eyes. When the ant is brought into the sphere of the ultra-violet rays it feels this, just as barium platino-cyanide reacts when brought into the same sphere of chemical activity. If I completely darken a room and have only the ultra-violet rays there, then the ant would notice at once that something was happening. For instance, if one had ants' eggs or larvae they would be completely changed, they would be destroyed the moment this powerful chemical working occurred. This is why the ants rescue their eggs.

What this article is really concerned with is effects of a chemical nature.

The statement I made recently is quite correct. I said the bees have a sense which is intermediate between smell and taste; thus these things are sensed by the bees, and it is similar in the case of ants. So little are these gentlemen aware of the real question that they do not know, for example, that when man himself perceives colours, even in perceiving the ultra-violet rays, slight chemical changes take place in his eyes. Man's perception of colour tends to be of a chemical nature.

All that has been investigated here is the reaction to the inner chemical change that takes place in the bees when they are in the ultra-violet light.

Now all that is within the sphere of black, white, yellow, grey (and grey is only a somewhat darker white), or blue-grey, in all these colours there is no ultra-violet. Thus all these colours are freely perceptible to the bees. The chemical effects which the bees sense so strongly when they come to the ultra-violet are not present in these colours. But when the bee leaves the sphere of black, white, yellow and blue-grey and comes into this other sphere it feels in the ultra-violet rays something alien to it. There the bee can do nothing. It is thus so important to note that the bee has a sense between taste and smell.

We men make a great distinction between smell and taste. The latter is primarily a chemical sense; it is entirely based on chemistry. The bee has something which is intermediate between taste and smell. This does not contradict the fact that the bee is able to distinguish colour when the front of the hive is painted in one way or another; for you must consider that as all colours differ in their chemical effects, so they can also be perceived in relation to their warmth or coldness.

If, for example, you cover a surface with red paint and the bee approaches it, it experiences warmth. How should the bee not know that this is different from coming, for instance, into the sphere of blue! Near the blue surface the bee senses coldness. The bee senses the warmth of red and the cold of blue, and then it can naturally distinguish between them. But one is not therefore justified in concluding that the bee sees with its eyes in the way man does. This of course is utter nonsense. But so it is with many other things that people think.

I have previously told you what all such experiments amount to. I once told you there is a certain plant, called the “Venus fly-trap” which immediately contracts its leaves when they are touched. Just as you make a fist of your hand when you are going to be touched—that is, when somebody means to give you a blow—so the Venus fly-trap waits for the insect and then shuts itself up. Then people say: this plant, the Venus fly-trap, has a soul like men have. It is aware of the arrival of the insect and shuts itself up.

Yes, gentlemen, but I always say: I know of a certain arrangement so constituted that when an animal approaches it and touches something inside it, then it immediately shuts up and the animal is caught. This is a mouse-trap! If one ascribes a soul to the Venus fly-trap, one must equally ascribe one to the mouse-trap! If one ascribes sight to the bees because they do something or other in ultra-violet light, then one ought to ascribe sight to barium platino-cyanide as well!

If people only took the trouble to think they would discover many quite remarkable things, for barium platino-cyanide consists of barium. This is a white metal belonging to the class of alkaline metals. Now it is interesting that such metals play a certain part in the life of man. As human beings we could not have the right working in our bodies of the albumen we take in if we had not such metals in our pancreas. They must be there. In barium we have something connected with our feeling comfortable in our digestive process. Platinum is an especially valuable metal, as you know; a metal that is also especially hard and heavy—it is a precious metal. All these metals have the property that they are, once more connected with feeling, with “sensing.”

Now remind yourselves of another thing. Cyanide is also there. This is a certain kind of cyanic acid, of prussic acid. I told you before that man always develops a little prussic acid in the working of his muscles. This substance thus resembles what man is constantly producing in his body. You can gather from this that man is particularly susceptible in his body—not in his eyes—to what happens in ultra-violet light—i.e., to the chemical components of light. We can judge for ourselves if we only pay attention to these things.

But it is only Spiritual Science that can enable one to observe such matters as the fact that where barium platino-cyanide is affected a kind of feeling arises. This applies to the bees in the highest degree. The bees sense colours with especial intensity, but they only see the colours dimly shining on the appearance of a self-luminous organism.

For this reason I say, that generally speaking, twilight surrounds the bees. But when the new Queen appears, she shines for the other bees as the glow-worms shine for us when June is here. This is so, only as regards the three small frontal eyes; the other eyes, the larger ones, have already some perception of light, but as in twilight. When it is in darkness the creature senses the presence of just those colours that work chemically, such as ultra-violet, or of one that does not work chemically at all—i.e., the infra-red.

At the end of this article in the bee journal, it is stated that further information as to the infra-red rays will be given later. Certainly, when the bees come to the infra-red, they will behave quite differently, for then there are no longer any chemical effects.

As to the facts, the experiments are correct, but one must be clear that one cannot draw conclusions such as Forel and Kühn have actually done. To do so is a totally thoughtless way of following up the experiments. Then people say: “this has been proved beyond contradiction.” Naturally, but only for those who ascribe a soul to the mouse-trap! But for others who know how far one can go, how far one is able to think in such a way that things are rightly followed up, these proofs are by no means beyond contradiction.

In ordinary life we are not in the habit of following things up accurately. When people experience some small matter or another, then, as the saying is, a gnat can become an elephant. And so it is with our scientists. When they get hold of something they don't stop their thinking, but carry it on, and apply it to what is immediately before them. This results in fantastic nonsense; a gnat becomes an elephant. When modern science makes such statements this is due to its authority, for what is thus brought forward meets, as a rule, with no contradiction, because all the periodicals are in the hands of scientific authorities. But in the long run, one will not be able to make much use of this nonsense.

if you go over the whole ground of bee-keeping, I believe you will find that just the very best bee-keepers do not trouble themselves very much about the discoveries of Forel and Kühn; for bee-keepers must work practically, and then instinctively one does what is necessary. Of course, it is best if one has the right instincts. I seem to have noticed that the bee-keeper sometimes likes to settle down on a Sunday evening, when it is snowing perhaps, and to read some such article, because naturally, it interests him, but he cannot make much out of it because in an article of this kind there is nothing he can get hold of.

But surely, gentlemen, you have other interesting things to ask me about?

HERR MÜLLER:

I should like to add something about the Queen. We have already described how she lays her eggs. Then we have the unfertilised Queens; for instance, in bad weather, and then only drones are hatched which have no value. Also, when a Queen dies and there is no young brood, then one of the worker bees is bred to be a Queen. It also lays eggs but only unfertilised eggs, from which only inferior drones come out.

-1. Then I should like to add something about swarming. At the time of the first swarm there is as yet no new Queen there. She is still asleep in her cell and cannot yet provide new brood. Only the older bees leave the hive with the Queen. I can take her out and put the whole swarm back in the hive.

0. As to the sight of the bees, I should like to say that when we are at work in the bee-house and there is too much light there (for the bee-master himself there is always too little light), then the bees are terribly agitated.

As to stinging when the bees are swarming, it is well known with us that the first swarm is rather ticklish; this is much less the case with casts. We hold the opinion that young bees do not sting, that they do not use their stings.

2. There are certain districts where people do not harvest the honey before August 8, which is held to be a Holy day. August 8 is a honey day.

3. It can happen that the swarm goes out and the Queen settles somewhere, and it seems that is an end of it, but it is not so—not altogether so.

DR. STEINER:

With regard to what I said, everything pointed to the fact that the old Queen leaves the hive when the new Queen shows herself and appears to the bees like a glow-worm. When the swarm goes out and the old Queen has been captured, then one can return all the bees into the hive, as you say, and they will go on working quietly. That does not mean that one cannot therefore say that the bees were first driven out by the strong effect of the light of the new Queen on their tiny eyes. This cannot be done away with. You must proceed quite logically here. I will give you an example from life. Imagine for a moment, that all of you here were employed somewhere, and you discover one day that you must all go on strike because something is wrong with the management. Let us suppose you all decide to go on strike. So you swarm out, gentlemen.

Then a certain time passes and you find yourselves unable to procure the necessities of life. You reach the hunger-stage, and are obliged to go back to your work. I cannot now say that therefore you had originally no reason to run away! You must consider that if you take the old Queen out of the swarm and bring it back into the hive, then naturally, the bees must endure the new Queen after all, for the old Queen is no longer there. They must bite into the sour apple! What I said is therefore not wrong; it is a question of seeing these things in the right light.

Then you spoke about the first swarm, when the new Queen is not yet there, when you cannot yet speak of her. Well, have you ever seen a first swarm when even the egg of the Queen is not there?

HERR MÜLLER:

Nine days before the young Queen has crept out.

DR. STEINER:

To begin with the young Queen is within her cell, as an egg. After sixteen days she is a full-grown Queen; then she creeps out. Nine days before this she is already there in the egg. The strange thing is that the egg shines brightest of all. Gradually it shines less and less, but the young Queen still shines for some time; she shines strongest of all in the larval state. Thus, it is quite comprehensible that you may have several swarms made up of the most sensitive of the bees which go out. It is to be explained by the fact that nothing happens before the young Queen is there. For what is the young Queen? She is already there when only the egg is there.

As to an unfecundated Queen, when the Queen is not fertilised then no worker-bees come out but only drones, and as Herr Müller said, very bad drones at that. This is true. The brood of an unfertilised Queen is useless because there are no worker-bees. One must see to it that the Queen can make her nuptial flight under the influence of the Sun.

You see, gentlemen, once more, what a great part is played by the chemical element. For what takes place on this flight is an effect on the sexual nature of the bee. But the sexual nature is entirely of a chemical character. When the Queen flies so high then naturally the impregnation is not brought about by the light, but by the chemical working of the light. Just in this instance you can see how delicately sensitive the bee is to the chemical element.

You said further that while at work in the bee-house, as a man one naturally needs light, and this makes the bees restless.

Try to form a vivid picture of the bee receiving chemical reactions from the light which it feels terribly strongly. When you, as a human being, approach and let the light in, suddenly making it light everywhere, this affects the bee as a strong gust of air affects you; it is just as if you opened the window and a strong draught were to blow in. The bee senses the light, it does not feel that it becomes light all round it, but it senses the light as a concussion, it is quite shattered by it. One could almost say, (though I have not actually seen the bee-keeper letting in too much light) the bees become terribly nervous, inwardly restless. They are thrown into these chemical workings of the light and begin to fly hither and thither almost like little swallows. They dance up and down as a sign of how restless they feel within. The bees would not behave in such a highly nervous way if they could see the light; they would then try to hide away, to creep into a corner where the light could not thus affect them.

Naturally, in all these matters, we must realise how perfectly clear we need to be as to effects that everywhere exist, and must not be compared with the effects things have upon men. Otherwise we anthropomorphise everything, and cannot but conclude that because man sees in a certain way, the animals also must do the same. One cannot make such statements straightaway.

Maybe you have observed the following. If one notices such things, one can often become aware of them. Imagine you are in a kitchen where the stove is nice and warm. The cat likes to sit on the warm stove; it curls itself up and falls asleep, has its eyes shut. Well, if there is a mouse somewhere under the cupboard, which the cat cannot possibly see with its eyes, it may happen that the cat suddenly springs down without opening its eyes, pounces with absolute certainty on the mouse, and before you have time to think the thing out to the end, the cat returns with the mouse already in its mouth.

Now naturally, you gentlemen, will not say the cat saw the mouse, for it had its eyes shut, it was asleep. Some people say the cat has a very fine sense of hearing, and by means of this very sensitive hearing the cat is aware of the mouse. Well, apart from this, that one must now state that the cat hears best when it is asleep, which is a rather doubtful statement, because sight and hearing are those senses which play so great a part in waking life, whereas the sense of smell for example, plays an extremely important part in sleep. It works chemically. Within the nose, and the whole brain something chemical is happening. Moreover, when you hear something, can you pounce upon it with absolute certainty? This is not at all the case; hearing is not at all such that it leads one to orientate oneself quickly. Hence, it is not the hearing of the cat that is in question here. But what is very strongly present in the cat is a terribly fine sense of smell, which it has within its bristly beard. This terribly fine sense of smell is there because in each bristle there is a little channel, and within each bristle (see diagram 9) is a substance, and this substance is chemically affected by the presence of the mouse. When there is no mouse near, this substance has a certain chemical quality, but if there is a mouse anywhere in the neighbourhood of the cat, even some distance away, then the cat is aware of the mouse through the chemical reaction in its whiskers.

I told you once that there are people who, though living on the third floor, are aware of some substance in the cellar, and can sometimes be made ill by it—for example, by buckwheat.

People could easily convince themselves with what certainly the sense of smell works, for otherwise there could he no police dogs. These dogs work very little by sight, but much with their sense of smell. In the animal kingdom precision and sureness cannot be ascribed to the eyes, but to chemical activity; under the influence of ultra-violet rays this activity is strongest of all.

If you wished to be especially gracious to a police dog you would do well if, for instance, you went with him and constantly held a dark lantern in front of him so that you kept him always in the ultra-violet rays. The police dog would then be even more certain in finding things, for in its “smelling hairs” (for the dog also has smelling hairs) the chemical reactions would be still more certain.

All that can be known about the animal points to the fact that the moment we enter the animal kingdom, one must not look for such conscious senses as those of man, but must descend into the senses of smell and taste—into the “chemical senses.”

You indicated, Herr Müller, that young bees do not sting. This is easily accounted for, for young bees have not yet the organ of the sting as they have not fully developed their whole inner organisation. This comes only as they grow older. There is nothing especially remarkable in this, and it does not contradict what I have said.

(Herr Müller asked about artificial feeding. He takes for this four parts of water, five of sugar, and then adds thyme, camomile-tea and a pinch of salt. What is the effect of this?)

DR. STEINER:

We are especially able to give you information in this matter, because our own remedies are partly based on the same principles as those that have been used instinctively here. Not all our remedies, but a certain number of them, are founded on similar principles.

You see, when you feed the bees on sugar, this is certainly nonsense, for the natural food of the bees is not sugar but nectar or honey, and pollen.

HERR MÜLLER:

For example, one has to empty even the half-filled combs of honey that come from the woods, because otherwise the bees get dysentery; also when the bees have at times only 4–6 lbs., left over, this is not sufficient.

DR. STEINER:

Bees are not accustomed to feed on sugar but on nectar and honey. This is in accordance with their whole nature. The remarkable thing here is that in winter the bee changes whatever food it happens to get into a kind of honey. All food is changed by the creature that partakes of it. Thus, in winter the bee is able, in its delicate digestive processes, to transform the food it takes into a kind of honey.

You can well imagine that this is a proceeding demanding much stronger forces than when you feed the bees on honey. They do not then need to expend the same amount of strength as when they must change sugar into honey. What kind of bees then will those be which within themselves can transform sugar into honey? They will only be the strongest bees, of which one can make good use. One cannot get weak bees to change sugar into honey; hence, they are more or less useless.

Now I said just now that we can well understand why you take for example, camomile tea, because you thereby spare the bee something which it has otherwise to do in its own body. If you dilute the sugar with camomile tea, then you take that part of the plant which prepares the nectar. For the substance of the camomile tea has not only camomile in it, for every plant also contains potential honey (the camomile contains this process in a greater degree, and can for this reason not be used as a honey plant). Suppose you have a plant, with a great deal of so-called starch in it. The starch has a constant tendency to change into sugar. The camomile sap already works on the starch of the plant in such a way that it directs the sugar-sap of the plant towards the formation of nectar.

If you give the bees camomile tea you support them in their inner honey-process. You make the sugar already like honey, when, you dilute it with camomile tea. We do the same with our remedies. When one takes some kind of metal, one cannot give it to a human being just as it is, because it would disappear in the course of digestion. You must dilute it with something so that it can be more readily absorbed, and so it is with the camomile tea which you add to the sugar. Salt must be added for the reason that salt especially makes otherwise indigestible things, digestible.

Man instinctively puts salt into his soup, because salt has the property of spreading rapidly through the body, and makes food digestible.

Herr MÜLLER has handed me another number of the “Swiss Bee-keeper's Journal” with an article dealing with the results of certain experiments with honey-cures—(“Our further Experiences with Honey-cures in the Frauenfeld Children's Home, Amden,” by Dr. Paula Emrich. Weeson.) (No III of the “Schweizerische Bienenzeitung” March 1923). (Certain passages from this article were read aloud).

Dr. Steiner:

It will be quite interesting, gentlemen, to add today a few remarks on this article. In this Children's Home an attempt was made to give honey treatments to children found to be suffering from some form or other of mal-nutrition. As described here, the treatment was to dissolve the honey and stir it well into moderately warmed milk, not brought to boiling point but kept just below it. This mixture was given to the children.

Excellent results were thus attained. The author, Dr. Paula Emrich, mentions the satisfactory result that the percentage of red corpuscles in the blood of these children increased to an extraordinarily high degree. For instance, two children were admitted belonging to the same family. On arrival the younger child had only 53% of red blood-corpuscles. On leaving, after a honey-treatment, the percentage had risen to 82%. The elder child had at first 70%, and on leaving this had risen to 78%. In this case there was thus less improvement, but still some improvement.

The elder child had milk only, and benefited by it, but the percentage rose only from 70% to 78%; it was therefore, to begin with, not so weakly, but did not get stronger in the same proportion.

There are still quite a number of very interesting experiments. As I shall refer to them, I should like to ask you to note carefully the ages of the children concerned. If one is to observe the effects of some special substance on a person, it is no use simply to make experiments in the laboratory; one has always first to find out the age of every patient; one must always note the age in any experiments in nutrition, or in healing.

Here we have a boy aged 11; he went through a honey-cure lasting 8 weeks, with the result of a very considerable improvement in his glands. A case of catarrh of the upper parts of the lungs also improved, the red corpuscles—those really significant elements—increasing from 55% to 75%.

Then again we have a boy aged 11. He shows a rise from 50% to 74%. Then a girl aged 11, with a rise from 70% to 88%. The rise is throughout, significant. She then gives the increase in weight also, which shows that the children became stronger. I will not read the further details.

Mention is also made of a girl aged 10, of another of the same age; then a boy aged 13, a girl of 7, a boy aged 11, a boy aged 8, a boy of 12, a boy of 9 and a boy of 7.

The experiments show that children of these ages, let us say roughly, the school-age, derive great benefit from a honey-cure.

Now, this doctor tries to discover why the children benefited so remarkably from this treatment with honey. And here, gentlemen, he mentions something very interesting, something which in a most remarkable way condemns what is so largely applied in science today.

For what does science do now-a-days when it tests food-stuffs in respect to their nutritive value? Science analyses certain food-substances to discover how many components of one or another chemical substance are to be found in it. This is what science does.

Now the following thing happened—a pupil of the famous Bunge, the Professor of Physiology—(you very probably know him by name, he was at one time in Basel)—made experiments in feeding mice with milk. These mice had a good time of it, they throve extremely well when they were fed on milk. So now he made the experiment in another way. He said:—milk consists of casein—i.e. cheese-substance, fat, sugar and salts. He said to himself:—the mice throve splendidly on milk; milk consists of casein, fat, sugar and salts; consequently, I shall give some mice casein, fat, sugar and salts. This is exactly what is contained in milk. And behold! when he gave the mice casein, fat, sugar and salts, they died within a few days! They got the same things, but they all died.

You see, gentlemen, the composition of the substance is not the whole matter. Those gentlemen ought to have said to themselves: something else must be in question here. But what did they say? They said: “substance is everything: substance must be everywhere where anything happens.”

Well, yes, but the substances that are there in casein, fat, sugar and salts—well, they do not make milk. So the gentlemen said, evidently there must be a new substance here, in such minute quantities that it cannot be found by chemical analysis. This substance is what people now call—vitamin. Vita means life; min is connected with “make”; therefore, vitamin “makes life.”

Once, gentlemen, when Heine wanted to mock at something, he said: “There are people who wish, for instance, to explain poverty, the cause of poverty. Well, the simplest way is to say—‘poverty comes from being Poor!’” One has found another term, but one has not explained anything! I was once in a society where people discussed the question where what is “comic” came from. Some of them had arrived at quite interesting ideas as to the source of the “comic”—of what one laughs at. Then however, someone got up and went to the platform in a way that one knew at once—“he has the feeling he has a great deal to say.” So then he brought forward his ideas of “comic” and said:—“The ‘comic’ originates solely from the fact that man possesses a ‘vis-comica.’ ‘Vis’ is force—‘comica’ is comic. Man has the ‘comic force.’ This is where what is ‘comic’ originates.”

This is just as though one should say in economics:—where does money come from? Money comes from the money-making force. Nothing is explained in this way. Well—in economics one would at once remark that anyone saying that money comes from the money-making-force was a queer fellow! But in science people do not notice it when someone asks:—where does the life-giving property of milk come from? and then answers:—from the vitamin! That is the same as saying that poverty comes from being poor! But it is not noticed. People think they have said something wonderful, but in truth nothing at all has been said. And that, you see, is what I should like to call the disturbing element in modern scientific methods. People claim to have something to say; they announce it in gigantic words, and everybody believes what is said. But if this continues further in the history of the world, things will come to a point where everything will dry up and perish. For the world depends on the fact that something can be done, not that things are merely discussed and many words made about them. Words must signify what is there in reality.

And truly, gentlemen, in earlier times a kind of knowledge existed that was directly connected with practise. Today there is a science which no longer knows anything about practical matters. Often it merely spins out words. This has naturally come about because a new authority has superseded an old authority.

You need only consider how short a time ago it is that we did not have so many journals on special subjects as we have today. Communications which were to be made on various subjects—let us say for instance bee-keeping—were given out at special bee-keepers' meetings. This was still so in my youth. At such a gathering of bee-keepers one could learn how things were being dealt with. One would tell the other what he knew from his own experience, and one felt at once whether a man was merely a wind-bag, or whether he had real practical knowledge behind him, which is a very different matter. When you hear someone speak, you know at once whether he knows something, or whether you can find it all in print somewhere. For printer's ink has come as a new authority in addition to all the rest. If anything is printed people believe there must be something in it!

But there is something further to be considered in this article. This doctor has indeed achieved something of great value with her honey treatments. What she has done in her practical work is really admirable. But when she begins to think it all over on scientific lines, the result is really nil. Further she says this:—“It is much to be desired that these results of our experiments should be made known as widely as possible, and that more honey should be given, especially to the young ... For the moment our communications only give the results of our practical experiences; but we do not doubt that with the further development of the theory of vitamins the pharmacologists and physiologists will give their attention to the problem of the working of honey on the human organism.”

The author also says at the beginning: “I feel obliged to give this account of the effects of honey-cures from the medical point of view. Our good results encourage us to seek their deeper connections, as I am well aware that I am far from having penetrated their innermost nature.”

It is evident from her own words that this doctor is modest enough to admit that the whole theory of vitamins does not enable her to reach the real heart of the matter.

And now let us consider very exactly the following question. Let us see on what these effects of honey-treatments really rest. You see, these experiments show us something; they show that the effect of honey is an especially strong one, and that further experiments will increasingly show this, not in the case of very young children, but with those who have reached the change of teeth, or with those who are well beyond it. This is shown by the actual experiments, and it is extremely important to take this into account.

But the experiments indicate something further. They indicate that honey is most effective when one gives it in moderately heated milk. It is this admixture of milk and honey that has such especially favourable results with children. If one went a little further one would discover that honey is important even in the case of the younger children. One must then put only a little honey in the milk—more milk and less honey. With old people it is the honey without any milk that is good. Excellent results can be obtained with really old people if one persuades them to take honey without milk. We must say that milk and honey have very great importance in human life; these experiences make it evident.

You see, the old wisdom, as I have often told you, was not so stupid as modern learning thinks. This old wisdom is sometimes expressed in very simple words, but it was really wise. In the ancient saying:—“This is a land where milk and honey flow,” the meaning is that it is a land of health, a country where men can live healthily. Thus, of old, men knew that milk and honey have a tremendously strong relation to human life.

Nature often speaks in a very reasonable way. One observes her utterances if only one takes simple matters sufficiently simply.

If one knows that Nature works with great wisdom, one does not need much proof of the fact that milk is good for little children, for were it not so, honey would flow from the breasts of women and not milk. This would by no means be beyond the sphere of Nature's possibilities, for the plants produce honey and it certainly might be possible that the glands of the female breast secreted honey. One must only take things simply enough. One must not say:—Nature is a bungler, she makes only milk to flow from the woman's breast and not honey, but one must say:—Behind this lies the knowledge that for the small child, milk above all else is necessary; one can add the honey as the child grows older.

Well, then, surely we should not form such an idea as the above, which is nothing but mere words, and say to ourselves; “poverty comes from being poor; the comical from the vis-comica, and the life-giving power of honey from the vitamin!” One must look for what has reality in this connection.

We will now, gentlemen, gather together some of the things we have long learnt to know from these lectures, for the important thing is that one should always observe things in the right way.

When you go into the mountains you find, just where the rocks are hardest, where so to speak, the very hardest earthly substance pours in—there you find the quartz-crystals. They are very beautiful. You find many kinds of crystals. You will remember I drew these quartz crystals for you; they look like this:—(Diagram 10). When they are entire, they are formed below just as they are above, but usually, they are not perfect. They come out of the rock; they grow, as it were, out of the rock in the form I have just drawn for you here. What does this signify?

It signifies that the earth permits crystals to grow out of itself which are hexagonal, growing to a point. Within the earth there is thus the power to build up this six-angled form.

As I have so often explained to you, the forces that are within the earth and in the universe, are also in man. The earth in her turn receives this force from the universe; man has it from the earth. Man has the same force within him which, in the earth, drives out the crystal. How is it then within him? Truly, gentlemen, the human body is full of quartz.

Quartz as you find it in the mountains is one of the very hardest of substances, But substances are not everywhere just as they present themselves to us here or there. In man there is something quite similar to quartz, but it is in a more fluid form. Why?

You see, if one observes—and one must really observe in the right way, and with a true inner vision—what flows continually from man's head into his limbs (see Diagram 11), and this is most interesting, there streams incessantly downwards from the head what the earth once upon a time caused to flow from within outwards, and which became hard up above there, and settled down, for instance, as quartz crystals. It streamed out from the interior of the earth. In man it flows from his head through the whole of his body. It is quartz, or silicic acid. But the human body does not permit the quartz to become a crystal. That would indeed be a fine business if we were all to be filled up inside with quartz crystals!

Only to a point where the quartz is about to become hexagonal does man allow the thing to go; there he stops it; he does not allow it to go any further. Thus we have only the beginnings of the quartz formation in our body, and then it is arrested; it must come to an end.

Our whole life rests on this—that we are perpetually on the point of forming hexagonal crystals from the head downwards, but we do not permit it actually to come about. These hexagonal crystals always wish to take form in us, but in reality they do not do so. They are interrupted, arrested, and then we have, so to speak, the quartz fluid in the highest possible state of solution within us.

If we had not this quartz-fluid within us, we could for example, eat ever so much sugar and we should never have a sweet taste in our mouth. This tasting of the sugar is brought about by the quartz we have within us, not by its substantiality, but by what is the will within it to become hexagonal like a crystal. That is what causes it; that is the essential.

You see, in the interior of the earth this crystallising process is continued. Man arrests the silicic acid when it wants to grow spiky up above inside him. The earth allows it to become spiky up above.

But man needs this force, this silicic acid force—i.e., this power to bring forth hexagonal forms—man has need of it.

I imagine that you are not all of you good geometricians. Geometry is not exactly familiar to you all; you could perhaps not straight away, draw a quartz crystal, or model one in clay. But your body is a very good geometrician, and wants always to be forming such crystals. We are prevented from doing this. All life consists in the holding back of death, and when we can no longer hold death back, we die.

Now let us look at the bees. The bee flies out and gathers nectar. This it works upon in its own body, and in so doing provides its own life-forces. Further the bee prepares the wax. What does it do with the wax? It makes hexagonal cells. You see, the earth makes hexagonal silicic-acid crystals. The bee makes hexagonal cells, and this is extremely interesting. If I could draw the bees' cells for you—or if you remember Herr Müller showing them to you—then they look just like quartz crystals, only they are hollow. But in their form they are the same.

You see, these cells are hollow (Diagram 12), but what is put in them? The bees' eggs are laid there. Where there is silicic acid in the quartz, here in the cell is a hollow, and there the bee places its eggs. The bee is shaped by the same force that is within the earth and forms the quartz. Here the finely dissolved silicic acid (Diagram 13) is at work. A force is at work there, though this cannot be physically proved. The nectar works in the body of the bee so that it can shape the wax in a form which man really needs, for man must have those six-cornered spaces within him. Man needs the same thing. Inasmuch as the bee is the creature best able to give form to this hexagonal force, the bee is the creature that everywhere collects that particular food which can best be transformed in the body into this hexagonal force.

You need only eat some honey and you receive an immensely strengthening force. If you are too weak to develop this hexagonal force in yourself which has to pass from the head into the whole body, if you no longer have the power to give the blood so much firmness that this force is always present in it, then honey must intervene—or milk in the case of the child. The child has not yet got this hexagonal force; therefore, it must receive it from what is prepared in the human being as milk.

Now you see, gentlemen, that you can give as much casein, fat, sugar and salts to the mice as you please—and they will die. Why? Because the animal also needs this hexagonally-working force. If one only mixes together chemically casein, fat, sugar, and salts, then the force present in the hexagon is not there. When you give the mice milk then it is there. Only in milk it is not so strongly present that when the milk is turning sour it crystallises hexagonally. If this hexagonally-working force were a little stronger in milk, one could drink sour milk and it would form little silicic-acid crystals on the tongue. This would taste as though the milk were full of tiny little hairs. But it does not go so far, because milk comes from the human or animal body, and there it remains fluid. This is sufficient for the child but not for the grown man. But to become adult is something that already begins in childhood, so we must give the child the more powerfully-working hexagonal force that honey contains.

You see, gentlemen, it is very interesting that when you take milk, even if it comes from the human being, it is still something belonging to the animal-nature in man. In man it is animal. If you take honey, it comes from the plant kingdom—indirectly through the bee. But it comes from the plant world and has a plant nature. If you take silicic acid—quartz—then this has a mineral-nature; it has quite a definite hexagonal form. The wax which is produced within the bee itself through the food which is its nourishment, the wax has received its form; it does not originate it, it receives the form as developed in the hexagonal cell. In milk this form is dissolved again; only a shadow-picture of the hexagonal crystal remains in the milk (see Diagram 14). Thus, one can say that honey is a substance most suitable and health-giving for man.

One might however, be inclined to think that it would be just as good if man were to take some silicic acid instead of honey, for then he would also obtain this hexagonal force. But the silicic acid which has been driven as far as the hexagonal form, as far as to evolve this silicic acid form, contains too powerful a crystallising force; it would work much too strongly in man.

Now let us imagine the following. Picture to yourselves some poor child not so fortunate as to be given this honey-cure (as described in the article), at the age of 16 or 17, or at 13 or 14, when it is most suitable. This child has not had this good fortune and the iron-corpuscles in the blood get weaker and weaker.

The percentage in the blood gets less and less. The child grows up, let us say to the age of 30, and has grown up into a weak man. The writer of this article describes this also when she says, “they collapse.” When the man is 30 years of age it may often be a very good thing to give him a honey-treatment, but he is already too much exhausted; he would have to eat so much honey to get any real benefit from it that his digestion would be ruined. Honey teaches man moderation; if you eat too much honey you ruin your stomach.

This rests on quite a simple fact. Honey is sweet; it contains a great deal of sugar. The stomach especially needs acids, and when you put too much sugar into the stomach you hinder the working of the acids. Thus, briefly put, honey must only be eaten in moderate quantities, and when a man is already exhausted at the age of 30, one would have to give him so much honey, if a honey-treatment was to help him (and this it would doubtless do), that he would first get bad stomach disturbances and then intestinal troubles. Thus, one cannot do this, but one can do something else. One can at first give the man very highly diluted, pulverised quartz, that is, silicic acid as a remedy. When you have given him this highly diluted silicic acid as a medicine for a time, then after a time he will be able to benefit by small quantities of honey. The strongly diluted silicic acid will have called forth in him the power to make use of the hexagonal force, and then a small amount of honey can follow. The silicic acid has prepared the way for the honey.

One might also help a man with whom the content of the blood in regard to hæmoglobin has become exhausted, by adding to the honey, suitable to an adult, some highly diluted silicic acid the honey can then take effect. In the case of a child one should give plenty of milk.

You see, it is necessary to know these connections. One might ask: what then is it that works through the honey into man? It is the formative forces of the hexagonal principle. This is within the bees themselves. One can see it in the waxen cells of the comb, and it is this that makes honey so beneficial. It was for this reason that I said just now that it is primarily the force of milk that works in the child, and this can be further enhanced by the addition of honey, whereas in the adult person the forces of the honey are more especially active.

Nevertheless, when a man has grown older this honey force must be strengthened by that of silicic acid, as I told you. Also, a milk and honey cure can be of use because the forces of early childhood still exist in the older man; this is beyond contradiction the good effect of a honey-cure remains undoubted.

In practise, this is well-known, and one should really insist on making these things so clear to people, that a right amount of good honey should be available. On this matter people are very readily deceived. I do not mean this in a bad sense; I might say people are easily mislead by the conditions of present day civilisation. If you have ever asked for honey in hotels when travelling, it was certainly not honey that you were given there, it was sugar-honey, artificially produced.

If people realised that this is by no means the same thing, for there can be no question of any hexagonal force being in such honey, they would never claim that imitation-honey could have the same effect as pure bee-honey. One could very well feed mice with pure honey, they would like it very well. But if you were to feed them on this artificial honey, they would die, though not perhaps in a few days. I have now added what I wished to say about this article on milk and honey cures.

Now another interesting question has been put to me about which I would like to speak, and also to hear what you yourselves have to say about it; also what Herr Müller has to say to you. You see, there are so many matters to be considered that it will really be worth our while to discuss these things further next time. You will then be able to ask your questions, and Herr Mailer or I will answer them.

I want first to touch quite briefly on two other points. They may seem rather strange to you, but I am really eager to know what you will have to say about them.

Written Question:

Among old-fashioned bee-masters there is a conviction that a certain soul-relationship exists between the bee-master and his bees. It is said that when the bee-father dies, then his death must be at once announced to all the bees. If this is not done, then the whole stock will die out in the course of the following year. That a certain relationship of soul does exist between the two is again indicated by the fact that one gets far more stung when one approaches one's work in the hive in an angry or irritable mood, then when one does the same work in a peaceful and harmonious one. Is there any objective reality at the base of this old idea of the bee-masters?

DR. STEINER:

It would be interesting if Herr Müller would tell us quite simply whether he believes such things to be quite in the air or no? Such things are customary among the peasant bee-keepers; they announce a death to the bees. But this soul-relationship, this connection between the bee-father and his bees, is what I now have in mind. Perhaps Herr Müller can tell us more.

HERR MÜLLER:

Two cases were cited which had occurred in Basel and in Zurich. In one family a woman who had helped a good deal with the bees had died, and in the course of a year all the bees were dead. In the other case, at Basel, it was also a woman who died who had given much care to the bees; the same thing happened. It was a very large apiary; in a year's time twenty-eight stocks were reduced to six. One cannot explain this by anything connected with the general conditions, or with the bees themselves. One could trace no disease that the bees may have had. It may have been a “soul” connection.

DR. STEINER:

Let us remember what I once told you about the relation between man and the animals. You may perhaps have heard, gentlemen (I have spoken of it before), that some time ago people talked a great deal about the so-called “counting” horses, horses which, for instance, were asked the question: “How much is four and five?” Then one counted—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9—and the horse stamped its foot at nine. Really remarkable and not inconsiderable sums were done in this way—by the horses. You may perhaps have heard of these “Elberfeld counting horses;” they were very celebrated. Whole delegations went to investigate the matter.

I did not myself see these horses, but I saw another horse belonging to Herr von Osten that could count equally well. One could form an exact judgment of the whole matter. People simply racked their brains over these “counting horses,” for it is naturally something fundamentally terrible that horses should suddenly begin to count. Science itself was put to shame by such a thing! Naturally one was quite aware, for it is an obvious conclusion to reach, that a horse cannot count; one had to find out how it was that the horse stamped its foot at a correct number. In reality, it cannot count; it would be quite idiotic to think a horse could count. Even a University lecturer knew this who scientifically investigated the matter, but he constructed a theory. He said: “Herr von Osten makes a slight facial movement when he counts; the horse observes the lines in his face, and in response to those it stamps its foot.” But he himself then made the following objection: “Yes,” he said, “but in that case the horse should be standing in front of Herr von Osten, and be looking at him, observing his face so that it knows when to stamp.” So he then took this position himself and saw nothing. Still, he did not give up his theory, he merely said: “The change of face is so minute that I cannot perceive it, but the horse can!”

Well gentlemen, it then follows that a horse can see more than a University lecturer! Nothing else can be inferred!

The matter was naturally otherwise. If one is trained by spiritual science and then observes the facts, one does not then lay much stress on some small facial change, for it happened in this way: there on the one side stood the horse; there stood Herr von Osten, very lightly holding the bridle. In his right hand waistcoat pocket Herr von Osten had plenty of sugar. Now Herr von Osten perpetually gave the horse little lumps of sugar. The horse licked them, found them sweet, and loved Herr von Osten very dearly. It loved him ever more and more through these little lumps of sugar, and thus an affectionate relation was set up between the horse and Herr von Osten. The latter had no need to make faces, he had merely to think—nine is the correct number; then the horse could sense it, for animals have a most delicate perception for what is going on around them. They sense what is going on there inside man's head even if he indulges in no small grimaces which a horse might be able to see but not a man. The horse senses what is happening when the brain thinks—nine—and then it stamps. But if the horse had not had any sugar its love would be a little changed into hate, and it would not have stamped with its foot any more.

Thus, you see, the animal has a very delicate perception of things; not of little grimaces, but of things actually not visible; for instance, with the horse, this sensing of what is going on in the brain of Herr von Osten. One has only to observe the facts, and then one knows how wonderful a sensitiveness the animals have.

Just imagine for a moment that you go near a number of bees, and are very much afraid of them. The bees will feel this fear in you, that is undeniable. Well, what does it mean when one is afraid? When one is afraid of something or other one grows pale, fear makes people pale. When one turns pale the blood flows inwards, it does not go outwards into the skin. When the bee comes near a man who is afraid, it senses more than it normally does when the blood is in the skin. It senses the hexagonal force of the blood, and stings into it; it would like to get honey or wax from you. On the other hand, when a man works quietly and his blood is flowing evenly in his veins, then the bee senses something quite different.

And now think of a man who is angry, and in his anger he goes to the bees. Anger makes a man red, and a great deal of blood flows into the skin, for the blood would absorb the hexagonal force. This, too, the bee senses in its delicate feeling and believes you would deprive it of this force—and it stings you. So fine are the subtle sensibilities of the forces of nature at work here.

And now we come to the question of habit. Think of the bee-father, the bees do not see his approach as men would do, the bee “senses”—if I may use this expression—everything that emanates from him—how all this is constituted. The bees get used to this, and should the bee-father die they must re-adjust themselves, and this means a great deal to them.

And now, for a moment, think what one finds even with dogs when the master dies. It has been known to happen that the dog will go to the grave and die there, because it cannot adjust itself to a new master. Why should one suppose that the bee with its fine sensitiveness should not be aware of what happens, why should one not think that the bee also, accustomed as it is to the bee-master cannot at once adapt itself to a new one? Indeed something very significant lies at the root of all this.

But you may say: “Is it then the same with these tiny little creatures as with dogs and horses?” Well, perhaps you may not have noticed, but it is nevertheless true, that one finds men who have, as the saying is, a specially lucky hand in the cultivation of plants. Even when they sow plants, or grow flowers in a pot, everything thrives with them, while another person may take equal care of the plants, but none will thrive; he is not successful. This is due to the “emanations” man has, and which work favourably on the plants in the one case, and unfavourably in the other. It is quite impossible for some people to cultivate plants. They have an unfavourable reaction which above all affects the forces in the flower that produce nectar, the forces that sweeten the flower. So we can say, Man works even on the flowers, and in a much more pre-eminent way upon the bees.

One need not wonder at this, but one must bring the facts before one as they appear; then one begins to understand that things really are so, and can bring them to bear in practical life.

QUESTION:

According to an old peasant rule it is held that if it rains on the third of May, the Day of the Finding of the Holy Cross, the honey is washed out of all the flowers and trees, and there will be no good honey harvest that year. My observations of the last four years seem to confirm that there is some truth in this rule. Is such a thing at all possible?

DR. STEINER:

This question leads us very deeply into the great processes of Nature. You see, it is just this day of the Finding of the Holy Cross, this third of May which is of less importance; it is of much greater importance that it is just this season of the year. What does it actually mean when it rains at the beginning of May? It means this. You know that on March 23, the Sun enters the Sign of the Fishes. I have told you before that the spring equinox is now in this Sign of the Fishes. The Sun remains in this Sign till April 20, then it passes on into the Sign of the Ram. Thus the rays of the Sun come at the beginning of May from an entirely different corner of the Universe than at other times.

Suppose now that it is fine weather in the beginning of May—on the third of May—what does this signify? It signifies that on the third of May the Sun has a powerful influence on all that is earthly. Whatever happens on the earth is under the influence of the Sun when the weather is fine.

What then does is mean when it rains on May the third—that is in the beginning of May? It means that the earth has the strongest forces, and hinders the influences of the Sun. This is immensely significant for the whole plant kingdom, for when the rays of the Sun come from the direction of the Ram, they can so work that their whole power is directed to the plants. Then the flowers can develop the sweet substance which is present in honey. Then the bees can make honey.

When, however, the earth has the greater power, when it rains at this season, the flowers cannot develop in the rays of the Sun which come from the Ram, but must await later events, or maybe even be altogether interrupted in what they have already developed. Then the flowers do not mature the nectar rightly and the bees find none.

A matter such as this only becomes comprehensible when we know that everything that happens on this earth is, as I have repeatedly told you, under the influence of the Cosmos, of all that is outside and beyond the earth. Rain means that the influences of the Sun are chased away. Fair weather means that the Sun forces can unfold in all their power. The question here is not that the power of the Sun comes only in a general way, from where we look up to it, but that it comes definitely from that part of the heavens where the Ram is. The forces of the Sun differ according to the particular corner of the heavens from which they come. This is not due to the Sun alone, but because as the Sun shines down upon the earth, behind it, in this instance, in the Cosmos stands the constellation of the Ram. What the Ram gives, the Sun first absorbs and then pours it forth again with its rays. Thus, it is quite different if the Sun sends its rays to the earth at the beginning of May, or at the end of May. In the beginning of May the full force of the Ram is working; by the end of the month the Sun is already in the Sign of the Bull. These forces of the Bull cannot work with the same strength on the plants, they tend to harden and dry up the plant, and this means above all that the plant is no longer able to mature the forces for honey-production.

Thus something has really come to light from these old peasant rules that has sound reason, and one should take note of it. Naturally, as I have previously said—the consciousness of these things has been lost, and we have fallen into superstitions, for when one is no longer able to distinguish things one may easily become superstitious. Then these old peasant rules are of about the same value as the saying: “If the cock crows on the dunghill the weather will change, or will remain as it was before!”

This does not apply however, to all these old rules, for many of them are based on deep wisdom, and this we should once more study. The peasants who have applied these rules have sometimes done very well! A deeper wisdom will also lead us to the point where we can once more make use of them.