The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Good morning, gentlemen! It's been a while since we last met; perhaps someone has thought of something in particular that we should discuss today?

Questioner: The large ants that live in the forests have a kind of honey or resin at the bottom of their hive; this is used for cultic purposes, and Catholic priests like to use it for incense. I would like to ask what this comes from and what it is composed of.

Dr. Steiner: The resins that form here contain the same substance as incense, and so it has no other value than that it is a cheap way of getting incense. The anthill is formed by the fact that the ants, with the formic acid, also secrete all kinds of things that they bring with them from the resinous components of the trees, where they collect their juices. So it is not a kind of honey, but a resin mixed with formic acid.

Mr. Müller: I would like to come back to the bees, to the carpenter bees, which nest in the trees. When I was young, I experienced a case in a forest, a district where all the wood had rotted, had not been utilized. Then a master carpenter came along and bought up this wood, which had previously only been used as crate wood, in large quantities. He used this wood for carpentry work for new buildings, built it in. After a year, bees were found everywhere inside the apartments. These bees were so dangerous for the building that after two years the carpenter had to take it back, and all the beams up to the roof had to be taken down. He had to take it back completely, had to buy it.

Dr. Steiner: Of course that can happen, naturally. Was the wood infested by the carpenter bees in the forest or only in the storage area?

Mr. Müller: It was auctioned in the fall, then used in the spring, and in the summer the bees came out.

Dr. Steiner: Anything that can be very useful on the one hand can also be terribly harmful on the other. But that does not contradict what I said, that these bees on the wood are absolutely necessary. As I said, anything that can be extremely useful on the one hand can also be extremely harmful on the other. I will give you an example: Imagine that a young boy is short-sighted and you give him a pair of glasses. This is necessary and can be very useful. But if the other boys see it as something particularly elegant and also want to put on glasses, it would not be useful, but harmful. And so it is: what is extremely useful in one case can be extremely harmful in another. That is already the case.

Mr. Müller would like to return to the topic of bees and what our life and work as beekeepers involves: Recently, my colleagues have repeatedly told me that it would have been better if I hadn't read out loud but spoken off the cuff. But I have to reply to my colleagues: I only attended elementary school and do not have a particular talent for speaking. So I am not able to speak off the cuff. So today I will read and not speak off the cuff: About the bees, the queen. (He moves from the beehive to complaints about the workers and the employer; goes back to 1914, expresses some dissatisfaction. Compares: we are also a beehive, and so on.)

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, it is difficult to deal with such matters off the cuff, and I'm sure we've all had the experience that when such things are put on the agenda and dealt with immediately, the discussion takes on a different tone than when the matter is thoroughly considered. Therefore, if the matter is to be discussed further at all, we want to consider it thoroughly. We do have another hour available on Wednesday, and I will then ask the gentlemen who have something to say about this matter to choose the Wednesday hour.

The issue of temperament has rightly been raised. Temperaments work differently if you have had a good night's sleep! Of course, I don't want to take the matter off the agenda at all, because I'm not saying that I won't say something about it myself on Wednesday. But I think we will do it so that we do not deal with the matter right now, when it could boil up hotly in many people, but that we will take our time until Wednesday. Then I will ask the gentlemen, if they wish, to take the floor on Wednesday.

So today, let us stay with what we usually deal with, with the questions of knowledge. And as I said, Mr. Müller's suggestion should definitely be taken into account, that we then express our views on the matter on Wednesday. And I will also say what I myself have to say.

You see, for someone who is completely immersed in it, it is relatively easy to say something about science, even without preparation; but I would like to think again about the whole matter that has been presented here. You agree, don't you? (Agreement) Does anyone have any questions?

Mr. Dollinger: The question has been raised a lot lately, it has been discussed in all the newspapers, that you never know where the dead elephants are buried because you never find the remains of them. I would like to ask Dr. Steiner if it might be interesting to talk about this?

Dr. Steiner: That is an interesting point about elephants! It is a fact that the remains of prehistoric elephants, of ancient times, are sometimes found in an excellent state of preservation. And the way in which these prehistoric elephants are found shows that these animals, which in natural history are called pachyderms, must always have perished in the same way wherever they are found as prehistoric animals – that is, they must have been preserved in such a way that they were suddenly enveloped by the surrounding soil. So I mean by this: these pachyderms could only remain so well preserved if they were not gradually permeated by water, soil and mud, but rather had to be lying in a cave and were suddenly enveloped by earth in a landslide. As a result, when the foreign soil around the skeletons had dissolved the flesh, the solid shell preserved the skeletons extremely well. You can find beautifully preserved specimens of these mighty prehistoric animals in museums everywhere.

But this proves to you that these animals have the peculiarity of retreating into caves when they are about to die. Not quite so strict as you said before, of course, but one can only say that in very frequent cases – of course, dead elephants are also found – the elephant, which could previously still be seen quite well, is missing without a trace. These animals have the peculiarity of retreating into caves when they see death approaching, and ending up in caves. You see, gentlemen, this is connected with the fact that these animals – and what you said essentially only applies to pachyderms – have this extraordinarily thick skin. And what does this thick skin mean? You see, the hardest parts of an animal are the ones that are most closely related to the earth. Even the nails on your own hands are most closely related to the earth. And the skin of an elephant is so extraordinarily related to the earth. As a result, the elephant feels surrounded by the earth all its life, namely by the earth in its skin, and only feels comfortable when it is surrounded by its skin. Well, the elephant is actually constantly dying in its skin. When death approaches – and this is the peculiar thing about these pachyderms – these animals feel it very strongly precisely because of their thick skin. They then want to have more of the earth inside their skin; it is their instinct that they then stay in burrows. You just don't look for them in these burrows. If you were to look for them in burrows, you would find dead elephants where there are elephants. You don't find them in open fields.

But this fact proves that animals have a much stronger sense of their own death than humans do. This is especially true for those animals that are covered by thick skins. But it is also especially true for those animals that are lower animals, are small, for example insects, which are also covered by horny skins. And you see, with these small animals, one must say: it is the case that they not only feel their death, but that they also, when they come to their death, take all possible precautions to ensure that death occurs where it can best occur. Certain insects withdraw into the earth to meet their death there.

It is the same with humans: they buy their freedom by having as little sense of foreboding as possible. Animals have no freedom; they are all unfree. But they have a strong sense of foreboding, and you know that when, for example, there is danger, earthquake-like danger, animals migrate, while humans are truly surprised by such things.

We can say that it is extremely difficult for humans to put themselves in the shoes of animals. But anyone who is really able to observe animals, who has a sense for observing animals, will definitely find that animals act extremely prophetically throughout their lives. And the peculiarity discussed is precisely related to the prophetic life in these animals. But then again, when animals do something like this, they cannot be compared to humans!

There is something else we want to discuss that relates to elephants, and from that in particular what you asked about will become even more understandable. You see, it has been repeatedly observed that, say, any small herd of elephants is led to the watering hole, as we would say here. Now, there might be some no-good boy standing there when the elephants go, and he throws something at an elephant. The elephant seems to be a patient animal at first and does nothing of the sort, behaving quite indifferently. The good-for-nothing boy waits and wants to throw the elephant again when it comes back. But lo and behold, as the elephant goes back, it has retained a good load of water in its trunk. And as it comes back and sees the boy again, before the boy can throw it, it splashes the boy all over with this load of water. These things have been observed repeatedly. Now, you could say: Gosh, the elephant is much smarter than a human, because the elephant must have tremendous wisdom if it remembers something like the insult the boy did to it and now retains this load of water in its trunk and takes revenge later!

Yes, gentlemen, the thought that you have for the elephant is not quite right. You don't have to compare it to human cleverness, but you do have to compare it to something else in humans. If a fly lands on your eye, you do this: you wipe the fly off without giving it much thought. In science, where we have many expressions for things that we sometimes understand much less, we call this a reflex movement. So you just wipe away, out of some kind of instinct, out of some kind of defensive movement, what could possibly be harmful to you. Such things happen to people all the time. When a person simply wipes away a fly, his brain is not active at all; only the nerves that go to the spine are active. Not so when a person is thinking about something: Up here he has his brain, then, for example, when he has seen this or that, his optic nerve goes to the brain, and from the brain the will goes through the rest of the organism, which does something. But if a person simply swats at a fly sitting there, then the nerve does not go to the brain at all – even if it is at the head – but goes directly to the spinal cord, and without the brain even thinking about it, the fly is swatted away. So it is the spinal cord that actually causes us to instinctively defend ourselves as humans when something approaches us in this way.

We humans, at least physically, do not have thick skin, but very thin skin. Our skin is so thin that it is even transparent, because the human skin consists of three layers: the inner one is the so-called dermis, then there is a layer, which is the so-called Malpighian layer, and then there is the outer skin, which is already completely transparent. We also have skin like an elephant, only it is very thin. The outer skin is completely transparent. The fact that we have a skin that is transparent means that we are in contact with our surroundings through all our senses, and the fact that we are in contact with our surroundings means that we are inwardly thinking people and reflect on things. The elephant is simply a thick-skinned animal in the physical sense, while people are often thick-skinned in the moral sense. But what does that achieve? You can easily imagine, after what I have told you, that the elephant is extremely insensitive to its surroundings. Such an elephant, basically, feels nothing at all, and everything it perceives of its surroundings, it must see; it is like a world closed in on itself. To study the mind of an elephant in depth is, of course, something extraordinarily interesting for some people. Sometimes a person would have to have an extraordinary desire to advance in knowledge, to be an elephant. Because, you see, if a person had the mind to do so – to have an elephant's mind – then he would indeed become so clever that it would be impossible to express how clever! But the elephant doesn't have the brain to become so clever. Because he is completely closed in on himself, his reflex movements, his defensive movements, are prolonged. This takes a long time. If you had a fly sitting on you and you didn't have the instinct to swat it away right away, the fly would fly away by itself first. Now, with the elephant, it is like this: He would let a fly sit because the story that he would brush it away would only come to him after an hour, that's how slowly the reflex movement, the defensive movement, works. And what the elephant does with his trunk is nothing more than such a reflex movement that just takes a longer time. And it is not that he thinks: The boy insulted me, I have to splash a load of water over his head – the elephant does not think about that. But he wants to actually hit the boy with his trunk while he is standing there; but that takes a long time for an elephant. If you throw dirt at a boy, you hit him without thinking twice. But the elephant is a slow animal, precisely because it is a pachyderm, and so it takes a long time, going back and forth, until it has extended its trunk and wants to hit the boy. But while he is drinking in the meantime, he realizes: When the water is in his trunk, his trunk is stronger, it strengthens his trunk; he wants to make his trunk stronger by keeping water in it. And he feels that his trunk is getting longer. It is simply the extended trunk with which he wants to hit him when he squirts out the water load. That is what you have to think about. You can't just ascribe human wisdom to the elephant, but you have to go into the elephant's whole mind, and then you find something like that. And so it is with the elephant that he is inwardly a closed entity and notices everything, and especially notices what happens inside him. That is how he also notices the approach of death and can withdraw.

It is a fact that there is very little animal psychology at all today. It is true that people do observe animals and find all kinds of interesting facts, as I have already told you. But actually looking into the animal soul is something that is extremely rare today. But if you want to find out about these things, you have to sharpen your senses by observing life in general.

Go to the very small animals, as there are such. There are very small animals that consist only of a soft, slimy mass (see drawing). This soft, slimy mass can, when there is a grain of some kind nearby, stretch out something like a thread from the mass. First an arm is formed out of the mass. This can be retracted again. But you see, such animals excrete lime or silica shells, so that they are surrounded by lime or silica shells. Now, you cannot notice much about such a small animal that excretes a lime or silica shell. But then there are more perfect animals, and you can already notice more. There are animals that also consist of a slimy mass, but inside there is something that, when you look closely, looks like small rays; and then they have a shell around it, and there are spines on the shell. Everything that then grows into a coral looks like this.

Take an animal like this, which has a shell with spines and, inside its soft mass, such radiant structures. What is that? If you really investigate, you will find that these rays inside are not caused by the earth, but are caused by the earth's surroundings, by the stars. This soft mass is caused by the sky, and the hard mass, or the mass with the spines, is caused by the earth's interior. How does something like this come about? Well, gentlemen, if you want to know how something like this comes about, imagine: here is a piece – I am drawing it quite enlarged – of one of these slimy little creatures. Now, due to the influence of a star from far away, a piece of such a ray is formed here inside. As a result of this forming, the star's influence presses the rest of the mass here quite strongly. But the surrounding mass presses even harder against the wall. Because of this, a stronger bulge forms on the shell inside because it presses harder, a spine of the surrounding lime or siliceous mass. So this spine is caused from the outside, from the earth, but this ray from the inside through the influence of the star. Can you understand that?

What is forming in there is the beginning of a nerve mass; what is forming out there is the beginning of a bone mass. So we see that in these lower animals, nerves form under the influence of the external world, the extraterrestrial. Everything that is bony, shell-like – after all, the lower animals only have an outer bone – forms under the influence of the earth.

The more you look at more perfect animals, the more you see that the formation of shells stops and the formation of skeletons sets in, which is then most perfectly present in humans. But look at the human skeleton. When you look at the human skeleton, you come to the point where you can actually compare the head with a lower animal, because it has a kind of shell. Inside it is soft. That is a great difference compared to the rest of the human bone structure. Your leg bones, you carry them internally, and the flesh covers them. The soft mass is on the outside. In this way, the human being has taken the bone skeleton into itself. Now, the fact that the external skeleton is not taken in as it is with the head, but as it is with the rest of the human being, is connected with the fact that the blood develops in a certain way in these higher animals and also in humans. If you look at such lower animals, everything is a white mass. Even what runs through them as blood is white. These lower animals actually have white blood that is not warm at all. The higher the animals become and the more we approach the animal organization up to the human being, the more the human being, who remains light, is permeated by the blood mass. And the more the nerve is permeated by the blood mass, the more the skeleton, which was previously only an outer shell, also retracts into the interior of the organism.

So that one can say: Why do human beings have internally structured bones, like on their arms and legs? Because they have permeated their nervous mass with blood mass. So that one can say: The higher animals and human beings need blood internally so that they can take the shell inwardly. Can you understand that?

But from this we can also say that a lower animal knows nothing of itself. But humans and higher animals know of themselves. How do we know of ourselves? By having a skeleton within us, we know of ourselves. So if you ask how humans actually have their self-awareness, how they know of themselves, then one must not point to the muscles, then one must not point to soft tissue, but one must point straight to one's solid skeleton. Through the solid skeleton, man knows of himself. And the thing is that it is extraordinarily interesting to look at the human skeleton.

Imagine you have a human being here and I draw in his skeletal system very roughly (see drawing). Now it is extremely interesting: when you look at a skeleton, you have to imagine that this skeleton was inside the human being; but this skeleton of the human being is completely covered by skin. If I am to draw this skin here, I would have to draw it like this. When a person is alive, his entire skeletal system is enclosed in a skin, the so-called periosteum, which is very closely adapted to it, just like in a sack. So imagine a joint here, where a bone has a head that engages, let's say, in a joint socket. This is how it is with the periosteum: there is the periosteum; the entire outer bone is surrounded by the periosteum, and there the periosteum continues, it arrives again, goes over the skeleton. So if you simply imagine the skeleton inside the human being, the skeleton is quite separate inside the human being. Between all the other parts of the human being and the skeleton is a sack-like skin. It is really as if you take the skeleton of a living person and imagine spreading a sack over the whole skeleton and touching it everywhere so that the sack would cover the skeleton on the outside. But you don't need to do that at all, because nature has already done it; the whole thing is inside a sack, in the leg skin. And the interesting thing is: the blood vessels only go as far as the periosteum – the periosteum is permeated by them – this blood nourishes, as far as it is to be nourished, the bone, but within the sac the bone is completely earth: calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, ash, salts and so on. So you have the strange fact: So you have muscles, liver and so on, and you have your blood vessels in you, and the blood now first forms a sac. The sac seals you off from the inside. Within this sac is a cavity, but this cavity first contains the skeleton. So it is really as if your bones were inside you, and you had sealed your bones off with a sac, the peritoneum. And these bones are completely earthy, they are earth inside. You cannot feel them inside. You feel your bones through what the bones are, just as you would if you took a piece of chalk. If you take a piece of chalk, you don't feel it either, it is outside of you. So the bone is outside of you, and you are separated from it by a sack. All of you have something in your skeleton that is not really you, that is earth formed into bone, phosphoric acid lime, salts, carbonic acid lime; you carry that within you, only you have surrounded it with a sack, the periosteum.

You see, gentlemen, there is no room for anything unspiritual; because if you bring any splinter of earth into yourself, it must fester. The bone does not fester. Why? Because in the place where you are dead within, where the bone appears dead within the skin of the leg, there is spirit through and through. You see, that is the wonderful instinct why simple people, who often knew more than the learned, imagined death under the skeleton, because they knew that the spirit resides in the skeleton. And so they imagined that when a spirit walks around, it must also appear in skeletal form. This is a correct pictorial representation. Because as long as a person is alive, he makes room for the spirit through his bones.

This is something we will discuss in more detail in the near future. But you can also see from this that people put a lot of effort into bringing the spirit into their bones. The elephant still leaves room for the spirit in its thick skin. And because the elephant leaves room for the spirit in its thick skin, the spirit that the elephant then feels can perceive when the outside world destroys it. Man knows nothing of his own death because his skin is too thin. If he were also physically a pachyderm, he would also withdraw into a cave and die in a cave. And one would also say: Where do people go? They go to heaven when they die! Yes, gentlemen, the same thing was said about those people who were greatly revered in certain circles as they were about the elephant. For example, about Moses, of whom it was said that his body had not been found. He disappeared because people imagined that this had really happened to him. He became so wise, people imagined, as I told you earlier. If man were physically a pachyderm and had his brain, then he would be so clever that one cannot even express how clever he is! And people knew such connections. Think, it is amazing what people knew! They say of Moses that he was already as clever as he would have become if he had had a thick skin; that is why he also withdrew and his body was not found. It is a very interesting context. Does it not appear so to you? Ancient legends are often related to pure, beautiful animal worship.

Well, we'll talk about that some more next time, if the proceedings we've been saddled with today leave us time.

So next Wednesday, gentlemen.

I would like to add a few more things to what I told you last Saturday, and I can answer the two questions I was given for today next time. We talked about poisons and their effects on people, and we have just seen from the poisons that if you understand real science, you have to ascend to the supersensible, to the spiritual parts of the human being.

Now, in order to give you a complete picture, I would like to add to what produces such strong toxic effects, so that you can see the full picture, what the more or less healthy body can cope with when it comes to nutrition. I have spoken about nutrition several times, but let us talk about it again and take into account what we presented last time.

When it comes to nutrition, humans mainly consume three to four types of food. The first of these is protein, which you can best recognize by looking at a chicken egg. Protein is produced by plants as well as by animal and human bodies. Not only do human and animal bodies need the forces they have within themselves to produce protein, because every living body produces protein, but they also need the protein that is independently produced by plants. The human body also absorbs animal protein. In relation to this protein, science in particular has basically been embarrassed in the very latest times; because it was still taught everywhere twenty years ago that a person must absorb at least 120 grams of protein per day in order to stay healthy. And so the whole diet was organized in such a way that people were prescribed which foods they should eat in order to get the necessary amount of protein into their bodies. It was believed that 120 grams were necessary.

Today, science has completely abandoned this view. It now knows that if a person eats that much protein, not only does it not help their health, but it directly contributes to their illness, because most of the protein in the human intestinal tract decays. So that the human organism, by consuming 120 grams of protein a day, constantly has something like rotting eggs in its intestines, which terribly contaminate the intestinal contents and sweat out the poisons, which then pass into the organism, into the not only easily produce in the body what later leads to so-called hardening of the arteries – most hardening of the arteries comes from eating too much protein – but also what makes people extremely susceptible to all kinds of infectious diseases. The less protein a person consumes, the less he is exposed to the risk of contracting diseases – provided, of course, he has the necessary resistance. People who consume a lot of protein contract infectious diseases such as diphtheria, measles, and smallpox more easily than people who do not consume as much protein.

It is indeed very peculiar that today science teaches that not 120 grams of protein are necessary, but only 20 to 50 grams. That is the amount, they say, that a person actually needs daily. In just two decades, science has so quickly changed its views. So you can see how little you can actually rely on when something is supposedly scientifically established. If you happen to need to inform yourself on this subject and you pick up a twenty-year-old encyclopedia, you will read in the relevant chapter that you need 120 grams of protein. If you get a later edition, you will read: 20 to 50 grams, and if you had more, you would become ill from it. So you see what the situation is with scientific truths. We are taught what is to be considered true or false depending on which edition of the encyclopaedia we get hold of. All this just goes to show that you cannot get a clear idea of such things, which go into the spiritual, at all in this way. And that is of course a reason, when one really considers the matter, to go into the spiritual, when one wants to understand what happens when man takes in egg white. But it is that food, which must still be processed in the intestines, in the abdomen, and the abdomen itself must have the strength to process this egg white. You know that protein, especially fresh egg white, is semi-liquid. All protein is semi-liquid. The human etheric body has access to all semi-liquid substances. The human etheric body cannot do anything with solid substances, only with liquid ones. So the human being must take all the food he consumes in a liquid state.

Now you will say: When a person takes salt, sugar or something like that, it is solid. But it is immediately dissolved! That is what the saliva is for. The solids that make up the actual physical body must not enter the human body from the outside world at all. Therefore, you can conclude: You have solids in you, you know that; the bones are solid. But the thing is this: The firm bones are formed only out of the fluids in the human body itself. Nothing solid from the outside can ever enter the human body. The human body must allow everything solid to arise from the fluids. Therefore, you can say: We have the solid in us and the physical body forms it. But the physical body is formed entirely out of the liquid, and for the liquid, the etheric body is there, the fine body that cannot be seen, but which permeates the whole human being. And the egg white must also be completely processed by the etheric body, in the lower abdomen. Of course, as I have already told you, the other spiritual elements of the human being also work in there; but the egg white must be processed in the etheric body. So the fluid is there for the etheric body of the human being. Now, from the fact that you can know that the egg white must be processed in the human abdomen, you can see that the egg white cannot actually do the very hardest work in the human being, because it does not need to work its way up into the thoracic body, and above all, it does not need to work its way up into the human head. You see from this that egg white cannot serve as a nutrient that comes into consideration in the first place. One could say that it is actually impossible for a person to eat too little protein, because in the abdomen, what one eats is immediately inside; it does not need much work there. The protein is processed in the abdomen. Even if a person only consumes food that is very low in protein, all protein is processed immediately.

So you can see that it is entirely possible for humans to get by on a low-protein diet. Today, science already admits that, but years ago, children in particular were overfed with protein. Today, we see the children who were overfed with protein in the 1870s or 1880s; they now suffer from hardening of the arteries or have already died from it. So the harmfulness of something does not become apparent in the same period of time, but only much later.

The second type of food is fat. Fat naturally goes into the abdomen when it is eaten. But fat passes through the intestines and has a very strong effect on the middle part of the human body, on the chest. So for the middle part, the thoracic region, for the proper nourishment of the heart, chest and so on, humans must take in fatty substances.

From this it follows that man needs fat in the thoracic region because breathing takes place in the thoracic region. What does that mean? It means that the carbon that humans carry within them combines with oxygen. When carbon combines with oxygen, warmth is needed. The function of fats, in combining with oxygen, is to produce warmth. So fats contribute greatly to what the human chest organism needs.

Now one can say: proteins, when not processed by the body, and specifically when not processed in the abdomen, have a tendency to rot. If we have proteins in us that cannot be properly processed, we really do have something like rotten eggs in our intestines. Isn't that right, gentlemen? You are well aware of the smell of rotten eggs, and the thing is that if a person takes too much protein, he sweats this rotten-egg smell out internally into his body. He permeates himself completely with this rotten egg stench. Yes, if you leave eggs standing, then they will become rotten eggs, then they will stink like rotten eggs. And the part that the body has not processed will of course also stink in the body; but the other part, which is processed, will not stink, but will be transformed into something pure in the body. But that is the work of the etheric body. The etheric body is there to overcome and eliminate that which arises as a putrid stench. It is the case in the human body that the etheric body is the fighter and the victor over putrefaction. Putrefaction is conquered in the human being through the etheric body. If a person no longer has their etheric body after death, then they begin to rot. So I would like to say quite tangibly here: a person does not rot while they are alive; as soon as they are no longer alive, they rot. Why is that? Because the etheric body is gone when a person is dead! The etheric body is therefore the part of the human being that prevents rotting. So we are constantly fighting putrefaction within us, and the one who fights putrefaction is our etheric body.

So I think, gentlemen, anyone who thinks this through must find with the utmost clarity, merely by external observation, that an etheric body must be there, that an etheric body must be there everywhere at all. Just imagine, proteins are produced everywhere on earth, and they rot. The earth would have to stink up to heaven if it were not for the ether, which repeatedly drives away this putrefaction. So, inside and outside the human organism, it is the ether that constantly fights against the proteins from becoming putrid. This must be taken into account.

If we move on to fats, then we have to say: fats do not go bad, but they do go rancid – you all know this if you have ever left fats out somewhere – even butter goes rancid. So fats have the peculiarity of going rancid. Now, if you have left butter standing, you won't be able to tell whether it's rancid or good, fresh butter — unless you're trained to look at it. But when you put the butter on your tongue and taste it, you know immediately that the butter is rancid. So it has something to do with consciousness, with sensation. Rotting has something to do with smelling, with the external, you can smell it. Of course, it is different with rotten eggs than with the scent of roses, but at least you smell it. But not the process of going rancid. Rancidity is something that is described in terms of something more internal, of tasting.

This already indicates that it has much more to do with inner sensation than with what is putrid about eggs. The human thoracic body is physically connected to all that is sensation in consciousness, but the astral body is spiritually connected to it. And you know that what is air-like is in the thorax. We breathe in the air. We process the air. In the chest, the air is in the right place. In the other part of the human body, only a small amount of gases and air types may be produced. If too much gas is produced in the intestines, it causes bloating, and that is not healthy. The middle body of the human being is there for the actual gas production. And the higher supersensible spiritual link that intervenes there — that intervenes in the gaseous — is the human astral body. This human astral body now fights the rancidity of fats within itself; just as the etheric body fights the putrefaction of proteins, so the astral body fights the rancidity of fats. Man would constantly have a rancid belching of his own fats, would taste rancid inside, if his astral body did not constantly fight this rancidity. So that we have this astral body within us to fight the rancidity of fats.

You see, gentlemen, that is quite wonderful, because you can see from it that what is outside in the ordinary physical, material world takes a completely different course from what is inside with us. Outside in the physical world, fats definitely go rancid. Man does not always go rancid for his own good, only when he becomes ill inside. So the thing is that in a healthy state, a person's astral body is such that it cannot go rancid. It only goes rancid if the person eats too much fat for the astral body to cope with, or if too much fat is produced due to some other reason. But internally, the person does perceive when their fat is going rancid. And one can say: When a person becomes very rancid, that is, when the activity of the astral body is much too weak, then he has an unpleasant taste in his mouth all the time. This unpleasant taste then has an effect on the stomach. And in this roundabout way, a person first gets stomach and intestinal diseases from the rancid fat within himself.

If you notice that a person is becoming rancid inside, then arsenic is a good remedy for the fats that he has inside that he is not processing. Arsenic fights against fattening and strengthens the astral body. And the result is that the person can fight this rancidity. These are things that are extremely important. If a person shows an inclination within themselves to be unable to overcome their putrid protein through the etheric body, then some compound with copper usually has an extremely strong effect on the person as a remedy. Copper is effective when the lower abdominal diseases, intestinal diseases, are directly caused by the protein. But if you notice that something is making itself felt through the mouth, through the sense of taste, it does not help to give the person copper, but arsenic is needed because you first have to strengthen the astral body. So it is not enough to simply state that this or that disease lies in this or that part of the human being; instead, one must know where they come from. Whether they come from rotten protein in the intestines or from fats that have gone rancid, which in turn affect the intestines and stomach through the taste of the mouth.

So you see, gentlemen, we have within us the opposite of what these substances show on the outside. We have an astral body that fights the rancidity of fats, whereas in the ordinary physical material world, fats simply go rancid.

A third food that humans consume is the substances that are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are found in particular in potatoes, for example, in lentils and beans, and of course in all types of grain. The carbohydrates are in there. In a great many of these substances, either sugar is directly contained, which we always take with our food, or sugar is produced directly from these carbohydrates by converting what we take in with the potato, for example. Potatoes contain mostly starch. This starch paste is first converted into dextrin and then into sugar in our bodies. So when you eat potatoes, you are actually nourishing yourself with sugar, because the potato paste, the starch paste, is converted into sugar in the human body. Isn't it true that grapes, for example, contain a lot of this sugar, and so does alcohol. What alcohol is for a person is actually based not only on the alcohol itself but also on its sugar content. Sugar is produced in the human organism from alcohol.

The first kind of food was therefore protein, the second kind was fat and the third kind was starch, sugar. We have seen that protein is processed by the etheric body in certain quantities, so that it does not become putrid. The fats are processed by the astral body, so that they do not go rancid. Now for starch and sugar! If you look at the etheric body, you have to say that it is mainly active in the lower body. The astral body is mainly active in the chest area. Now we come to something else. You all know, I don't want to say from your own experience, but from seeing people who are not like you, the effect of alcohol, and you know that alcohol produces a particular characteristic in people, first in the intoxication, but we don't want to talk about that for now. But you know, the next day – we have already spoken about this – the so-called “brummschädel” (headache) comes, it is also called a hangover. What does the headache or hangover mean?

Yes, gentlemen, you will already have gathered from the name that a headache has something to do with the human head. And if you have heard people describe how they were different from you the next day because they had a little too much to drink the day before, you will have heard them complain mainly about their heads. Their heads hurt, and when they don't hurt, they feel like they might fall off their shoulders and the like. What actually happens then?

The task of the head is namely to fight what starch and sugar want. What do starch and sugar want? You only have to look at wine. Isn't it true that when autumn comes, you harvest the wine, the grapes. They are pressed and then the mixture ferments. What is left after the process is enjoyed as wine. Now, because wine has become wine through fermentation, it has overcome fermentation. But when you bring wine into the stomach, something is created from it that in turn goes into the food. The alcohol is almost transformed back. And now the substances that want to ferment directly are starch and sugar. Starch and sugar in the human organism want to ferment. When you drink alcohol, the alcohol in the head drives away the forces that prevent the fermentation of sugar and starch in the human body. Let's take the story very clearly. Say you ate potatoes and beans on January 22nd and drank alcohol with them. Well, if you hadn't drunk alcohol, your head would have stayed sober. Potatoes and beans contain starch and sugar, which is produced from the starch; the head would have the power to properly prevent the fermentation of starch and sugar. If you take alcohol, the head loses the ability to prevent the fermentation of starch and sugar that you have taken in with the potatoes, and the potatoes and beans, and also the other things, cereals for example, begin to ferment in you.

So instead of preventing fermentation in the human being, it now occurs. And it occurs through an inability of the head that has occurred as a result of alcohol, so that the person is now full of fermentation. There is a strange expression in central Germany, in Thuringia. When someone talks nonsense, they say in Thuringia: He is fermenting. In these parts, it is not customary to say that someone who talks nonsense is fermenting; but those who have been to Germany will have heard it said in central Germany. And if someone always talks nonsense, then in central Germany, in Thuringia, they call him an old hag. So the thing is that in central Germany, fermenting is associated with being confused in the head, with talking nonsense. That is a very good folk instinct. You know that there is too much ferment in a person when they talk too much nonsense. Now, if someone has drunk alcohol and has a headache, then he does not talk nonsense, because he becomes quiet, but the nonsense is in him, it rumbles in him. So it is something that occurs to prevent starch and sugar from fermenting, something that counteracts the tangible effect of alcohol. So that one can say: There is something in the human mind that constantly works to prevent the starch and sugar in it from fermenting.

Now, no one denies that the human head is home to the strongest I, just as the abdomen is home to the etheric body and the middle body to the astral body, the I, the actual I. It is now the case that this actual I has to do with the warmth, just as it has to do with the solid of the physical body, with the liquid of the ether body, with the gaseous of the astral body. It is the case that in everything that depends on the actual self, the human being sets warmth in motion. This can be traced in the human body down to the last detail. The actual self is also connected with the blood, which is why the blood generates warmth. But the actual self, that which the human being experiences in consciousness, is also connected, for example, with glandular secretion. Therefore, glandular secretion is now associated with warmth. It is also the real self that now prevents fermentation from the supersensible through the powers of the head. So one can say: the etheric body fights the putrefaction of the proteins, the astral body fights the rancidity of the fats, the I fights the fermentation of sugars and starches.

This is also the reason why I had to tell you that excessive consumption of potatoes is bad for the head. Excessive consumption of potatoes has the following effect on people. You see, potatoes contain little protein. Because they contain little protein, they are actually a good food for humans. And if a person eats potatoes in moderation with other foods, then it is a good food because of its low protein content. But the potato contains an extraordinary amount of starch, which has to be converted into sugar in the human body, first into dextrin and then into sugar. I told you at the time that if a person eats too many potatoes, his head has to work terribly hard; of course, because the head has to prevent the fermentation. That is why people who eat too many potatoes and therefore have to work their heads terribly to process the potato fermentation become weak-headed. In particular, the middle sections of the brain become weak; only the frontal sections of the brain, which do not have to work as hard to prevent potato fermentation, remain. And so it is precisely because of the fact that potato food has become widespread in recent times that materialism has come about, because it is produced in the forebrain.

It is so strange: one believes that materialism is a logical thing. In a way, materialism in modern times is nothing more than the result of eating potatoes! Well, it's not true, people don't like to think that they should live on potatoes alone; but then they like materialism. So they are actually in a contradiction. If you really wanted to be a materialist, you would actually have to advise spreading potato food everywhere, because it would be the best way to become convinced of materialism, wouldn't it? That is something that most people don't succeed at. But if the materialistic monists wanted to fight effectively, they would actually have to ensure that other foods are replaced by potato foods as much as possible. Then the Monist League would achieve quite tremendous successes. If it did not work very quickly, it could work best over a period of several decades, and it would have the best possible results if it tried to influence people to eat only potatoes. But the people on whom it wanted to exert an influence would have a few tricks up their sleeves to get around its efforts, so it would not have the best possible success!

But you can see from this that spiritual science, as practised here, recognizes precisely the right kind of materialism. Materialism knows nothing at all about the material; spiritual science recognizes precisely that the potato is the right producer of materialism. It is terribly insidious, the potato, cunning, clever to excess. For just see, man can only eat the tubers of the potato, not even the eyes on the potato – they are harmful in themselves – and he certainly cannot eat the flower, because the potato is a member of the nightshade family and the flowers are poisonous. But what is the poison? I already told you last time: in large quantities the poison kills, in small quantities, finely distributed, it is a remedy. The potato itself has a great deal of starch paste in it, it consists almost entirely of starch paste. It could not live because the starch paste would be terribly harmful; at the same time, it draws the poison out of the world and destroys the harmful effect in itself. That is why I call her clever and cunning. She herself has her poison, through which she removes the harmfulness for herself. But the poison of the potato is particularly harmful to humans; she does not give that to him, she only gives him what she herself combats in herself through her poison. It is really something that can be called that: the potato is a clever, cunning creature! And humans must be clear about the fact that if they eat too many potatoes, their midbrain will atrophy and that even their senses can suffer precisely from excessive potato consumption.

If you eat too many potatoes as a child or very young person, your midbrain will become extremely weak. But the midbrain contains the sources of the most important sensory organs. The midbrain contains the four-mound body, the visual mounds and so on, and excessive potato consumption can even weaken vision because it has its sources in the midbrain. And some eye diseases in old age are caused by the fact that a person was raised on too many potatoes as a child. The person then becomes visually weak, weak-eyed. It is really the case that in the past, people in Europe became visually weak much less often in old age than they do now. And that in turn stems from the fact that, in addition to what otherwise affects the eyes – but that does not even have such a strong effect because it does not work internally, electric light and so on – the excessive consumption of potatoes has a very harmful effect on the eyes, on vision and even on the sense of taste – even on the sense of taste! You see, that is where the following comes from. Suppose a person eats too many potatoes from childhood on. You will often see this in later life: the person never knows when he has had enough because his taste has been spoiled by eating too many potatoes. In contrast, a person who has not eaten too many potatoes knows instinctively when he has had enough. So the instinct, which is more tied to the midbrain, is spoiled by excessive potato consumption. This is what has emerged particularly strongly in recent times.

But from all that I have told you, you can see that a person must be particularly careful to be strong enough to overcome, firstly, the decomposition of proteins, secondly, the rancidity of fats, and thirdly, the fermentation of starch and sugar.

Now, as I told you last time, a person cannot be completely teetotal, because if he does not drink any alcohol at all, alcohol is produced in him. But this alcohol remains in the abdomen; it does not go up to the head, because the head must be free of alcohol, otherwise it is immediately unable, as the carrier of the ego, to fight the fermentation that is in the body in the right way. You see, now you can form an idea of the way in which man relates to his natural environment. If you look, for example, at the protein that is rotting everywhere – after all, animals and plants are rotting – you have to say: there is ether everywhere, which gradually balances this out. If you look at the fats, which are also in the plants and are everywhere, you have to say that these fats would gradually make all living things incapable of living, both animal and human, if it were not for a fighter against rancidity in the astral body. So, in fact, the human being fights that which is outside in nature. And when the human being dies, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego leave the physical body. The human being then passes over into the spiritual world. What happens then? Well, gentlemen, you know what happens. The corpse immediately begins to decompose, to go rancid and to ferment at the same time, except that the decomposition is of course more visible, or rather more noticeable, because people rarely walk around with their noses stuffed up. So the putrefaction is easily smelled. But somehow lying over a grave and tasting whether the fat of the corpse in question has gone rancid is not something one usually does, and that is why one usually knows nothing about it. And the fermentation that does take place is certainly not studied. So it is actually the case that when the ego departs, the human body begins to ferment; when the astral body departs, the human body begins to go rancid; and when the etheric body departs, the human body begins to rot. Man carries this within him continually, but while he lives on earth, he fights it continually. Anyone who denies that the etheric body, the astral body and the I are spiritual realities within the human being must be asked: what do you think actually happens, why does the human being not rot? Why does he not ferment? Why does he not turn rancid? He would have to do so if he were like the mere physical body!

But what does our science do? Our science waits with its study until the human being has died. Because what it knows about the living human being is actually very little compared to what it actually knows from anatomy when the human being is a corpse, has died. Everything you can actually learn relates only to the corpse. Our science always waits for the corpse. So this science cannot know anything at all about the real human being who is alive, because it does not take this human being into account at all. And that is precisely the damage to our science – it has only been like this since the 17th century – that it has basically only gained its knowledge from the corpse. But the corpse is no longer the human being, because one must ask: What is it that, while the human being is alive, the corpse, which he also carries with him during his lifetime, does not behave as a corpse in such a way that it rots, ferments and becomes putrid? It is precisely when one really looks at the living human being that one comes across these spiritual, these supersensible aspects of the human being. And then one also notices that the ego works primarily in the head, that the astral body works primarily in the chest, and that the etheric body works primarily in the lower body. And science does not even know about the lower body, because it believes that the same processes that are outside in nature are in the lower body. That is simply not the case.

Well, gentlemen, it is interesting to study things, I would like to say, not in the study chamber, but to study them in the life of the people outside. There are, as you know, baths where it smells of rotten eggs, for example Marienbad. There are also German baths that contain hydrogen sulfide, where it smells like rotten eggs. Yes, really: people who are otherwise gourmets and also have a fine sense of smell have to go to such bathing places. And why do they do that? Why do they sometimes live there for several months during the summer in places where it smells as if everything has been sprinkled with rotten eggs? You see, it is like this: these people have actually eaten too much protein, and now they come to the seaside resort; because they are covered with skin and the thing is internal, they themselves do not smell like that, but if you could smell it, they would smell terribly of rotten eggs inside! Now all these people, who smell of rotten eggs on the inside, come to the seaside resorts, where it smells of rotten eggs, and what happens there? Yes, you see, one time the rotten egg smell is inside, the other time it is outside. The first time it is inside, the nose does not notice it; the second time it is outside, the nose notices it. Head and stomach are opposites. What the stomach produces in terms of rotten egg smell when it comes from the head through smelling is fought. And so, in the seaside resorts that smell of rotten eggs, the internal rotten egg smell is fought.

This is especially noticeable for those who have the sense to make such observations. As a boy, I happened to go to a seaside resort like this. I had to go to Bad Marienquelle every other day. So it stinks of rotten eggs there. While it is so unpleasant on the outside because it smells so terrible, you suddenly start to feel very comfortable in your stomach. So if you are not sick, if you don't have a rotten egg smell in your stomach, you experience a feeling of a higher zest for life. Those who do not let themselves be repelled by the rotten egg smell can experience this. Of course, the one who holds his nose shut does not have the opposite, does not have this spring effect in the stomach that one has when one really surrenders to the rotten egg smell. And the rotten egg smell, for example, even when artificially produced, is an extraordinarily good healing agent. It gives the body the strength, for example, to make fading muscles firm again, to make them strong. Now, people do not love such cures, but they are extremely useful in a certain respect. Because, you see, when the rotten egg smell approaches a person externally, it becomes spring in the belly internally. And in spring everything sprouts and grows, and a person can become strong again by getting spring in his belly.

This is what happens to people who gluttonously spoil their stomachs during the winter. You see, if you don't spoil your stomach in winter through gluttony, then you join in with the spring that is outside. It is precisely the abdomen that participates in spring in an extraordinarily strong way. But if you really want to experience spring outside in nature, then you should eat as few such things as goose liver pâté and so on as possible. If you have eaten a lot of goose liver pâté, then it is not spring in the human stomach, but rather it remains in the human stomach as it is under the earth in winter - not as it is on the earth, but as it is under the earth. It is warm there, that is where you put the potatoes in the pits. But everything in the person rots because the warmth is stored in the belly; it does not spring in the person. And then you have to look for an artificial spring in the rotten egg smell.

Such is the contrast between the ego and the etheric body. The I and the etheric body must balance each other out in the human being. You can see from this that if you only really study nature, if you go to a seaside resort with an open mind and there is a rotten egg smell, hydrogen sulfide, then the feeling of spring in the belly teaches you how the opposite of this actually works internally in the putrefaction of the protein substance.

I wanted to give you some additional information to what I said last time. You know that I told you that when someone has taken a certain poison, they must take liquid egg white as an antidote. Those things that are healthy become poisons if they are not properly treated in the body, if too much of them enters the body. So even egg white can expel a toxin from the human body, but egg white itself is toxic if it decays in the body, if too much of it enters the body. So close together are nutrition and poisoning. And you will have heard for yourself how excess in nutrition can become poisoning. A large part of illnesses are nutritional illnesses, that is, no consideration is given in nutrition to the fact that the substances in question should only be consumed in a certain amount if they are to be processed.

I will have the next lesson announced because I cannot be there on Saturday. I will be in Bern.

Good morning, gentlemen! I will now continue with the considerations we have begun. Don't you see the situation quite clearly: over there in the east is Asia. In ancient times, people came over from Asia to Europe, to Greece, directly along a whole series of islands. So the thing was like this (it is drawn): here Asia ended; here it went over to Africa; there was the Nile, of which I have spoken to you a lot. Here is Greece, here is the Adriatic Sea, and here is Italy, here then the island of Sicily. So there would be a lot of islands here, Samos, Rhodes, Cyprus and so on, and on these islands one came from Asia over to Greece. Here is Greece, here is the Roman Empire, today's Italy.

Now you have to remember the following, gentlemen. You see, in Greece, from about the year 1000, 1200 BC, one might say, everything I have told you about developed, and through that people learned to look at the world. But already, one might say, from the 4th, 3rd century BC, the rule in Greece was gradually lost, and it passed to Rome. After all, that was the capital. The way it happened was that in the most ancient times more and more Greeks, those who were more or less dissatisfied in Greece, emigrated and settled here, both in Sicily and here in southern Italy. As a result, over a period of half a millennium, four to five hundred years, Greek culture spread across the sea, so that southern Italy and Sicily were then called: Greater Greece. Even the ancient Greek homeland was referred to merely as Greece, and the other was referred to as Great Greece. It was not just the dissatisfied who turned to it, but people went there like the great philosopher Plato, who wanted to found a model state there. And actually the most important people who created the culture lived in southern Italy. And it must be said that in southern Italy, here in the south, there was a refined, educated life, while from above the brutal rule later called Romanism spread.

You know that the original population of Rome came into being in a very strange way: all the scoundrels in the surrounding area were summoned by the chiefs, of whom Romulus is particularly well known, and All the scoundrels in the area were summoned to Rome, and with them the first Roman robber state was originally formed. It is then that the robber mentality was continued under the first Roman kings. But very soon, under the fourth and fifth kings, the settlement and immigration of a northern tribe, the Etruscans, became established. These were again people, one can already say so, who then mixed with the descendants of the robbers, and through this again a human trait was introduced into the Roman culture. But all that which Rome later established as world domination, and which has been passed down to our time in the form of mankind's desire for power, actually comes – and we should have no illusions about this – from this original colony of scoundrels, which was founded on the seven hills of Rome. Only that everything possible has been poured over it; the thing has of course been terribly refined, but one does not understand the thing, how it was done later, if one does not know that an original robber colony had been gathered together from the forests. And all the lust for power and the like that spread throughout Europe and still play such a great role today came from this. In Rome, too, what then increasingly intertwined the church with secular rule was formed. And that is how the times of the Middle Ages came about and so on.

Now, you see, the Mystery of Golgotha happened at the beginning of our era. Roman rule was established, as I have described to you now, in the 8th century BC. So at that time, seven centuries after the establishment of Roman rule, this rule had spread far and wide, forming entire areas all the way over to Asia. Even where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, Roman rule was everywhere. The Jews living in Palestine, among whom Jesus of Nazareth appeared, were also under Roman rule. After all that we have said about the Mystery of Golgotha, it will be good to also take a little consideration of what has actually happened on the Italian peninsula since ancient times.

It is a fact that one must say: Europe actually only understands that which goes back to Roman times. Our so-called educated people have always studied Greek, but very little of Greek culture has actually been understood in Europe. You see, it is now very interesting that one hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha took place, one of the most important Roman writers, namely Tacitus, writes a single sentence about Christ Jesus in his extensive historical works! This Tacitus described the ancient Germans, the ancestors of the Germans, in a way that could no longer be written at all later, for example, a hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha. In his writings, there is only one sentence about Christ Jesus, which is: “The so-called Christ founded a sect among the Jews and was then executed according to court judgment.” That is all that the educated Roman Tacitus said, a hundred years after Christianity was founded in Palestine! So you can imagine: the ships went back and forth continuously, all kinds of trade relations developed, and in Rome, a hundred years later, no more notice was taken of Christianity than that a sect had been founded and the founder had been executed after a proper legal judgment!

Now, it must be added that, although the Roman Empire cannot yet be called a state – the correct concept of the state did not actually arise in Europe until the 16th century – but I would like to say that the state ethos is already there. Actually, what later became the state ethos had grown out of Romanism. So one can say: Tacitus was already so imbued with such a state ethos that the most important thing about Jesus Christ seemed to him to be that he was executed according to the proper judicial judgment. That is one thing.

But then you must also consider that Christianity was not at all what it later became. It originally had a truly free spirit. And it can be said that there were the most diverse views, all of which found expression only in that they saw something special in Christ Jesus; but otherwise they held the most diverse views.

Now, gentlemen, you will only understand what actually came into the world with Christ Jesus, and why it was necessary in the end that I pointed out to you how the earthly environment has an influence on the earth, even in language, you will understand it only when I now attempt to show you how Christianity has actually formed as a doctrine, as a view, as a world view, as a view of life, and how the Christ Jesus has intervened in this formation of Christianity. It is something very special to see: there in Jerusalem, Christianity is being founded; a hundred years later, the most educated Roman does not know more about it than what I have told you! But now people are constantly migrating from Asia through Africa to Italy. And beneath the surface, I might say, of what is considered humanity in Rome, this Christian sect is spreading. And when Tacitus wrote what I have told you, the Christians, as they were called, had long since spread among the people in Rome, who were not bothered by a noble Roman.

But what did they do with the Christians? Yes, you see, the descendants of Romulus, the robber, had also arrived at a point in time where they had become “properly educated”. Namely, their education consisted of building large arenas, among other things; there, fights with wild animals took place. There was a great desire to throw those who were not considered part of humanity in the Roman sense to the wild beasts and to enjoy watching them being devoured after they had first had to fight with them. That was a 'refined' enjoyment, for example. Now, the despised sect of Christians was particularly suited to being eaten by wild animals, when people in Rome thought the way I have indicated to you; they were also particularly suited to being covered with pitch so that they could be set on fire and then used as torches in the circus. But the Christians found ways to live anyway. And they could achieve this by holding their ceremonies and so on without being noticed. They spread what they thought was right for the purpose of spreading it underground, in the catacombs. Catacombs are wide spaces under the earth. In these wide spaces under the earth, the Christians buried the dead they loved. There were graves, and services and religious ceremonies were held on the graves. It was a custom at that time to hold religious services over the graves. That is why you can still see today, when you look at an altar in a Catholic church, that it is actually a tomb (it is drawn) and inside there are, for example, so-called relics, the bones of saints and so on. In the earliest times, the altar was actually a real tombstone, and the religious services were held on it. But under the ground, in these catacombs, the Christians in the first centuries were able to hide what they had done.

And if you look a few centuries later, the picture changes quite significantly. Here is what happened. You see, the Romans, in the first centuries after the founding of Christianity, were sitting at the top and enjoying themselves as I have told you, and down in the catacombs were the Christians. After a few centuries, the Romans had disappeared and the Christians took over the world. Whether they did better or worse, we will discuss on another occasion; but they took over world domination. And that is precisely what has done the greatest harm to Christianity, that it has become associated with world domination; for religious life can tolerate less and less in world history the amalgamation with the external state and world domination.

The matter is now the following: The formation of Christianity, the participation of Christ Jesus in the formation of Christianity, can only be understood if one knows what religious life, which permeated everything in the ancient times, was like. I have already told you: in the ancient times there existed the so-called mysteries. Well, you see, the mysteries were – if I were to use a modern word, one would say they were institutions – the mysteries were the institutions where everything that a person could learn was learned. But at the same time they were the religious and artistic institutions. All spiritual life emanated from the mysteries. And learning in the most ancient times was not the same as it is today. What is learning like today, after all? Learning today is like this, isn't it, that you are drilled in high school or in secondary school; afterwards you go through university years, and you have not become a different person as a result. But in the mysteries, there you became a different person. There you had to gain a different relationship to the whole world. In the mysteries, there you had to become wise. Today, through the institutions that exist in the world, no one becomes wise at all; at most, they become learned. But two things are compatible, and two things are incompatible: wisdom and stupidity do not go well together, but erudition goes very well with great stupidity. So that's one thing: in the ancient mysteries, people were made wise; they became people who were imbued with the spiritual. You became a person who could take the spiritual seriously. And you had to go through seven stages. Only a few people reached the highest level. These seven stages had names that you first had to understand in order to know what the people at these stages had to do.

If you translate what the one who was first initiated into the mysteries had to do, you come up with the term “raven”. So the first level were the so-called ravens. So anyone who was initiated into the mysteries became a raven. What did the raven have to do? Well, the raven had to mediate between the outside world and the mysteries. Newspapers didn't even exist back then. The first newspapers only came about thousands of years later, when the art of printing had been invented. Those who had the mysteries as their teaching profession had to be taught by trustworthy people whom they could send out and who observed the world. So you could also say that the ravens were simply the trusted representatives of those who were in the mysteries. And you had to learn to be a real trusted representative first. Today many people are employed as trusted representatives, especially in parties and so on, but you wonder if these trusted representatives are always trustworthy! Those who were employed here - in the mysteries - as ravens were only considered trustworthy after they had been tested. Above all, they had to learn to take what they saw very seriously and to report it truthfully in the mysteries. So in those days one also had to learn what truth actually means in the human being. It is certainly true to say that people in ancient times were not less dishonest than people are today. But today dishonesty is introduced everywhere, whereas in those days one first had to learn to be a truthful person. And this had to be acquired by being a raven, a trusted messenger of the mysteries, for years.

The second step, however, is something that is quite unappealing to today's man: the second step is that of the so-called “occult”. Occult means hidden, secret. They were no longer sent out, but now had to learn something over a period of time, something that modern people do not like to learn, namely, silence. And that was one of the teaching levels in these old mysteries, learning to be silent. Yes, it may seem quite grotesque to you, quite ludicrous, that one had to remain silent for at least a year, or even longer! But it is true. You learn an enormous amount through silence; you learn an awful lot through silence. Today, that is no longer feasible. Because think if it were imposed in our schools – which would really be quite useful for attaining wisdom – on young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty to remain silent for a year instead of joining the military, then they would indeed become terribly wise through this silence! But that is no longer feasible today. However, something else is feasible. Of course, you can't get people out of the habit, they don't want to be silent today, they want to prattle on, and every person knows everything very well, and when you meet a person today, above all they have what is called a point of view. Everyone has a point of view. Of course everyone has a point of view; but from each point of view the world also looks different, and that is nothing new to anyone who knows life, it is quite natural: if you stand here, this mountain looks different than if you were to stand over there. It is the same in the spiritual life. Everyone has their point of view and everyone can see something different. And when a dozen people are together, well, today, of course, they have thirteen opinions! That is not necessary. But that they have twelve points of view is not surprising; it is just that it should not be taken as so important. But each person usually takes their own point of view very seriously, terribly seriously! But in the early days, people in the mysteries had to remain silent about what they were to learn; they were only allowed to listen. In the occult, they could only be called 'listeners' because they had to listen. Today, those who come to our universities are no longer called 'pupils', but rather, by leaving out the 'to', 'listeners'. But often they are no longer listeners, but chatterers. And some people consider chatting with their friends to be much more important than listening in the lecture halls. Sometimes even listening is no longer something that engenders particular seriousness. That was the second stage. Then people could learn silence. And in silence it becomes particularly clear – and this is connected like cause and effect – that the inner being of the human being begins to speak to him. That is where the person comes to it. Imagine you have a basin of water; if you now attach a hose and drain the water that is in the basin, then the water just runs away – if it is not a spring but just a basin – and there is nothing left in it. And so it is when a person constantly prattles: everything flows out with the words, nothing remains inside. The ancients realized this, and that is why their listeners were initially instructed to remain silent. So after people had developed an appreciation for the truth, they learned to remain silent; only then did they learn to remain silent.

And the third stage was that which, if translated, could be called the “defenders”. Now people were allowed to start talking. Now they were allowed to defend the truth they had learned in the mysteries through silence. In particular, they were obliged to defend the spirit. The word “defense” is precisely one that can already be used for this third stage. Those who belonged to this third degree must know enough so that what they could say about the spiritual had weight, real weight. So one could not just talk about the spiritual in these mysteries, but one had to have learned it first and become a real defender. Then one ascended to the fourth degree.

The fourth level can be translated as “lion”. That is how it is usually translated. It would be even better to translate it as “sphinx”. Sphinx is a word that roughly means having become a spirit oneself. Of course, you still walk around with a human body, but you behave among people as gods behave. The ancients did not make any great distinction between men and gods, but in the mysteries one gradually became a god. That is the much freer point of view of the ancients. The moderns, yes, they see the gods standing above humanity everywhere. But that was not the view of the ancients. Today one says: Well, man comes from the ape. The famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond even went so far as to say that there was once a giant leap in the development of nature between the ape and man, a giant leap even in the enlargement of the brain. The brain suddenly became larger than in the ape. You see, it is a strange statement from a modern scholar! Because one would actually have to assume that if he says that the brain of modern man is much larger than that of the ape, he would have dissected the ape and would know how large its brain was. But if you read up on it again, you will find that these scholars had to say: the ape has not yet been discovered in reality! – So the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond spoke about that which has not yet been discovered, which no one has yet seen: the ape, which has a much smaller brain than humans. This is the kind of “conscientiousness” that characterizes science today. And people do not even think that the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond is talking about something he has never seen, but they think: Oh, that's the famous naturalist, he knows everything! - because today humanity is much more gullible than the ancients were.

Now, the ancients certainly had the opinion that man can develop to the point of divine consciousness.

The one who was at the fourth level, who was a sphinx, no longer spoke like a defender of the third level, but spoke in a language in which he expressed himself in such a way that it was actually difficult to understand him; one had to think first about how to understand him. It is difficult for today's man to form a conception of this language, which was spoken by the Sphinxes, because he no longer looks at the matter correctly, as it was looked at there. But still in the Middle Ages, for example still in the 17th century, so that is only two hundred years back, there was still something present as a tradition of that language. For example, two centuries ago there were so-called Rosicrucian schools. There, too, certain initiates spoke in a language that was somewhat veiled and that had to be studied first; they spoke in a pictorial language. And so, for example, two centuries ago you can still find a picture - this may interest you - that was intended to explain something to people everywhere. This image was (it is drawn): a human figure with a lion's head, and here next to it a human figure with an ox's head. Among the people who were to be taught, it was said that the relationship between these two beings was expressed by “the being with the ox's head, the being with the lion's head” - they meant man and woman. But they did not speak the two words man and woman, but said: the being with the ox head - and meant the man; and they said: the being with the lion head - and meant the woman, because they saw something in the relationship between ox and lion that was the relationship between man and woman. Today, of course, this seems quite paradoxical and funny to people, but it has been preserved as tradition. And the sphinxes used animal names everywhere to express more clearly and characteristically what lives in man. And in such a language, you see, with which one spoke more out of the spiritual, the sphinxes then spoke. So they were already such that they spoke more out of the spirit.

But then came the fifth stage. In the fifth stage there were those human beings who had the obligation to speak only out of the spirit. Now, depending on whether they belonged to this or that nation, they were called “Persians” or “Indians” or “Greeks”. In Greece it was only the real Greeks. Because they said to themselves: Yes, when someone belongs to a people, they have their private interests, they want this or that, they want something different from someone who belongs to a different people! Only when they have reached the fifth level do they no longer want something special, but what the whole people want; that is also in their interest. He has become like the spirit of the people. In other words, he has become a spirit of the people. These spirits of the people were, in fact, in the ancient mysteries, even in Greece, very, very wise people. They did not think: If something comes, I will stand my ground and have my point of view, I know everything. They prepared themselves for a long time, even though they had already ascended to the fifth level, through exercises to help them reach a judgment in any matter. You see, if someone is a statesman today, well, then an interpellation may be brought before the Reichstag, and then he has to answer. Just imagine if that were done as it was in the past! If the person who had to answer said, “I must first withdraw from the world for eight days, come completely to myself in order to have an opinion about it.” Well, I would like to know what the parties in the Reichstag would say, say, to Mr. Stresemann or to other bodies, if an interpellant were to get the answer, In order to give a mature judgment on what you have asked me, I must first withdraw for eight days! But that was the case back then. Because in those days people believed in the spiritual world, and they knew that when you are in the hustle and bustle of life, the spiritual world does not speak; the spiritual world only speaks when you can withdraw. Of course, you then develop the ability to withdraw even when you are in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the world; but you first have to learn that. And once you had learned it, in the old days you ascended to the sixth level.

The sixth step was that the person no longer had an earthly point of view at all, not even that of the people, but said to himself: “I am a ‘Greek’; my brother initiate over there in the fifth step in Assyria is an ‘Assyrian’; the one further over there is a ‘Persian’. But that is a one-sided point of view. The sun comes over from Persia to Greece; it shines over us all. And so those who were initiates in the sixth degree no longer wanted to learn from what a people says, but they wanted to learn from what the sun says. They became “sun people” - no longer earth people, but sun people. You see, such sun-men sought to investigate everything from the standpoint of the sun. What was done in those days, people today have no conception of, because people today know nothing of the secrets of the world.

If you want to have an insight into such things, then you have to consider the following, for example. Some time ago a man came to me who said: “A strange book has been published, in which it is proven that the Gospels are written according to a numerical code. Namely, if there is any word in the Gospel, let us take the ‘primal beginning’ in the Gospel of John: ”In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God», then if you divide the word, and you get out, any division is twice as long as the other, and each word has a numerical value: there is a word where the numerical value is 50, then 25, another word, 50, another word, 25. And you can calculate what kind of word must be in a certain place.

Now it is interesting, gentlemen, to see how such things are true. So let us take, for example, any word, let us say - I will make it clear to you with a word still used in German -: let us take the word Eva. Now let us assume that the E has the same value as one, the v as two, the a as three. Let us assume that this is the case. In ancient times, every letter had a numerical value; it was not just a letter, but it was known that if, for example, you had an L, that L meant this or that number. You can still see how the numerical values are included in the Roman letters:

I = one, V = five, X = ten.

they are also letters, but the letters have numerical values.

Let's take as an example – it's not right with 1, 2, 3 for Eve, but as an example to make it clear, we can take it that way.

1 2 3 = Eve

is the mother of all life. Now let's turn it around:

3 2 1

Yes, then we get the word Ave, which means the end of life. Going in opposite directions, read in reverse from the back:

Going in opposite directions, read in reverse from the back:

1 2 3 = Eva; 3 2 1 = ave

So, if you change the numbers, you can find how numbers and letters match everywhere.

And so there is a numerical key. And one can say: Now let us look at the first line of the Gospel of John. These are the numbers. Let us look at the second: the numbers are only rearranged, and the fact that they are rearranged means something. - You see, people today are very surprised at such things. But, gentlemen, I knew a man named Louvier who tackled the “Sphinx”: “The riddle is solved”; he applied Goethe's “Faust” to this numerical relationship, and it was also true. Goethe did not think at all about using any numerical law to write his “Faust”. But it is true nevertheless, because in every piece of poetry there is something numerical in it. But if you endeavor to say something to someone and I endeavor to use a numerical key, then I can also apply it to what you say; that is already inherent in the speech itself. There is already a spiritual element in what you say. And that, gentlemen, is the extraterrestrial: that is what the influence of the sun gives. That is why these sun people have researched the secrets of the sun. The pyramids, for example, were certainly not built just to be royal tombs, but the pyramids had very specific openings to which the sunbeam could only come at a very specific time of the year. The sunbeam has described a figure on Earth. These people have observed this figure and have been inspired by it. In this way they explored the secrets of the life of the sun. So a person who had become a sun person could say that he no longer followed earthly things at all, but followed the sun. And then, when he had been a sun person for a while and had taught people what was extraterrestrial, he was elevated to the dignity of “father”. That was the highest honor, and only a few attained it. These were the ones who had matured completely, who were obeyed and followed. They were obeyed because they had grown older, because by the time one had passed through these seven stages, one had truly grown older, and they were obeyed because they had wisdom of life and, in addition, wisdom of the world.

Mysteries:

1. Raven
2. Occult: listener
3. Defender – Defense of the Spirit
4. Sphinx
5. Greeks: Spirit of the people
6. sun people
7. Father

Now, gentlemen, just imagine that Christ Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, did live in a time when, over in Asia, people still knew something about these mysteries. And it was still known, for example, that there were people who proclaimed solar wisdom. And what Jesus of Nazareth wanted was that people could no longer be enlightened only in the mysteries, but outside of the mysteries, that it could be made clear to people: What the sun does to people is also already within people, is within every person. And that is the most important thing about Christ Jesus, that He is the Sun-Truth and that He teaches the Sun-Word, as it was called, as something that is common to all people.

Now you only have to consider the great difference between the Christ Jesus and the other sun people. If you do not grasp this, you will never come to an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Because, you see, this is the way it is: what did one have to do in ancient times to become a sun person? One had to become a raven first, then an occultist, a defender, a sphinx, a folk soul - then one could ascend to a sun person. There was no other way. One had to be initiated into the mysteries. What did Jesus of Nazareth do? He was baptized, according to the custom of the Jews of that time, in the Jordan; and on this occasion, that is, after he had not been initiated into the mysteries, the same wisdom that otherwise belonged to the sun-men came to him. What could he say? He could say: This wisdom has come to me from the sun itself. He was therefore the first to enter into a relationship with heaven without the mysteries. What did he say, who had been a sun-person in the mysteries, when he looked up at the one who had stood on the seventh step? He said: “Behold, this is the Father.” He stood on the altar in a white robe, in the priestly vestments. That was the Father. That was the “Father” among those who had gone through these various stages in the mysteries. The Christ Jesus had not gone through this in the mysteries, but had received it from the Sun itself. That is why he said, “My Father is not on earth” - he meant, not in the mysteries - “but my Father is above in the spiritual world.” He thus pointed first to the Father in the spiritual world in the most eminent sense. So the Christ Jesus wanted to point out to people, who had previously received all spiritual from the earth, to the sources of the spiritual in the extraterrestrial itself. That is why people have always misunderstood what the Christ Jesus actually meant. Because, you see, it was said, for example, that the Christ Jesus taught that the earth would now perish, as it was said, and that a spiritual millennial kingdom would come very soon. Today's clever people, who in their cleverness sometimes also want to be benevolent towards the ancients, and also want to be benevolent towards Jesus, say: Well, that's what Jesus adopted from his time; he was also a child of his time and adopted it.

But all the things that people talk about are nonsense, because the millennial kingdom has really come - it just didn't look the way people in the world imagined it would, but the thing was like this: in ancient times, through the way I have described it to you, people had gained ideas about the spiritual world, and had also had experiences. That was the custom in ancient times, when people were different. That ended in the time when Christ Jesus lived, and people had to find the spirit in a different way. The spirit had to be found directly. That is what Christ Jesus did. And if Christ Jesus had not done what he did, then humanity would have completely degenerated. Life would have become meaningless. This does not contradict the fact that in later times, precisely through many Christian institutions, much that was senseless came about; but that was not originally natural in it. And people would have become dull. The mysteries would have perished just as they did there; but people would have known nothing of what was taught in the mysteries. Because, take now the old sun-man. What did they say about the sun man? They knew that he knew what came from the standpoint of the sun; he was dead to earthly life. When they spoke of the sun man, they meant someone who was dead to earthly life. And that is why, before a sun-man was initiated into the mysteries, a ceremony was always performed that imitated death and burial. And Christ Jesus outwardly presented death and burial before the whole world; and what happened at the death of Christ was, before all the people of the world, only a repetition of what had always happened in the cultus through the mysteries. Only in those days it was a mystery secret, and then it stood at Golgotha before the whole world. You see, it was really the case with the solar man that he had died to the earth. But through this he was also in between, between the setting world of death and the world of resurrection, the world of the eternal.

Sometimes things remind you of the old things, of which you can no longer understand the meaning. Imagine, for example, that a canonization is taking place in Rome. Someone is being canonized in Rome. It is a great ceremony when someone is canonized after dying hundreds of years ago. How does this ceremony take place? This ceremony takes place in such a way that first the Advocatus Dei, the divine defender, appears. He emphasizes all the good qualities of the person to be canonized. And then the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the devilish accuser, appears; he emphasizes all the bad qualities that the saint had. And then a decision is made between these two – I do not want to say that it is always a fair decision, but a decision is made. This ceremony is still being carried out today. When someone, like the Maid of Orleans, for example, is canonized, then the devil's advocate and the devil appear. Between the one who represents all that is good and the one who represents all that is evil, stands the saint himself, spiritually. You know that the image of Golgotha is always depicted with Christ Jesus on the cross in the middle, with the two so-called robbers, they are called robbers, next to him. But the strange thing is that Christ says to one of them: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” So he goes up, and the other goes down. These are Lucifer and Ahriman - devil and devil.

And so it was with the old solar man. He made the acquaintance of Lucifer and Ahriman, of that which wants to draw man up into the spiritual world, so that he becomes entirely spiritual – which is also not suitable for man – and of that which wants to bring man down to the earthly, which again is not suitable for man, because man belongs in the intermediate stage.

And so, through the Mystery of Golgotha, what used to be only implicit in the mysteries, and was only carried out figuratively, because one did not really die, is now standing before the whole world. One became a father there. The Christ really dies. But He says: My spirit does not die; it goes to the Father, because the Father now does not work down here as the Primordial Father, but works in the spiritual world. This view has come entirely out of the Mysteries. And if one wants the concept of the Father, one must seek it in the old Mysteries. Only then does one understand correctly how Christianity was actually formed.

Now, you see, gentlemen, all that I have described to you was very common over there in Asia. It was still part of the foundation of Christianity. The Greeks knew very little about it because they built the outer culture. And only the Romulus people, who descended from a colony of scoundrels, knew nothing about it at all; they only knew external world domination. They only knew external world domination so well that the Roman Caesars, the Imperators, even behaved externally as initiates; but it was at a time when the mysteries had already fallen into decline. For example, there was a Roman Caesar of the very first imperial period, his name was Caligula. Now, you see, a German historian once wanted to describe the German Kaiser Wilhelm in the 1890s; but you couldn't, because it wouldn't do; you would have been locked up if you had written it down! So the good man wrote a little book called 'Caligula'. He described the Roman Caligula, but every trait applied to Wilhelm II! Everyone who understood such things knew: Caligula is our Wilhelm II; it could only be done that way. This Caligula was at the same time an initiate, because everything had already become external. Of course, what the ravens had to do when it was not taken very seriously could be understood from what the princes also did. So Caligula had become a sun person, but of course only on the outside, like someone who, let's say, is a “general” who puts on military robes at the age of five or six. So Caligula had become an initiate. He had only taken the outward appearance. But he was even supposed to initiate others! During a ceremony, the story happened to him where the symbolic blow is struck with the sword at one of the sphinxes, that he actually killed the person concerned with the sword! But of course that didn't bother Caesar at all. With the Romans, everything had become so externalized that they no longer understood any of it inwardly. No wonder they couldn't understand Christianity at all.

And so Christianity in Rome passed to the secular ruler. In the times when Christianity came to Rome, there was the secular ruler who, however, saw himself as a god – of course, because one became a god when one was an initiate. Augustus was seen as a god; his successors as well. But in addition, there was the Pontifex Maximus, the “great bridge builder”. That was the spiritual ruler. But he had gradually become a shadow in Rome, had no significance, and the only significance was the worldly ruler. So it was, of course, more in line with a people who had the Romulus as their ancestor, who had gathered together all the scoundrels from the surrounding area. And now, you see, it was precisely through Rome that Christianity was secularized.

And that is what I wanted to tell you today about the outer form of Christianity. Next time, next Wednesday, I will discuss the inner form, how the sun really influenced Jesus.

You see, in the early days after the founding of Christianity, it spread first in the south, as far as Rome, and then later, from the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries onwards, it spread northwards. Now let's take a look at Europe at the time when Christianity spread, that is, at the time of the founding of Christianity, or shortly thereafter. I would like to answer the question: What did Europe or our civilization look like at the time when Christianity spread?

If we imagine Asia over there (a drawing is made), Europe is like a small appendage of Asia, like a small peninsula. You will know that Europe looks like this: here we have Scandinavia, here we have the Baltic Sea; we then come to Russia. Here we have present-day Denmark. Here we come across the north coast of Germany, here we come to the Dutch area, here to the French area. Here we come to Spain, here we come across to Italy. Now we come to the areas that we already know: we come to the Adriatic Sea, we come across to Greece; then there is the Black Sea. Here we come up against Asia Minor, and across there we would come to Africa. On the other side, here we would have England with Wales, and then here Ireland, only briefly mentioned.

Now I will try to explain to you what Europe looked like at the time when Christianity was gradually spreading across Europe. Here, Europe is closed off from Asia by the Ural Mountains. We then have the mighty river, the Volga, and if we had come to these areas, which today form southern Russia, Ukraine and so on, at the time when Christianity came from the south, we would have found the Ostrogoths there, a people who later completely disappeared from this area, moved further west and then merged with other peoples in the west. So at the time when Christianity began to spread, we have the Ostrogoths here. You will see in a moment how all these peoples began to migrate at a certain point in time. But at the time when Christianity came up from the south, these peoples in Europe were settled in this place.

If you take the Danube, then further upstream you have today's Romania and today's Hungary. In these areas – today's Hungary and today's Romania – the Visigoths were located at that time. If we go further upstream, here to today's western Hungary, north of the Danube, we have the Vandals. That was the name of these peoples back then. And where today is Moravia, Bohemia and Bavaria, the so-called Suevi were located, from whom the Swabians then emerged. If we go further up – this is where the Elbe rises and then flows into the North Sea: here, everywhere, they are all Goths. But here is the Rhine, which you know well; so that would be today's Cologne – here around the Rhine, the so-called Ripuarian Franks live. Further up, where the Rhine flows into the North Sea, the Salic Franks live. And here, as far as the Elbe, the Saxons live. The Saxons got their name from the people who were to the south. They got their name because these peoples to the south noticed that they preferred or almost exclusively ate meat, and they called them “carnivores”.

Here, in these areas, the Romans had spread: even in present-day France, in present-day Spain and so on, here too were Greco-Roman peoples everywhere. Christianity spread among them first, and then it pushed north. It can be said that Christianity came to these areas earlier than to the more western areas. Among the Goths, for example, we have an old bishop: Wulfila, which means “the little wolf.” Wulfila made a Gothic translation of the Bible very early on, in the 4th century. This Bible translation is very interesting because it differs greatly from later Bible translations. It is contained in an extraordinarily valuable book that is now in the library in Uppsala, Sweden; and it can be seen from this that Christianity spread here in the east earlier.

If you follow what I have written, you will find: So there are the Greco-Roman peoples; but in these areas, in the oldest times, there is still an ancient population everywhere, an ancient population of Europe that is very interesting. This population of Europe, which I have now marked in red on the drawing, had already been pushed back more towards the western regions by the time Christianity pushed up from south to north. For originally none of these peoples were in these regions at all, but only at the time when Christianity was spreading; they were all more in the east. All these peoples are to be imagined living on the border between Asia and Europe. And what the Slavs are today are even further inside Asia.

The question now is this: if we go back to the times before the emergence of Christianity, I would have to draw this whole map of Europe with red lines; the whole of Europe was permeated by an ancient Celtic population. And all the things that are in Europe later, that I have drawn and written down for you, actually came from Asia only later – the few centuries before, the few centuries after the founding of Christianity. And that raises the question: Yes, why do these peoples migrate all at once? These peoples began to move during a certain period of world history; they pushed their way into Europe. This happened for the following reason: if you look at present-day Siberia, it is actually a huge, barren area that is very sparsely populated. Not so long ago, namely not long before the emergence of Christianity, a few centuries before, this Siberia was still much lower land, and this lower land was relatively warm. And then it rose. A country does not have to rise very much for it to become cold in the countries that were previously warm, and the lakes dry up and it becomes desolate. So nature itself caused the people to move from east to west.

The Celtic population in Europe was a very interesting population. The migrating peoples to the west encountered the Celtic population. They were a relatively peaceful population. The Celtic population in Europe still had what could be called an original form of clairvoyance, a real original form of clairvoyance. When these people set about any kind of craft, they thought: the spirits will help them with this craft. And when someone felt that he was adept at making boots – they didn't have boots yet, but things to cover their feet – he saw in his skill the help of the spirits. And he could really perceive what was helping him from the spiritual world. These ancient Celtic people still viewed their lives in such a way that they were, in a sense, “on familiar terms” with the spiritual world. And that is why these peoples also produced very beautiful things. The Celtic population also penetrated into Italy in ancient times, bringing with them many beautiful things, which helped to soften the rough Roman way of life, which had come about through the marauding people. It was precisely through the penetration of the Celtic population that the original Roman coarseness was somewhat mitigated.

So here, in ancient times, there was Celtic population throughout Europe. In the south, there was a Roman-Greek, Romance-Greek, Latin-Greek population. And, as I said, due to the elevation of Siberia, which made Siberia barren, these peoples moved over. And at the time when Christianity pushed up from south to north, the map of Europe looked like this (pointing to the drawing).

It is very strange, gentlemen: certain peculiarities of the peoples are well preserved, other peculiarities are less well preserved. For example, one must note the following: among the peoples who moved from Asia into Europe were the Huns, who had Attila as their most powerful king. But Attila is a Gothic name! For Attila means 'little father' in Gothic. Because many of the peoples that I have written down here also recognized the Hun king Attila as their king, he was given a Gothic name. But these Huns were very different from the other peoples. And that was because all these more savage peoples who came over had originally been mountain peoples in Asia. The somewhat tamer peoples who came over, like the Goths, were more the peoples of the plains. And the wild deeds of the Huns and also later the wild deeds of the Magyars came from the fact that they were originally mountain peoples in Asia.

It so happened that the Romans, more and more independent of Christianity, extended their rule northwards, and there they came into contact with these peoples who came over from Asia. Many wars broke out between the Romans and the peoples who were here in the north. Last time I already mentioned the name of a very important Roman writer, Tacitus. He wrote a lot about Roman history, but he also wrote a very great and powerful little book called “Germania”. In it, about a hundred years after Christianity had already been founded, he gave a magnificent description of the peoples who lived up there, so that in Tacitus' description, these people come to life before you. But I have already told you the other thing: Tacitus writes as one of the most educated Romans, but he did not know more about Christianity than that it was founded as a sect in Asia by a certain Christ, who was executed by the court! So Tacitus was writing in Rome at a time when Christians were still enslaved, when they still lived in their underground catacombs, actually not even that correctly. And so there was still no Christianity among these northern people.

But these northern people also had a religion back then. And it is very interesting to see what kind of religion these northern people had. Remember again, gentlemen, how religious ideas developed among southern and eastern peoples. We have spoken of the Indians; they looked primarily at the physical body, that is, at something of the human being. The Egyptians looked at the etheric body - again something of the human being. The Babylonians and Assyrians looked at the astral body – again something of the human being. The Jews saw the I in their Yahweh – again something of the human being. Only of the Greeks – and this then passed over to the Romans – must I tell you: they saw less of the human being, they turned their gaze more to nature. And the Greeks were truly the greatest observers of nature.

But these people here in the north, they have seen nothing at all of man as such, of the inner man, even less than the Greeks. It is interesting: these people here in the north have completely forgotten the inner human being, and they do not even have memories of what could be thought about the inner human being. The Greeks and Romans at least still had memories; they were neighbors of the peoples all over the Near East, of the Egyptians, Babylonians and so on; they had memories of what these ancient peoples had thought. These Nordic peoples only looked at their surroundings, only at what was outside of people. And they did not see nature, but rather the nature spirits outside of people. The ancient Greeks saw nature; these people here in the north saw the nature spirits. That is why the most beautiful stories, fairy tales, legends and myths originated precisely among these people, because they saw the spirits everywhere. The Greeks saw the tall mountain, Mount Olympus; but the gods lived on Mount Olympus. These people up here in the north did not say, “The gods live on a mountain.” Rather, they saw the god himself in the summit of the mountain, because the summit of the mountain did not appear to them as a rock. When dawn shone on the mountain top, gilding the mountain and the morning sun rising over the mountains, these peoples did not see the mountain, but this weaving of the morning sun over the mountain; that was the divine for them. It seemed ghostly to them. It was quite natural for them to see the ghostly spread over the mountains in this way.

And the Greeks built temples for the gods. Throughout Asia Minor, temples were built for the gods. These people in the north said: we will not build temples. What does it mean to build temples? It is dark inside them; but over the mountains, there is light and brightness. And the gods, that is, the spirits, must be worshiped by going up the mountain.

Now they have thought about it: Yes, when the light shines over the mountains - it comes from the sun; but the sun is most beneficial in the middle of summer, when St. John's Day, as we call it today, approaches. Then they climbed up the mountains, made a fire and celebrated their gods not in the temple, but on the high mountains. Or they said: Yes, the sunlight and the warmth of the sun go into the earth, and in spring what the sun causes comes out of the earth again. And that is why you have to worship the sun, even when it sends its power out of the earth. They felt this particularly charitably in the forests, where many trees grow out of the way the sun's power works back from the earth. That is why they worshiped their gods in forests. Not in temples, but on mountains and in forests.

And, you see, these peoples believed in spirits for everything. The ancient Celts, who were driven out by these peoples, still saw the spirits themselves. These peoples no longer saw the spirits, but in all of nature, they regarded as divine whatever shone as light, whatever was there as warmth, whatever acted as air in the clouds. And that was the old Germanic religion, the old religion, which was then driven out by Christianity.

Christianity came to these areas in two ways. First, it pushed up into southern Russia, and into these areas that are now Romania and Hungary. That is where Wulfila translated the Bible. A Christianity emerged that was much more genuine than the Christianity that spread everywhere from Rome by the second route. From Rome, Christianity spread more as domination. And one can say: if Christianity, as it arose here in the East through Russia, in the time when there was no Slavic population, if Christianity had spread there, it would have become quite different; it would have become more inward, because it would have had much more Asian character. The Asian character is an inward one. And the Christianity that spread from Rome took on more of an external form, which then became dead in the cult because the meaning of the cult was no longer recognized. I have spoken to you about the monstrance and the Santissimum, which actually represents the sun and the moon – but that was covered up, it was no longer accepted. And so a spiritless cult has spread. This spiritless cult was then carried over to Constantinople by a spiritless Caesar; the city of Constantinople was founded. And in later times, the changed Christianity also spread to the other countries.

The Christianity that is in Wulfila's translation of the Bible, for example, has completely disappeared from Europe. For it is more the cultic Christianity, the externalities, that spread from here. And in the East, when the Slavs came, what was more cultic, which has a very little inwardness, spread even more.

Now, what I have told you about the religious beliefs of these peoples later underwent a certain change. It is always the case among people that they originally know what it is about; then they no longer know what it is about, and it remains only a memory. It remains something external. And so, from the gods that people saw, from the spirits everywhere in nature, three main deities were formed: Wotan, who was actually imagined to be something like light and air floating over everything. Wotan was worshipped, for example, when there was a heavy storm; then it was said: Wotan is in the wind, Wotan is blowing in the wind.

It was a peculiarity of these peoples that they expressed in their language what they perceived in nature. That is right, they worshipped Wotan as blowing in the wind. Do you feel when I say: Wotan blows in the wind - the three w's? It was something terrible for these people when a storm came and they imitated this stormy weather by saying: Wotan blows in the wind! - That is how we would say it today, but it was very similar in the old language.

And when summer came and people saw lightning and heard thunder during a storm, they also saw spiritual things in it. They imitated this in language, and they called the spirit that rolls in the thunder Donar: Donar roars in thunder. The fact that this was in the language shows that these people were connected to the outside world. The Greeks were not so strongly connected with the outside world. The Greeks sought this more in rhythm than in the formation of language. In these Nordic peoples, it was already in the language itself.

And when, for example, these peoples crossed over to Europe and first encountered the Celts, constant fighting and wars broke out. Warring was something that was always there in those days when Christianity was spreading. Just as the spiritual was seen in the blowing wind and the rolling thunder, so it was also seen in the storm of battle. It was the case that the people had shields and with these shields in closed rows they stormed forward in crowds. So they still stormed forward when they came into the fight with the Romans. And when the Romans threw themselves against them and these northern tribes stormed down, then the Romans heard above all a terrible shouting: a thousand throats shouted into their shields as they charged forward. And they feared much more than the Germanic swords what was charging towards them with terrible shouting. And if you were to storm in shouting something similar to what these peoples shouted into their shields, if you wanted to imitate that today, then you would have to say it sounded like: Ziu zwingt Zwist! Ziu zwingt Zwist! - Ziu was the spirit of war; they believed that he was storming ahead with them. When such a Germanic tribe stormed forward, they felt: There is a spiritual being among them that forces discord. “Zwist” is war. Ziu forces discord! - and that now rushed into the shields. And the Romans heard this muffled: Ziu forces discord! Ziu forces discord! and it rushed over the Romans' heads. As I said, they were terribly afraid of that, more than of all the bows and arrows and so on. It was really something in which the spiritual lived in the courage, in the bellicosity of these people.

You see, if these people were to rise again as they were then – of course they rise again, since people re-embody themselves, but they have forgotten the story – but if they were to rise again as they were then and saw the present population, well, they would put all the sleepyheads in their place! Because they would say: It's not right for a person to walk around as a sleepyhead! They should put on a nightcap and go to bed. They had a completely different outlook on life, they were mobile.

Then, of course, there were also times when these peoples could not wage war. But, gentlemen, when they were not waging war, they had bearskins, on which they lay, and then they drank – they drank terribly. That was the second occupation. Well, in those days it was considered a virtue; after all, it was not quite as dangerous a drink as it is today, it was a relatively harmless drink brewed from all sorts of herbs. Beer developed from it later, but very differently, of course. But these peoples drank it in large quantities. They only felt like humans when this mead, this beer-like, sweetish drink, went sweetly through their whole body. Sometimes you still come across people in whom you can see how something like this lives in them when they feel a bit like descendants of these ancient Germans. Once I met a German poet in Weimar who drank almost as much as the ancient Germans! But of course he drank beer. The ancient Germans drank this mead-like drink. We got to talking, and I said to him: Yes, it's actually impossible for someone to be so thirsty! - And he said: Yes, thirst – when I'm thirsty, I drink water; but when I'm not thirsty, I drink beer. When I drink beer, I don't drink it for thirst, I drink it for fun! And so it was with these Teutons: they became merry and energetic when the mead-like sweet liquid ran through their limbs as they lay on their bearskins.

The third main occupation was hunting. And agriculture was actually practised rather incidentally by the subjugated peoples of that time. When such a people spread out, it was the case that others were subjugated; they then had to do the farming. These were unfree people. And when war came, they had to join; they had to carry the weapons and so on. Of course, in those days there was a great difference between the free population and the unfree. The free population, who waged war, hunted, and drank on the bearskins, came together to order matters. And when they came together, they discussed matters of a judicial or administrative nature and so on, everything that was necessary. Nothing was written down, because they could not write in those days. Everything was only discussed orally. And there were no cities; people lived scattered in villages. They always formed a kind of community of a hundred and a hundred villages, so about a hundred villages together. They then belonged together; they were called a hundred-ship. And in turn, large associations of hundred-ships were then a district. And the hundred-ships had their assemblies, the districts had their assemblies. For those people who were allowed to come together, for the free, there was actually quite a bit of democracy in this respect. And what was held there was not called an imperial council, not a parliament – these are words that came later. It was called a thing because a specific day was set for the meeting, and anything that was not given a specific name was called a thing. You can still hear it today when you hear English people talking about something and they can't think of the name straight away, they always say: thing = thing. The word “thing” has already been discredited today. I once got into trouble because of that. I was once commissioned to draft a resolution that had been written, and I put “thing” into this resolution; and the chairman at the time, who was a very famous astronomer, held it against me terribly because it is such a terrible word in our time; you cannot use it where serious people come together! But in the old days it was called a thing. People didn't say they were going to the Reichstag, they said they were going to the Tageding. And if someone talked, they were said to be vertageding the matter. And you see, the word 'defend' was formed from the word 'vertagedingen'. This is how words are formed later: defend originated from vertagedingen. Today, the word “defender” is only used in the context of court. Here in Switzerland, we don't say “defender”, but “ Fürsprech”, but everywhere else they say “defender”. This is how these people lived with their gods and spirits among themselves. And then the southern peoples brought Christianity to these people.

But again, in the West, Christianity arose in two ways. It was partly brought up directly from Rome; but there was another line in which Christianity spread, and that was this: from Asia, more across the very southern areas here, where the Latin-Roman element has not gained much influence, across Spain to Ireland. And in Ireland, in the first centuries of Christianity, there was a very pure way of spreading Christianity. And this way of spreading Christianity in Ireland also spread to Wales. And from there, Christian missionaries also moved into Europe. They brought Christianity with them, in part; in part, it came up from Rome.

You see, gentlemen, I told you that in the monasteries, for example, and even at the first universities, much of the old science was still available, so that with Christianity the old science was connected. What has been preserved of the ancient wisdom of the stars, which later disappeared completely in Europe, actually all came from Ireland. From Rome, basically, only the cult spread. And only later, when Central Europe turned to the gospel, did the gospel join the cult. But much of what came from Ireland lived among the people. You see, in Europe, Christianity has gradually become completely absorbed into secular rule. And the good elements of Christianity that were present up here, where the Gothic Bible translation by Wulfila was created, and those that came over from Ireland, have actually more or less completely disappeared later on. They were still present in many ways in the Middle Ages, but then more or less completely disappeared. You see, from Rome, they actually proceeded very cleverly. In these peoples, who I have written down here for you and who were originally pushed by nature itself to migrate from Asia to Europe – they could not stay there because the land had become barren – but a certain wanderlust took hold. And it is strange what happens there.

Take the Elbe, for example. Up here on the Elbe lived a people in the time just after the advent of Christianity: they were the Lombards. They lived to the northeast of the Saxons, on the Elbe. Soon after, two centuries later, we find these same Lombards down there on the Po, in Italy! So the Lombards migrated over here. We find the Goths, the Ostrogoths, here on the Black Sea at a time when Christianity had not yet arrived but had already been established. Soon after, a few centuries later, we find them here, where the Vandals and the Visigoths used to be. The Visigoths migrated further west. We find the Visigoths here in Spain after some time. We find the Vandals here on the Danube. A few centuries later, the Vandals were no longer in Europe at all, but over there in Africa, opposite Italy. These peoples were now migrating. And just as Christianity was spreading, these peoples were migrating; they were pushing more and more to the west. The Slavs came much later.

And what happened in the West? The Romans had already achieved world domination when Christianity emerged. The Romans actually behaved extremely shrewdly. At the time when these peoples came over to the west and pushed against the Romans, the Romans were actually already quite emaciated, weak, rather ghastly fellows, and they couldn't really do much other than shake and tremble with their lower legs when this: Ziu forces discord! rolled into the shields from up there. Then they trembled like aspen leaves. But in their heads they were smart, proud, arrogant, haughty.

Now, these peoples were necessarily different. There was, of course, a big difference: these people down there had their lands, their fields, were settled, had something behind them. These peoples up there didn't care much about location; they migrated. And so it came about that the Romans often took in these peoples who were storming south. They gave them land, for the Romans had land in abundance everywhere. They gave them land. And so it came about that these peoples changed from hunting and war to agriculture, to farming. But how did it happen when the Romans gave them land? Yes, these Germanic peoples now had the land; they could dig up the fields. They could do that, but the Romans did the administration! In this way, the Romans gradually made themselves rulers. And this rule was strongest here in the west. In the area that was later populated by Germans, the people resisted for a long time. But people like the Goths, they moved into Italy, came together with the people from there, and became dependent. Yes, the Roman-Latin population was clever. What did they do? Well, they said: If we carry the sword, it is no longer right. They had become emaciated guys. What did they do? They made warriors out of the people who came in! When the Romans wanted to wage war, they waged it with the Germans, so they were the warriors! They were given their fields, but in return they had to go to war. Those who had remained at the top as Germanic people were at war with their own former warriors! The Romans waged war against them under the leadership of the Germanic people! And so, in the early days when Christianity spread, the wars that were actually waged by the southern population, the Roman population, were waged with the help of the Germanic people themselves, who had been absorbed by them. At most, only the leaders of the Roman armies were Romans. The mass of the soldiers were actually Germanic peoples who had become Roman. And now the task was to introduce the religious element from Rome in a way that would appeal to these people. In these earliest times, people were much more attached to their religion than they were later. And so, for example, the following came about. You see, these people saw light and air everywhere in nature as the spiritual. They felt it hard when the snow came in October, November, when the snow covered the earth and then actually all spiritual had to disappear. On the other hand, they particularly revered the time when our Christmas falls today. Then they felt: Now the sun is coming again. It was the winter solstice. The sun turned back to the people. And so a spiritualized nature was still very much what they assumed in these peoples.

The Romans, who had already adopted Christianity in their system of government, left this solstice festival to the Germans. But they said: We do not celebrate the solstice here, but the birth of Christ. And so the Germans were only able to continue celebrating their festival at the same time as they had previously done so, with a different meaning.

Now, the ancient Germans saw some kind of spirit under every significant tree, one might say. The Romans made a saint out of a spirit! And so they basically re-baptized everything that was contained in the old pagan religion. This went largely unnoticed by the people, and in this form, Christianity was actually spread among the Germanic peoples. Festivities such as those celebrating the return of the sun and so on were observed precisely because the ancient Germans loved celebrating with the gods in the open air, in the mountains and forests.

So we can say that in more recent times, since the founding of Christianity, it has been cunning that has been most prevalent in Rome. And basically, Europe has been ruled by cunning for many centuries – by Roman cunning. It has gone so far that the Romans have always preserved the old Latin language in schools, and the vernacular was actually only spoken among the people. When the Romans introduced Christianity and science, they did not speak in the vernacular – that did not come until the 18th century – but they presented science everywhere in Latin. For a long time, Romanism was also noticeable in its original form.

But now, what happened in the West, through Spain, France and into England? You see, there Romanism really remained alive. That is why the language in which Romanism lives on came into being. Here, in Central Europe, the Germanic element was more dominant. That is where the Germanic languages originated. Over here, the Romance element triumphed; that is where the Romance languages came into being. But in terms of their origin, all these people who were there, both those who migrated to Spain and those who migrated to Italy, are actually Germanic. I have written down the Ripuarian Franks and the Salian Franks, who later moved over there – they were all Germanic tribes that settled in France. And the Romance language spread like a cloud over these Franks who moved into France, and became French or Spanish. The old Latin lives on in a modified form.

Only further east, from the Rhine onwards, did the people as a people say to themselves: Well, the scholars in there in the schools, with their wigs, they can speak Latin, and those who want to become priests can listen to them; but the people have kept the language. And that is how the antagonism arose that still troubles Europe today, this antagonism between Central Europe and Western Europe.

From the east, the Slavs gradually came. I had to tell you: these peoples come over to the west, where some of them disappear, some of them also adopt another language, and so on. Then the Slavs came, settled in the east of Europe, and in some places advanced quite far. Here, for example, the old Germanic element mixed with the Slavic element; for certain reasons, which I will explain to you next time, the Slavs in the east over there got the name “Russians”; on the other hand, those who now moved into these areas, they disappeared among the Germanic peoples. A blood mixture remained. And that is how the Borussians came into being, those who are the vanguard of the Russians. Borussians then became “Prussians”! That is just the transformed word. There is a lot of Slavic blood in it. While the Slavs themselves, when they remain behind, are more passive, more of a quiet population, when they absorb other blood, they become combative! This belligerence, which was present in ancient Germanic peoples, then passed over to them. And so what was in Prussia became a rather belligerent population; and what migrated to the west, the Czech population, actually became a rather belligerent population as well.

And so Europe stirred itself up, I would say. And into this porridge Christianity was added. Well, we will continue with that next time.

The question that was asked, gentlemen, is quite a detailed one, and we will need to discuss some of its aspects a few more times.

Today, however, I would like to say a few more specific words about the later spread of Christianity. When viewed today, Christianity takes three forms. These three forms must be considered if one is to go back from today's concepts to what actually happened as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Let us first consider the matter in relation to Europe. I already told you the other day how it was: we have Asia over there, and Europe is actually a kind of peninsula of Asia. As you know, it looks like this (a map is drawn). Here would be Norway, here it goes over to Russia, here we come over to the German north coast; here we then have Denmark. From there we come over to Holland, France, and Spain would be here. From here we come to Italy, Greece; the Black Sea would be here, and from there it goes over to Asia. Africa is at the bottom.

Now, you see, in our time it is difficult to talk about the spread of Christianity, because special circumstances also prevail in relation to these things at present. But if you look at Christianity in these areas of Russia, as it was before the world war, then you come to the conclusion that Eastern Christianity still has more of the original religious character of Asia, of which I have spoken to you in its various forms among the Egyptians, the Indians, the Assyrians. Much of what was customary in terms of religious practices, for example, sacrificial rites, which were very well understood in Asia, has been incorporated into the religion that was then permeated by Christianity in these eastern regions. When you get to know the religion in these eastern regions, you immediately have the feeling that the cult is actually much more important than the teaching. The teaching wants to express in human words what belongs to the spiritual world, or at least what human feeling can grasp of the spiritual world. The teaching is also that which the human being wants to approach with his reason. The cult, on the other hand, is something that one has, that remains much more conservative. And where the cult is particularly dominant, religion also takes on a conservative character. So one has to say: Eastern religion here takes on a conservative character, places much more emphasis on the cult than on the actual inner impetus of religion, of religious life in man, than the more Western religions.

Now, the second current of Christianity started from Rome and spread to the north, and was then strongly influenced by Ireland, where the missionaries came from. This southern Central European Christianity, influenced from Rome, also retained the cult, but placed much more emphasis on the doctrine than the eastern essence. Therefore, the cult is felt much less in its importance by Roman Catholicism than the sermon, the doctrine. And there were many more disputes within the Roman Catholic Church about the actual content of the doctrine than in the eastern church.

But this Christianity has also experienced another influence. You see, Christianity originated at the beginning of our era. About six centuries after that, five or six centuries after that, Islam originated. I recently drew Arabia for you. If I draw Asia Minor again, we come down here to Arabia, would go over to India here; Africa would be there, Egypt here. Now, here in Arabia, Islam was founded by Mohammed. This Islam spread very quickly in the second half of the first Christian millennium. It spread from Asia, first towards Syria to the Black Sea, then across Africa to Italy, Spain, and up into western Europe. This Islam has a special peculiarity: it combines the fantastic element with an extremely sober, rational element in its religion. The main tenet of the Muslim religion, which spread rapidly across southern and western Europe and across Asia in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, is that there is only one God, proclaimed to you through Muhammad.

We must now only properly understand what this actually means in world history, that Muhammad proclaimed the principle: There is only one God. Why then was this so strongly emphasized by Mohammed? Mohammed was already familiar with Christianity; and Christianity does not have three gods, but it does have three divine figures. You just don't feel that anymore today. You don't feel today that Christianity did not have three gods from the beginning, but it has three divine figures: Father, Son and the so-called Holy Spirit.

What does that mean? You see, in the Latin language, “person” originally meant nothing other than a figure, a mask, that which reveals itself to the outside world. And in original Christianity, people did not speak of three gods, but of three figures in which the one God reveals himself. And they also sensed how it is with these three figures.

Let us take a look at what the situation is with these three forms. Not true, today, when there is a distinct science alongside religion, one can no longer understand this at all. For science is pursued quite independently of religion today, and one does not really look to religious life when speaking of scientific life. That was not the case in ancient times, nor in the early days of Christianity; rather, religion was received along with all the science that had existed. There were no special priests or special teachers, but there were those who were both priests and teachers. This was particularly the case with what I have described to you as the last mysteries.

Now, it was first seen that man is a natural being. Man is a natural being in that he is born out of the mother's womb as a physical human being with the help of natural forces. These forces are at work in man, as was thought and felt. When I look at how man comes into being as a physical being, I see forces that I also find when I see a tree growing outside, and that are ultimately also present when water evaporates and rain falls. They are natural forces. But in ancient times, people saw spiritual forces behind these natural forces. Spiritual forces are at work everywhere in nature. When a crystal forms inside a mountain, when a stone grows, spiritual forces are at work. When a plant emerges in spring, spiritual forces are at work. When water evaporates, clouds form, and rainwater falls, spiritual forces are at work. The same spiritual forces are at work in man when he develops as a human germ in his mother's body. The same spiritual forces are at work when his blood flows through his veins and his breath comes in and out. In everything that was seen as spirit in nature, which is also seen in the physical human being, the father principle, the father, was seen, because natural science was also religion.

They said to themselves: He who has attained the highest enlightenment in the mystery is an image of this Father-Spirit, who knows everything that is everywhere in nature. That was the seventh degree, the degree that man could take in the mysteries when he had ascended to the dignity of the Father.

The next dignity - I have told you - was that of the sun spirit. What did they understand by the spirit of the sun, which was later called the son? What did they understand by it? I have already explained to you that the Christ called himself the spirit of the sun. They said to themselves: 'Of course, man is born through natural forces, through the same forces that make plants grow and so on; but when he lives on earth, he develops. Just as he is born through natural forces, so, for example, one can no more speak of good and evil in him than in a plant. It will not occur to you to call a deadly nightshade evil because it acts as a poison on humans. You will say: it cannot help it. There is no will in the deadly nightshade, as there is in man. And so one cannot say, when the child is born, that it can be good and evil through the forces of nature. It then becomes good or evil as its human will gradually develops. And in contrast to the forces that work in nature, that which works in the human will, that which can become good or evil in man, was called the son of God or the spirit of the sun. And the one who was able to ascend to the sixth level in the mystery was only his representative. All these individual representatives of the sixth level were representatives of God on earth. And then it was known that the sun is not just a gas body; the sun not only gives light and warmth, but also the forces that develop the will. Therefore, not only light and warmth come from the sun, but also the spirit of the sun. The God-son is at the same time the one who is the spirit of the sun. So that one said: The Father-Godhead is everywhere in nature; the Son-Godhead is everywhere present where human beings develop free will.

But now they felt something very peculiar. They said to themselves: Yes, but does man, by developing free will and being under the son of God, become more worthy or less worthy as a result? - This question was also asked at the time when Christianity was founded.

Gentlemen, just take a look at any natural product, even animals, if you like. Of course, when a cow has grown old, you can still say that you pay less for this cow than you paid when she was young. So she would be worth less than when she was young. Now, that is quite true; but that is not the point. Rather, it is clear that the cow has not become less valuable because of something that works as a will within her, but rather she has become less valuable because of the course of nature. But the person who acts in a bad way, who develops his will in a bad way, becomes less valuable than he actually is by nature! Therefore, man needs a third deity to guide him to make his will good again, to make it completely good, to sanctify his unhealthy will. And that was the third form of the deity: the Holy Spirit, who was depicted everywhere in the mysteries through the fifth stage of initiation, which was thus designated by the people.

And so these old people said: There are three ways in which the deity reveals itself. - You see, they could have said: There is a god of nature, a god of will, and a god of spirit, where the will is again sanctified, spiritualized. - They also said it that way, because the old words mean that perfectly. “Father” actually means something that is connected with the origin of the physical, something natural. Only in the newer languages has the meaning of these words been lost. But then these old people added something when they said: There is a God of nature, the Father; a God of will, the Son; and a God who heals everything in man that can become diseased through the will, the Holy Spirit; but - they added - these three are one. So they said that their most important sentence, their most important conviction, is: There are three forms of the Godhead, but these three are one.

And then they said something else. When you look at a human being, they said, you see a great difference in relation to nature. When you look at a stone, what is at work in it? The Father. When you look at a plant, what is at work in it? The Father God. When you look at a human being as a physical person, what is at work in him? The Father God. But if you look at a person as a spiritual being, in his will: what is at work in there? The Son of God. And if you look at the future of humanity, how it should become, if everything in the will should become healthy: there the Spirit God is at work. All three gods, it was said, work in man. There are three gods or divine figures; but they are one, and they work in man as one unit.

This was the original conviction of Christianity. And if we go back to the early days of Christianity, people still expressed a conviction. They said: Now, this healing, this health-giving Spirit must work in two ways. Firstly, because nature can become ill, it must work on the physical, on that which comes from the Father-God. And because the will must also become healthy, it must act on that which comes from the Son. So they said: This Holy Spirit must work in such a way that it emanates from the Father and the Son at the same time. That was the original conviction of Christianity.

Now, Muhammad actually did get a certain fear. He saw how the old paganism, which had many gods, would degenerate, become corrupt, and ruin humanity. Now he saw Christianity emerging and said to himself: That would also have the danger of idolatry, namely, having three gods. He did not see through that these are three divine forms. Therefore, he entered into opposition and particularly emphasized: There is only one God and Mohammed proclaims him to you. Everything else that is said about the gods is wrong.

This doctrine was then spread with tremendous fanaticism. Now, as a result, in Islam, in Mohammedanism, this thinking of the three divine figures was not there at all. They confined themselves more to speaking of the unified God, whom they then actually felt to be the Father of everything. And that is why Islam has always thought more: Now, just as the stone has no free will to grow as it is, just as the plant has no free will but gets yellow or red blossoms from nature, so everything in man also grows up from nature. - This is how this rigid idea of fate arose in Islam - fatalism is what it is called - that man must actually submit to an absolute, rigid fate: If he is happy, it is ordained by the Father God; if he is unhappy, it is ordained by the Father God. He must simply throw himself into this, as it is called, fate.

You see, gentlemen, that was the religious side of Mohammedanism. But precisely because Mohammed saw everything in man as it is in nature, he was able to absorb all ancient art and all earlier life into himself much more easily than Christianity could. Christianity, after all, mainly saw the way in which human will can be healed. Mohammedanism did not concern itself with that. Why should it? If it is determined that man will become bad, then it is determined by the Father God. In Christianity it has been said: The old pagans, they mainly looked to the Father God; so you have to put the Son of God in contrast. - Mohammed, and especially his later followers, did not say that; they said: The old pagans, even if they had many gods, also worshiped the natural world, in which, of course, the one God also works. Therefore, much of the ancient science and art has continued into Islam. And it was already the case that while, for example, in the ninth century in Europe, Charlemagne ruled in the Frankish Empire, who is known as one of the greatest rulers of the Middle Ages and is mentioned everywhere in history – he had trouble learning the letters, he could not yet write – what he achieved in art and science was a mere trifle compared to what had emerged in Asia under the ruler – his name was Harun al-Rashid – who, during the time of Charlemagne, was active in Islam, in Mohammedanism. There was a great deal of art and science that had remained from ancient paganism. And such art and science then found its way into Europe via the south to Spain.

Now, Christianity spread out from Rome. From Asia, I would like to say, Christianity was bypassed by Mohammedanism. There were also strong struggles between Christianity and Mohammedanism. Truly, Mohammedanism did something very strange there. You know that when an army is stationed somewhere, you can achieve a lot in strategy if you can go around it unnoticed and then attack it from the other side. That is actually what Mohammedanism did to Christianity; it bypassed Christianity in the south and then attacked it from the left flank.

But, gentlemen, if that had not happened, if only Christianity had spread, we would still have no science today! The religious element of Mohammedanism has been repelled, that has been fought through wars. But the intellectual element, which did not deal with religious disputes but which propagated the old science, that came to Europe with Mohammedanism. And what the Europeans learned there has flowed into today's science. Therefore, in our souls today in Europe we actually have two things: we have religion, which was inspired by Christianity, and we have science, which was inspired by Mohammedanism, albeit in a roundabout way. And Christianity was only able to develop here in such a way that Mohammedanism influenced it scientifically.

But this has led to an even greater desire to defend Christianity in this western part of Europe. Wherever cultus is dominant, religion needs less defense; cultus exerts a great influence on man. Here, starting from Rome, cultus was less dominant, although it was preserved; the doctrine became dominant. But now it had to be constantly defended against the onslaught of Mohammedanism. Actually, the whole of the Middle Ages passed under the shadow of these struggles that had been left over from Mohammedanism, struggles that were initially military struggles but later became spiritual struggles. In the second half of the Middle Ages, what is called European culture or civilization gradually developed. What happened gradually?

In the East, as far as Russia and even Greece, Christianity could not but remain true to the old traditions in its cult. But what does that mean? It means performing external acts, even if they are only symbolic. Here one must follow nature. One is much more inclined to emphasize the Father God than the Son God. And just as this principle of destiny arose intellectually in Mohammed, that one must strictly submit to what the Father-God ordains, so this Father-God also came more into his own in Eastern Christianity, in the sense that he came more into his own than the Son-God. Only a remarkable shift in thinking has taken place: these people in the East have always held fast to the Christ, but they have transferred the attributes of the Father God to the Christ. They have somewhat obscured the story here, have not spoken so much of the Son of God, but they have become Christian, recognized Christ as their God, but they saw him with the attributes of the Father God. So that actually for this eastern religion the view arose: Christ, our Father. And that actually lives in all of this eastern religion: Christ, our Father.

And when you come to Europe, a pervasive concept of the three divine persons arose precisely because people wanted to defend themselves against Mohammedanism, against the mere unity of God, which has no three forms.

Now, you see, gentlemen, you will know that you can argue for a while; people can sit down together and argue and argue and argue; one says one thing to the other, the other says another thing to the first! Well, they will argue. But what usually comes of it? They finally separate, go their separate ways! The end of the dispute is that they disagree, that they go their separate ways. Agreement is reached only in the rarest of cases, especially when the disputes are extensive. You know, at first there was a socialist party; they argued a lot. There was a left wing and a right wing. But later the wings became their own party lines. And so it was with the spread of Christianity. It spread. In Asia, that is, in the East, more was given to the Father God, but the Christ was definitely retained; in Europe, more was distinguished between the Father and the Son. There was discussion about it, arguments about it until the 9th or 10th century. Then the great church schism occurred. The eastern church, which is called the Orthodox Church today because it held on to the original, old things, and the western church, the Roman Catholic Church, separated from each other. So first this great difference arose between the eastern church, eastern Christianity, and western Christianity.

This continued for some time. In the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, people became accustomed to this Eastern and Western division. However, an event occurred that, in a sense, confused the whole matter. And that was the Crusades.

The people among whom Muhammad originally worked and who first accepted Islam were the Arabs. These Arabs had a distinct natural religion. They were therefore actually quite suitable for understanding the “Father”, for recognizing the Father-Godhead. And that is why, in the early days of Mohammedanism, this view of the Father-God, who is active through all nature and also through human nature, developed.

But then other peoples came over from the far reaches of Asia, whose descendants are the Turks today. Mongolian, Tartar peoples came. They fought in wars against the Arab people. And the peculiar thing about this Mongolian population, whose descendants are then the Turks, is that they actually had no nature god at all. They had what man in the most ancient times had: no eye for nature, which the Greeks then had so strongly. They have kept that. The Turks brought with them from their original dwellings no sense of nature, but a tremendous sense of a spiritual god, a god that one can only grasp in thought, that one cannot look at at all. And this particular way of looking at God now passed over to Islam, to Mohammedanism. The Turks adopted the Mohammedan religion from their defeated enemies, but they changed it according to their way of thinking. And while the Muslim religion actually adopted much from the ancient world, from art and science, the Turks actually threw out everything that was art and science, and actually became hostile to art and science. And they were the terror of the western population, the terror of all those who had adopted Christianity.

You see, for Christians, the area where Christianity originated, Palestine with Jerusalem, was a particularly sacred area. Many made the pilgrimage there from all over the West, at great sacrifice. There were many people who were very poor who had to pool together what they needed to make a trip to Palestine to the so-called Holy Sepulchre. Yes, but they made that journey! And it was only when the Turks came that this journey became dangerous, because the Turks extended their rule over Palestine, and they mistreated the Christian pilgrims who came there. And the Europeans wanted Palestine to be free so that they could come there. They wanted to establish their own European rule in Palestine. That is why they undertook these great military campaigns, which have become known as the Crusades, which did not achieve their goal, but which actually express the war, the struggle between Western Christianity, and also between Eastern Christianity and Muslim Turkey. Christianity was to be saved from Muslim Turkey.

Well, there were many people who initially moved to Asia as warriors. What did they see there? The Crusades began in the 12th century and lasted for several centuries, falling right in the middle of the Middle Ages. What did those who went to Asia as crusaders or crusaders see first? First of all, they saw that the Turks were terrible enemies. In the Turks, they were facing terrible enemies. But if one or the other of the crusaders had a little time to look around in days free of fighting, they might have some strange experiences. For example, he might meet some old man who had retreated to a poor room somewhere, who didn't care about Turks, Christians or Arabs, but who had continued to develop with remarkable loyalty what had existed in ancient paganism as culture, as science, as religious science. The Turks didn't care about that. All of this had actually been eradicated by official culture; but there were such people, many such people. And so the Europeans got to know a great deal of ancient wisdom, much of which was no longer present in Christianity. They brought this with them when they returned to Europe.

Now imagine, gentlemen, what was there. Even in earlier times, the Arabs had moved across Italy and Spain, bringing with them this art and this scientific way of thinking. It spread and became our science. Now the ancient Eastern science was brought over, and it mixed with our own. And as a result, something very special came into being in Europe.

You see, the Roman Church adopted the cult, although it cultivated it less than the Eastern Church; it adopted the cult, but it also emphasized the teaching very strongly. But this teaching, this instruction, this religious instruction, was dependent on the person in the old church. Right up to the time of the Crusades, it was dependent on the person. Whatever was proclaimed from the pulpit, whatever was approved by the councils that were held, that was taught. And then there was also the so-called New Testament, the Bible. But reading the Bible was actually forbidden to people who were not priests, and this prohibition was strictly adhered to. It was actually something terrible if, in those ancient times before the Crusades, someone wanted to read the Bible, the New Testament. That was not allowed. And so you actually only had what the priesthood taught. The Bible was not in the hands of laymen, of believers.

But now something had come about – because the Arabs had brought science, because people had become acquainted with the ancient wisdom of the East – that made a great many people feel: The priests don't know that at all, the ones who teach! There is much more wisdom than they teach. – And from that came the intention: Now let's see where they get their wisdom from. And so the tendency arose to actually read the Bible and get to know the New Testament. And from that arose the third form of Christianity: Protestant Christianity, which then found a special representative in Luther, but which actually had already emerged earlier in accordance with its intention.

Take, for example, these areas of present-day Czechoslovakia, Bohemia and Bavaria, or take these areas here on the Rhine, from Holland to Germany – I could also name many other areas – where fraternities formed everywhere. Here the “Brotherhood of Common Life” formed in Holland on the Rhine. Here (pointing to the drawing) the brotherhoods formed that were called the “Moravian Brothers”. What did these brotherhoods want? These brotherhoods said: Yes, true Christianity was not actually spread from Rome, but Christianity is such that one must actually first get to know it, through the inner life. - And at first this intention to get to know Christianity originally was actually something that was striven for inwardly. Only later did they say: One must get to know the Gospel. - But both arise from the same.

You see, that is the great difference between Hus, who worked in today's Czechoslovakia, and Luther. Hus paid even less attention to the gospel than to the fact that man experiences Christianity inwardly. Later, this became more externalized into learning the gospel.

But the gospel, the New Testament, was written under completely different circumstances. It was written in a figurative language that was no longer understood later on. Let me give you an example.

At one point in the gospel, it is told how Christ healed the sick. Now, at that time, when Christ healed the sick, there were many more of those diseases in the areas where he taught that are today called nervous, nerve diseases, than those diseases that are actually located in the organs. Now, nerve diseases can often be cured from person to person through encouragement, love and so on. Most of the healings of which there is mention go back to such healing. But then it says at one point: “When the sun had set, the Christ gathered the people around him and healed them.” This passage, when you read it today in the Gospel, seems to people as if it were meaningless, as if it were only intended to give the time. But why is the time given at this point? Because they want to say: The powers that a person develops when they want to heal others are stronger when the sun is not in the sky, when it comes through the earth with its rays, than when the sun is in the sky. - This is a very meaningful passage: “When the sun had set, the Christ gathered the people around him and healed them.” It is no longer heeded. The intention was to suggest how the Christ uses the natural forces inherent in human beings for healing. And so the gospel was only translated at a time when it could no longer be understood. Basically, the gospel is very, very little really understood.

Now, actually it happened in all these areas, both in Oriental Christianity and in Western and Protestant Christianity, as it has happened in some other cases that I had to deal with, where something that was originally well understood was retained later, but no longer understood. Christianity was no longer properly understood in any of its three forms. I would like to say that each of these three forms has taken one thing mainly: Oriental Christianity took the Father God, even if He is called Christ. The Roman Catholic Western religion took the Son God, looks up to the Father only as the old man with a flowing beard, who is still painted, but little is said of the Father God. And Protestant Christianity has the Spirit God. In Protestant Christianity, the main question discussed is: How do you get rid of sin? How is man healed of sin? How is man justified before God and so on? So actually, while Christianity originally had the one Godhead in three forms, Christianity has fallen apart into three denominations. Each confession has a piece, a real piece of Christianity.

But by merely uniting the three pieces, one will not recover the original Christianity. One must rediscover it from the right human power, as I have already begun to show in the presentation I recently gave. But I also wanted to show you this so that you can see how difficult it is today to arrive at original Christianity. Because, if you ask about Eastern Christianity: What is true Christianity? Yes, they will tell you everything that refers to the Father, and then they will call the Father Christ. If you ask the Roman Catholic Church about the essence of Christianity, they will tell you everything that refers to the sinfulness of man, the wickedness of human nature, that man must be redeemed from his suffering and so on. You are told everything that relates to the Son, to the Christ. If you ask what the essence of Christianity is in terms of Protestantism, you are told: Everything depends on the principle of the recovery of the will, of healing, of the recovery of the will, of justification before God. They then speak of the Holy Spirit and call it Christ.

And that is how we came to have everything we have today; not that people thought: Now we have to unite the three different sides of Christianity, but they said: Now we understand nothing at all! And that is how the mood of the present has come about and the necessity to rediscover Christianity.

And in this way I would like to talk to you next Saturday about the mystery of Golgotha. Then I will see that I come to an end with this answering of questions.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now, today we would like to add something about the question concerning Christianity. Unfortunately, I could not speak last Saturday because I had to go to Liestal. We have tried to say something about what can be described as the actual essence of Christianity, what Christianity has adopted in the development of humanity. We then spoke of the struggles that actually arose around Christianity in Europe and which, as I said, were essentially based on the fact that one party emphasized the father principle more, as did Christianity in the East, while the other party emphasized the son principle more, as did the Roman Catholic Church, and a third party, the Protestant Church, emphasized the spirit principle more.

It is actually difficult to talk about these things today because most people think: Is it worth arguing about such things in the world? Today, the world is concerned with completely different things that are worth fighting for; and the fact that people once waged war on each other in the most horrific way for the very reason that they emphasized one principle or the other is difficult for people to comprehend today. But, you see, gentlemen, one must also understand such things, because there will come a time when people will not be able to understand why people fought over today's issues! This will perhaps be in the not too distant future. And when you consider that, you will also understand why the older people fought over something completely different than today. But you should know what people fought for, because it still lives among us.

What then is the outward view that has been preserved in the strongest possible way from Christianity? The strongest view of Christianity was, for long periods, the dying Jesus – the cross, and on it the dead Jesus. Not right at the beginning of Christianity did people look at the dead Jesus in this way. If you go back to the very earliest times, you find that the most common and widespread image of Christ is one that shows Christ as a younger man with a lamb around his shoulders and as a shepherd. And that was called the Good Shepherd. In the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Christian centuries, that was actually the most widespread image, the Good Shepherd. And it was only in the sixth century AD that images began to appear depicting Christ hanging dead on the cross; as they say, depicting the Crucifixus, the crucified one. The first Christians did not actually depict the crucified one.

There is also something important behind this. You see, the first Christians still had the view that the Christ had come into Jesus from the sun, that the Christ is an extraterrestrial being. The whole thing was misunderstood later. Because the whole thing was later turned into the dogma of the so-called immaculate conception, according to which Jesus, when he was born, was conceived and born not in the ordinary human way. Only when this was no longer understood, that Jesus was a human being at first, albeit a very important human being, and that only in the thirtieth year of his life did the spirit, which is called the Christ, come into him as a sun spirit - at the time when this no longer understood this, on the one hand they conceived the idea of depicting the dead Christ on the cross, the dying Christ, and on the other hand they already spiritually placed the coming of Christ at the moment of birth. This was a misunderstanding that only arose in the sixth century. But that gives us a very, very deep insight. For between the time when Christians still depicted Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd and the time when he was depicted as the Crucified, a very specific fact lies in between, namely the fact that at a council it was decided that man does not consist of three parts, body, soul and spirit, but only consists of two parts, body and soul, and the soul, it was said, had some spiritual properties.

This is very important, gentlemen! You see, throughout the Middle Ages, trichotomy, the division of man into three parts, was considered a heretical view. No one who was orthodox was allowed to believe in the tripartite nature of man. One was not allowed to say: Man also has a spirit; but one had to say: Man has body and soul, and the soul has some spiritual qualities. But by virtually abolishing the spirit, the whole path of human beings to the spirit has been blocked, and only today must the science of the spirit arise again to restore to humanity what has been taken from it.

Above all, the first Christians realized that that which lives in them as Christ cannot be born and die at all. That is not something human. Man is born and dies. But the Christ, who has gone in Jesus during his lifetime, was not born in a human way, and when Jesus died on the cross, he could not have been touched by death either, but rather, just as a man puts on another robe and remains, he took on another form, namely a spiritual form. But if you want to depict something that is spiritual – you can't see that with your eyes – then you have to represent it figuratively. And the fact that the spirit watches over man, that the spirit is a good advisor to man, that is what they wanted to depict by depicting Christ Jesus as the Good Shepherd.

And something has remained, it is just that people today no longer understand it. It is very often the case that only part of an image remains. Even today, when speaking of Christ, one often says, “the Lamb of God.” This was seen in the images that were there in the first centuries; part of it, depicting the lamb that Christ had on his shoulders, has remained. And only this part has been retained. In older times, people were referred to by some part of their body. Let us suppose, for example, that there are such names. Someone is called Kappa – Cappa, which was once a small headdress. Certain people got their name from this headdress. If someone is called 'Eagle', it means that they once had an eagle in their coat of arms, and so on. Isn't that right? The name 'Lamb of God' also remained because it was a part of the older images.

Now, in the sixth century, all sense of the spirit had actually already disappeared, and the consequence of this was that people believed that they could only look at what had taken place in the human destiny of Christ Jesus. They did not look at the living Christ, who is spirit, but at the mortal man Jesus and interpreted it as if He were the Christ. Therefore, from the sixth century onwards, this event of dying became particularly important.

Yes, you see, materialism already plays a role here. And we see, especially when we follow the development of Christianity, how materialism develops even more. And as a result, many things came about in later times that would not otherwise have come about.

I have told you, gentlemen, that this knowledge, that the Christ is a being from the sun that lived in the man Jesus, is expressed by this sign, which can still be seen on the altar at every high mass: This is the Holy Sacrament, the monstrance (see drawing p. 128): the sun in the middle and the moon on which the sun is. As long as it was known that the Christ was a being from the sun, it made sense. For what is it that is inside the monstrance? It is caked flour. How could this caked flour come about? It could come about through the sun's rays falling on the earth, through the sun's light and warmth falling on the earth, through grain growing and flour being made from that grain. So that is a real product of the sun. It is really, if you want to put it that way, a body made of sunlight. As long as one knew that, the whole thing had a meaning.

Furthermore, the moon was depicted in this form because the crescent moon appears to be the most important thing. And I have told you: man has received the powers that give him his physical form from the powers of the moon. The whole thing had meaning as long as people knew how these things are. But these things are gradually losing all their meaning. I will tell you one thing that shows you the significance of such things.

Do you think that the Turks, that is, the Mohammedans, as I told you, again merely worshipped the one God, not the three figures; they again attributed everything to the Father God. What did they have to accept as a sign? Of course, the moon! That is why the Turks have their image: the crescent moon.

Christianity should know that in this symbol of theirs it has the one in which the sun conquers the moon. And that was mainly depicted by the first Christians: that the sun has conquered the moon through the Mystery of Golgotha. But what does that mean? You see, now everything is actually going haywire in the spiritual realm! Because if you understand what the image of the sun represents, you say to yourself: the one who knows about this solar image assumes that man has free will in life, that something can still enter into him that has a meaning for life. The one who only believes in the moon thinks that man has received everything at birth, that he can no longer make anything out of himself. Yes, but that is precisely the fatalism of the Turks! And the Turks actually know something about it. In some respects the Turks are cleverer than the Europeans, because the Europeans once had the sun as their sign, but have forgotten what it means.

Now, when you consider that in the 6th century they actually no longer knew anything about the spiritual Christ, then you will also understand why in the Middle Ages - in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, and then a little later - they suddenly began to argue: What does it actually mean, this thing called the Lord's Supper? It only means something to the one who accepts a picture of the spiritual. But they were no longer able to do that; so now they argued. Some said: On the altar in the church, the bread really does change into the body of Christ. The others did not believe this, because they could not imagine that the bread, which looked exactly the same afterwards as it did before, had become flesh. They could not understand this. And so those medieval disputes arose, which led to such terrible results. For those who said: It is all the same to us whether people understand the matter or not, we believe that the bread is real flesh – that was the one party that became Roman Catholics. The others said: We cannot believe that, but at most what happens can have the meaning, the symbolic meaning. – Those were the ones from whom Protestantism then arose.

And it was actually over this issue that all the religious wars of the Middle Ages broke out, which came to a head in the terrible Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648. This Thirty Years War began with Catholics and Protestants getting mixed up. As is well known, the Thirty Years War began with the so-called Defenestration of Prague. The imperial governors in Prague were thrown out of the window by the opposing party; they only fell, despite falling from the second floor, so well that it did them no harm because they fell on a dung heap! But the dunghill was not made of cow or horse dung, but of shredded paper and the like, because at that time in Prague there was an order that shredded paper, envelopes and so on were simply thrown out of the window. But it did serve a good purpose, because when Catholics and Protestants quarreled and the imperial governors Martinitz and Slawata, together with the secret writer Fabricius, were thrown out of the window – that was often done at the time, it was something that was not that uncommon – all three were saved. But that was when the Thirty Years' War started.

Of course, you must not believe that the entire Thirty Years' War was just about fighting out religious disputes. In that case, the Thirty Years' War would probably have ended earlier. What was added then were the disputes between the princes. They took advantage of the fact that people were attacking each other. One took the side of one party, the other that of the other, and then they pursued their own aims under the guise of religious disputes, so that the Thirty Years' War lasted for thirty years. But it really started for the reasons I have told you.

Well, you see, it was not until the Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to 1648, that it lasted into the 17th century; it was not so long ago that people fought over such things. And it was actually out of this dispute that Protestantism, the Protestant Church, grew.

You will now say: Yes, but if the spirit was actually abolished, how can you tell us that of the three divine beings, the Protestant, the Evangelical Church adopted the spirit? - Yes, gentlemen, it must be said that the Evangelicals did not know that they were worshiping the spirit, because the spirit had actually been abolished. They did not know it. But I have already told you: just because you are unaware of something, it does not mean that it is not there. And there was a spiritual activity going on in the Protestant Church, even if it was not a very large spiritual activity. It was just that the Protestants were unaware of it. You see, if there were no such thing as what the professors, for example, are unaware of, well, how much would there be in the world? Gentlemen, that is precisely the point: we must be clear that we can speak of something that a person does even if he knows nothing about it! And so, when it comes to the origin of Protestantism, we can already say that this third figure, the spirit, was actually the active one.

You can literally see materialism emerging there! The older people in Christianity did not need to argue that this flattened flour physically turns into real flesh, because it never occurred to them to think such a thing. It was only when they wanted to think everything materially that it was also thought materially. That is very interesting in general. Materialism actually has two forms: First, all spirituality was conceived materially, and only later was the spirit denied. That is actually the path that materialism takes.

It is now interesting to see how even later, even after the 6th century, a much more spiritual view of Christianity is present in Central Europe than later. Christianity first became materialistic in the south. In Central Europe there are two very beautiful poems. One of them originated in Alsace in the 9th century and is called Otfried's “Evangelienharmonie”. The other poem, however, originated in areas that are now Saxon and is called “Heliand”, savior. If you read the “Heliand”, you will notice one thing. You will say to yourself: Now, this monk – because it was a monk from a farming background who wrote the “Heliand” – has indeed described Christ Jesus, but he describes him in a very particular way; he describes him roughly as the Germans describe a duke who rides at the head of German masses of soldiers, fighting and conquering his enemies. When you read the “Heliand,” you feel you are in Germany, not in Palestine. Of course, it recounts the same events as the Gospels, but it does so as if Christ Jesus were actually a German duke, a German prince. And the deeds of Jesus are also told in this way.

Yes, gentlemen, what does that mean? It means that the man who wrote the “Heliand” was completely indifferent to the external facts that could once be seen with one's own eyes in Palestine; he did not want to describe them faithfully at all. He was indifferent to the external image. He wanted to describe the spiritual Christ and thought to himself: It does not matter whether he travels around the world in the human form of a German duke or in the form of a Palestinian Jew. So at the time when 'Heliand' was written, people in Central Europe still truly believed in the spiritual Christ, they had not yet become materialistic. In the south, this was already the case at that time; the Romance peoples, the Greek peoples, had already become materialistic. But in Central Europe there was still a certain sense of the spiritual, and so this Saxon monk who wrote the “Heliand” actually still described the Christ, only in the image of a German duke. From this you can see that even here in Central Europe one finds the possibility of proving that the Christ was at first conceived entirely spiritually, precisely as the Spirit of the Sun, as I described him.

And if one then goes into the character of the Christ in this Heliand, one finds that the main point of view is that the Heliand, the Christ, in this Saxon book is a “free man”, that is, he has the sun within him, not just the moon, so he is a free man.

It is really the case that the whole connection of the Christ with the world outside of Earth has simply been forgotten and is no longer recognized today.

But now I would like to tell you something else. If we go back to those mysteries that I told you about, which in ancient times were places of learning, religion and art at the same time, if we go back to these old mysteries, we find that festivals are celebrated in them that are connected with the year. In spring, the festival of the so-called resurrection was always celebrated. Nature also rises at Easter time. That is when the festival of resurrection was celebrated. People said to themselves: the human soul can celebrate a resurrection just as nature does. Nature has the Father. In spring, nature's powers become new. But in the human being, if he takes proper care of himself, if he works on himself, the powers of the soul become new. And that was what was striven for in the old mysteries, by the people who actually knew, by the people who were said to have wisdom, that the soul should have an experience which I might call a kind of springtime experience in human life. You see, a springtime experience, when you can say of yourself: Oh, what I knew before, it's all nothing! I am reborn! Once in a lifetime, the realization can dawn on you that you are reborn, that is, reborn out of the spirit. As strange as it may sound to you, in the whole of Asia Minor, people were divided into those who were born once and those who were born twice. Everywhere one spoke of twice-born people. Those who had been born only once were born through the powers of the moon and remained so throughout their entire lives. The others, the twice-born, had been taught in the mysteries, had learned something and had known: Man can free himself, man can follow his own forces. - But that was represented in the picture.

You can go back far, far: Everywhere around the springtime there is a particular festival where in the mysteries they depicted how a god, present in human form, dies and is buried, and then rises again after three days. That was a real depiction that was always given in the old mysteries in the springtime. People came together. The image of this god in human form was there. They depicted how the god died; they buried the image. After three days, the image was taken out of the grave again and carried in solemn procession through the area, and everyone shouted: The savior has risen again for us! During the three days in which the savior figuratively lay in the grave, they had a kind of mourning festival, and this was followed by a celebratory festival.

You see, gentlemen, that means a lot; because it means that what happened at Golgotha was always enacted in the mysteries every year.

When it is said in the Gospels that there was a cross on Golgotha, that Christ died there, that is a historical event. But the image of it was present throughout antiquity. And that is why the first Christians felt that what really happened was a fulfilled prophecy. And they said: Those who lived in the ancient mysteries were the prophets of what happened as the mystery of Golgotha.

So you see: even in ancient times there was, so to speak, a Christianity. Only that Christianity was not the Christianity of Jesus Christ, but it was a spiritual Christianity that was celebrated in the image.

You see, one of the most important saints of the Catholic Church is St. Augustine, who lived in the 4th to 5th century. This Saint Augustine was initially a pagan, then converted to Christianity and later became one of the most respected priests and saints of the Catholic Church. Now, in the writings of this Augustine, you will find a strange saying. He says: Christianity was already there before Jesus Christ; the ancient sages were already Christians, only they were not yet called Christians.

Yes, gentlemen, it is something tremendously significant that even in the time of Christianity it is admitted that what was present as Christianity in the ancient mysteries was only presented by Jesus Christ in the time when the mysteries were no longer present, so that it had to remain as a unified event for the whole earth.

And the awareness that Christianity had already existed in ancient paganism has also been lost. Materialism has simply destroyed an enormous amount of what mankind had already found. And in this image, where the resurrection of the dead human god was always depicted in springtime, the wise man of antiquity saw his own destiny depicted. He said: I must become like that; I must also develop a science within me by which I say to myself, death has only one meaning for that in me which has come into being through natural forces, but not for that which later came into being in me for the second time, which I acquire through my own human powers.

There was still something in the early Christianity where people said to themselves: Man must, in order to be immortal, awaken the soul within himself during life; then he is immortal in the true sense. Of course, a false view could not actually be opposed to something like that. But a false view did fight. For while in the first centuries Christianity was spread in such a way that people said: One must cultivate the soul of man so that the soul of man does not die -, later the church preached a different view: It no longer wanted man to take care of his soul, but it wanted to take care of his soul itself! The Church is supposed to take more and more care of the soul of the individual, not the individual himself. This has led to the fact that people no longer see the actual way in which the soul is properly cared for, namely, that the spirit is reborn in the soul, that the sun-like element is reborn. You cannot take care of the sun-like element in a materialistic way. How then could one provide for the soul in a materialistic way? Yes, one would have to equip an expedition and always bring from the sun what one should give to man! But of course one cannot do that. And so the whole thing was presented in a false way.

You see, gentlemen, everything I have to tell you shows you how, over time, materialism has actually become more and more widespread and how the spiritual in man has actually no longer been understood. Today it is already the case that this principle, not letting the soul of man take care of itself, but letting the church take care of the soul, has not yet led to the death of the human soul. But if the same principle were to continue, it would not be long before souls died with their bodies. Today, people's souls are still alive; they can still be awakened when a true spiritual science comes. In a century or two they could no longer be awakened if a spiritual science does not arise, if the old ways continue.

What would happen if materialism were to remain? Yes, you see, gradually this materialism would have to laugh at itself; because even in education one must proceed in a spiritual way. You cannot educate and teach without speaking of the spirit. But if it really comes to that, as it is already evident in some places, materialism will either have to laugh at itself when it speaks of the spirit, or it will have to become honest.

When I and some other anthroposophical friends had spoken at the congress in Vienna in 1922, an article was published afterwards that ended with the author saying, “We have to fight against the spirit!” He wanted to dismiss us by saying, “We have to fight against the spirit!” But if we honestly continued the fight against the spirit, where would it lead? Then one would say, if one honestly wanted to start educating a six-year-old child: Gosh, that's matter, that presupposes the spirit! Let's rather prescribe a powder or something else for the child to change its matter; then it will become clever, then it will know something! That is what comes out when materialism becomes honest. He should let children come to school, and, as one might vaccinate against smallpox today, so one child after another should be vaccinated with cleverness; because if cleverness is materialistic, then it must be vaccinated. So human children should be vaccinated with cleverness. That would make materialism honest. Because if someone says that he does not think with his soul and spirit, but with his brain – and the brain is a material substance – then one must also make the brain clever in a material way, not in a spiritual way. Materialism would end up in such terrible contradictions. The only way to save itself is to learn again to know something of the spirit. A spiritual science was bound to come in our time, because otherwise the human souls would die.

Question: The one question is: why does it heal completely when a person inflicts a wound on himself, a cut, for example, while if you cut off a piece of flesh, for example, there is always a scar left behind; for thirty to forty years the person concerned has had no feeling at such a point. He wants to know how this is possible, since it is said that it renews itself every seven years!

The second question concerns the finds in Egypt. It is reported that a mummy, a tomb, has been found, and that during the opening of the tomb or while working in the passage, two engineers, the main conductors, died of poisoning. In the first case, it was thought that it was an ordinary heart attack or something like that; then later the same fate befell the other. It was mentioned in the magazines that poisons may have been used at the time of embalming the mummy to prevent people from entering the tombs. I cannot believe that poisons would last that long. Or did gases develop in the air spaces, causing death to occur after a very short time? Or could the poisons that were used in Egypt at that time be preserved for so long?

Some clothes were found with them. These clothes were aired: they immediately crumbled to dust. Subsequently, attempts were made through chemistry to prepare these substances again in order to preserve them for posterity.

Then grain was found in the tombs of the pharaohs that had been lying there for thousands of years. This grain was sown and was still said to be viable.

I would like to ask whether all of this was possible under normal conditions.

For example, according to the newspaper reports, it took them eighty days to get to the main tomb and to move the main stone. But it was as if the mountain had collapsed and the tombstone, the large stone, had rolled over it. Or as if everything had collapsed afterwards by detonation, since the burial places were so difficult to reach – how was that possible?

Dr. Steiner: First of all, with regard to wound healing – if we answer the questions one after the other – the incised wounds that one makes when operating: These cuts heal more or less well. That must be stated first: they heal more or less well. And indeed, one can observe how the cuts sometimes heal really extraordinarily well, so that one has to look very closely later when one comes to the place where the cut was and one wants to discover the scar. On the other hand, there are other cuts – and you don't just mean surgical wounds, but also when you cut yourself, right? – that heal extremely badly; the scar is thick and you can often find a very hard scar. Now I'll tell you something. As a boy, I used to carve a lot with knives myself. I had a peculiar habit back then of always having to have a pocket knife – I went a long way to school – you have to have something like that, don't you. But I always lost the pocket knife, and so a lot of knives had to be supplied. I did a lot of carving and, among other things, I cut myself very badly here and here, as you can see from the carving. But you have to look very closely if you still want to see the trace of it; it has almost completely healed. But if you look very closely, you can see this cut, which was a gaping wound and bled a lot. But you can hardly see it anymore. On the other hand, with some cuts the edges, the thick scars, can be seen for a long time. Now, what causes these thick scars? You see, the human body is formed entirely from the inside out; you have seen that from the way I have described the formation of the human body, and I have also told you that everything that has to be formed by the human body has to be formed from the inside, right up to the surface of the skin. Now, what causes colds? I have also spoken to you about this. Colds are caused by the fact that one does not develop one's own warmth alone, but that the external warmth or cold has an effect on one, that one is treated like a piece of wood by the environment, so that the cold comes so quickly that one cools down, so that one perceives the cold merely as a stimulus, that it opposes what comes from within. All of this is foreign to the human body and is fought by it. Now, at the moment when you cut yourself, whether it is through a clumsiness, a mishap, or an operation, at that moment there is still a foreign instrument at the site where only the human body should be at work. The knife penetrates into the space where blood and nerves and muscles and so on should actually be at work. So at this point there is a very lively struggle between the forces that are inside the body and the forces that are penetrating. They are, after all, intruders. And in order to ward them off, the inner physical matter of the human body clumps together all around, creating the scar. It clumps together to prevent these forces from penetrating further. So the scar is a protective covering that is formed initially to keep the foreign forces from penetrating. The scar always develops initially.

Now, suppose you are young, for example, very young, like I was when I made these cutlet stories; I was ten, eleven, twelve years old. Yes, when you are so young, the etheric body is in full activity, it is extremely active. When the etheric body is as strong as it is in early youth, then, when the physical matter falls away, the scar will simply heal gradually; the substance of the tissues is arranged in the appropriate way. Suppose you are older; then the etheric body, especially at the site of the scar, is not so strong as to overcome this. It does it again, does it a second time, because it cannot overcome the place where the scar is attached, because it cannot get over it. Because it always depends on the strength or weakness of the etheric body whether a scar is formed or gradually eliminated. Injuries in childhood will always leave weaker scars than injuries inflicted later. But each person is different; some people maintain an exceptionally strong etheric body throughout their entire lives, and they overcome scars more easily than others whose etheric body is weakened.

If a person is a farmer, for example, who always works outside in the fresh air, who never works hard in carbonic acid air, at most in winter when he is not working, in carbonic acid air - he alternates more between winter and summer in good and bad air - he has a stronger etheric body. It is not the case that the farmer is always only in fresh air. There is the well-known saying, isn't there: Why is the air so good in the country? - Because the farmers don't open the windows! If the farmers opened the windows, the air wouldn't be so good! - But that is just by the way. - The person who lives in the country always has a strong change between oxygen-rich and carbonic acid air. As a result, he lives in completely different, healthier conditions. This is not only evident in the scarring of wounds, but also in other formations. If you go out to the countryside, as you know, people walk around barefoot in summer, without boots. Every now and then someone might step on a rusty nail, but out there it doesn't mean much! He takes off the nail, wipes the blood with a dirty finger – everything is dirty, the nail is dirty, the blood he wipes away is dirty – it festers a bit, but it's done and healed in no time. It doesn't matter.

Someone who is only accustomed to living in the city has a much more sensitive etheric body. It may happen that someone has a small pimple; he shaves, hurts himself – and dies from it! I am telling you the truth: someone shaved, hurt himself while shaving, and simply died from the small pimple because blood poisoning set in immediately. That is, the blood poisoning occurred because of the weakness of the etheric body. The etheric body was no longer strong enough to immediately eliminate the invading poisons and foreign substances in the right way. For that you need a robust, lively etheric body. But that is precisely the case with farmers. Now it is getting weaker and weaker; but when you went out into the countryside in my youth, you could see these robust etheric bodies of the farmers! Of course, when the right age is reached, especially for farmers, they fall apart because the etheric body then falls away and because the astral body is not very strong in farmers. But the etheric body is very strong. That is why everything heals much faster there than in city dwellers. The earth profession has something tremendously healthy.

You see, all this can of course be known; but in our social conditions it cannot be changed for the time being. First of all, knowledge of these things must be spread. It can surely be understood that the scars are more or less pronounced depending on the strength of the etheric body, and that the healing of things that are connected to it as external substances that do not belong in the body also takes longer or shorter. A knife, for example, is an external substance; dirt that enters the body is an external substance – the body must immediately defend itself accordingly, and so on. And when one knows this, then one is no longer surprised that some wounds no longer heal at all, because people then have an emaciated, worn-out etheric body. This comes about in particular from the fact that work is no longer in harmony with nature; it comes not even so much from the carbon dioxide-rich air, but simply from the fact that one is no longer connected with nature. If someone is in the office or workshop all day, what they are dealing with has nothing to do with nature. Think of our incredible culture, which has gradually emerged: it separates people completely from nature; it creates ever more harmful and harmful substances that are ever more alien to what is natural.

A major change has taken place in recent times. We usually do not look at things from a spiritual point of view, but they must be considered from a spiritual point of view. Just think about it: in the past, people wrote by hand. Today, we work with the typewriter. Apart from the movement and so on, what is the most important factor for our health when writing? I would like to say that, among the more hidden things that come into play when writing, the smell of ink is the most important for health. And the smell of ink was not more harmful with the earlier ink production, but in a certain sense it was even corrective. What you have worn out, what you have had through unnatural exposure, that you have strained your hand, that has actually been compensated for by the old ink production, by the gall-apple ink production. What you got from the gall-apples smelled so that it continually strengthened the etheric body, even if not much, but still something. When, as you know, they started making aniline ink, producing purely chemical ink, no longer drawing on nature but, as they say in chemistry, making synthetic ink, then the human being was completely cut off; and aniline ink has an odor that is almost the opposite of what the smell of ink used to achieve. Now, of course, people are switching to typewriters. Of course, the movements you have to make, the clattering – there are already typewriters that type silently, but that is only the latest design – that is not the worst thing, but the worst thing is the dirt that is used to make the ink. It completely ruins the human etheric body, to the extent that people develop heart disease from typing because the heart is primarily powered by the etheric body. Culture is also making progress in this area; but it is never balanced out other than through knowledge that one can have about what is really at work. It is indeed true, is it not, that the present is increasingly resisting progress. Now, of course, that must not be the case; but there is a certain instinct underlying it, which consists in noticing, even if one does not know for sure, that more and more harmful things come up precisely with the progress of the future. It is connected. But it is so. Now, as for your other question, how it comes about that these extraordinarily dangerous things occur first when old mummy graves are uncovered: It is not only the case with old mummy graves, but it is also the case, for example, where there are no mummy graves, as in Egypt, but where otherwise the graves are well preserved and are rock tombs. When you enter such a place, there is an extremely toxic air present, which, if I may say so, comes towards you and is extremely dangerous and harmful. Now, what causes this?

It will seem strange to you, gentlemen, that I have to go to such lengths to explain such a thing, but only in this way can you understand it. You see, man does not live on earth just once, but - as I have already indicated to you - he lives in repeated lives on earth, he comes again and again. But when he returns, man is quite different from what he was before. You would all probably be very surprised if a painter came who knew enough about spiritual science to paint the whole company sitting here in a previous life! You would be amazed to see how each of you looked quite different in an earlier life. It would be very interesting! You will come again, won't you? When you have now lived and gone through death and gone through the spiritual world, you will come again. The power that is there to form the later body - it is not only formed from mother and father, but it is also formed by what is in us now and is carried through death into the spiritual world - this power continues to work. What works within the previous earthly bodies remains.

But now it is so that you can say: Does man really have the power to transform that which is in him today and which is so closely connected with the body he has, so that there is a completely different body? - Today no one could transform the spiritual forces within his body in such a way that the other body could be formed. But you cannot die and be reborn immediately either, there has to be a period of time, and a fairly long period at that, in between. This long period in between really has to be there. All the forces are transformed during that time. And under normal circumstances, if you have not been a criminal or a similar person, this period between death and a new birth takes quite a long time. So when do you come back to earth? You come back to earth when the conditions in which you lived have changed completely. Certainly, some people get back into the old conditions; that hurts them very much. But normally you only come back to earth when the conditions have changed completely. So you are not born back into the old conditions.

Yes, what is it that ensures that these old conditions have become completely different? You see, you never have to just fantasize, but you have to stick to the realities. The forces that we have when we are not living on earth, but between death and a new birth, are such that they also work on earth here. These forces flow to us from all the stars and everywhere. But these are actually our forces. We are just not on earth during that time. While we are on earth, our forces work from the earth; when we are not on earth, they work from the heavens. And these are precisely the forces of destruction. They destroy the circumstances in which we were.

This is easily understood in terms of external circumstances, but it goes further, into nature itself, gentlemen! It goes further, into nature itself!

Imagine, under today's conditions, a person is being buried or cremated. After some time, there is an awareness that there is hardly anything left of this person. And if you finally go to the cemeteries and look after fifty or sixty years to see what is left under the place where someone of our ancestors is buried, you will only find a few remains of bones, which will have dissolved. So there is nothing left of what has to be destroyed; after all, our whole body has to be destroyed if we are to be reborn. But even if outwardly nothing is visible of our body, there is still very much there; and he who can see the finer substances, he finds that in the place where a person is buried, even where a person is cremated, what is simply still present of the person continues to have an effect for a long time. All this must be destroyed first.

Now, the Egyptians had a specific intention behind their practice of mummification. They basically wanted to prevent people from having to come back down to earth. They did not want that at all; because by embalming the corpse, they prevent the descent. They wanted to preserve the comfort of being in the spiritual world. And the result of this was that they not only preserved the mummies, but they used materials with such great knowledge that the physical cohesion remained so beautifully in the form that we still have the mummies in museums today. They are an exact imprint of what the person actually was in those days.

Well, gentlemen, first of all, it is necessary that what has been preserved for thousands of years is like poison, because it is destructive. It actually belongs to the forces of destruction. There are an enormous number of destructive forces in a mummy. In fact, when you look at a mummy, the dust coming out of it is all destructive forces coming out. These destructive forces are there for the reason I have stated, because the human being actually wants to destroy, from the extraterrestrial, that which was there, in that form as well. Now it is there, and he has sent his destructive forces into it. So it already has its destructive forces within itself.

Secondly, however, the Egyptians used very special substances to preserve these mummies. These substances are particularly hostile to destruction. And these substances behave in such a way in a short time that they create a poisonous atmosphere. There is always a poisonous atmosphere around a mummy. This comes from the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

Now, of course, something else comes into play. Where did the Egyptians get such substances that turned into poison in a relatively short time, while they themselves could work with them quite well? You see, today's people have no idea about the power of language! The power of language in ancient times, including in Egypt, was enormous. Imagine you have a fire that causes a lot of smoke. If you blow into the fire, you change the shape of the smoke. You can make the smoke swirl in any way you like by blowing lightly; you can thus change the shape of the smoke. The blowing does not matter much. But if you start whistling a little song, then that is also a continuous blowing and so on. In this way you can shape the smoke flames according to the content of the little song. Ancient people always knew that the substance changes completely when they speak into it in any way, and especially when they use certain words. Now they used their spices for embalming, for preparing the mummies. They did not work with these spices in the way we work today, but they always worked in such a way that something was spoken during the embalming process that would be something like this today: “Whoever approaches my body will find death.” But it was spoken in such a tone and in such language that the material took it on, so that during the embalming this power passed over into the substance of the spices. It lives in them. Today's man can no longer believe this, but it is so. So if you have a mummy and you can get hold of the material it is still contained in it today: “Whoever approaches my body will die from it, will meet their death.” And that happens because the material has now received the power that was infused into it through the word.

Today, this is only present in the very last remnants. But go into a Catholic church – there the priest no longer has the power to subdue the spices with the word; but he does use a lesser power: he burns incense. Now the whole procedure that takes place would be completely ineffective if the right thing were done first, then the incense were lit, then certain prayers were spoken into the incense, or thoughts were sent. But that does not happen, instead the incense is made; certain words are spoken into it - they are then in the incense, and they then have an effect on the people who are in the incense atmosphere. Therefore the smell of incense is an important means for the conversion of sinners.

So you see, gentlemen, the last remnants of all this still remain! But this embalming was actually a religious act, and the matter was changed. You see, a man I know well, who approached Asian graves - the Egyptian graves are particularly characteristic of this, but the Asian ones have it too - found that You cannot approach these graves at all beyond a certain limit; you know that if you go any further you will faint or die. So you cannot get close; the toxic atmosphere holds you back. This is because the substances with which the corpses were treated have in fact been imbued with the word, the damaging, destructive word.

But now something else comes. Isn't it true that if man has been on earth, say, ten centuries ago, a millennium ago, his powers change. He passes through the time between death and a new birth. He comes again. Now he has the powers to build up the new body. He has these powers. He only has them because he can overcome all destructive powers in the spiritual. So the power that works from the seed is strengthened precisely by this. Because today a person could not form a human seed into a body that he wants now, but it would just become the body that was there centuries ago. The power that lies in any seed must also be old, it must have been there from the beginning. With the present power, nothing can be achieved in any seed. You see, in order for the seed to have any effect on the plant at all next year, it must be withdrawn from the external forces during the winter and turned towards the internal forces of the earth. These forces are destructive forces for everything external.

Now these grains of corn, which were placed in the Egyptian royal tombs, were actually buried with the destructive forces. So while everything that is the present body is destroyed when the human being brings his body into contact with the destructive forces, what lies in the seed has the opposite relationship. This is particularly strengthened in its life force. As a result, it can happen – it is not the case with all grains, but with many – that the same thing occurs as otherwise only occurs during the winter: that the plant seeds are together with the destructive forces of the corpses and their forces are even preserved, maintained. There they are effective even after a long time like fresh grains of grain.

And so one must realize, especially when looking at such things, that in life things happen that cannot be understood at all with materialistic science because spiritual forces are really at work. And spiritual forces immediately start to be effective when a certain time has elapsed in the course of life.

Suppose the following. Of course, this is something that I can only tell you about, but it is possible for a person to really look back at earlier lives on earth, for themselves and for other people who were with them. But then the people from the past have transformed themselves into spirit. Nothing of them remains. So if, let us say, a person who lived in ancient Greece is now a very wise person, is reborn and can see his form from ancient Greece, how he used to walk around, then he sees it in spirit, sees it really in spirit. If suddenly, through something or other – I don't know, through a devil – what he sees in spirit were to be transformed into a real human being, that is to say, if he were to encounter himself again as a physical human being, he would die from it. You cannot physically meet the past. You will die! And the one who would see a past incarnation as it really was physically, would also face the forces that absolutely want to kill the future, really kill it. That's how it is. Now, this gives rise to quite unnatural conditions. Just imagine, the people who were mummified in Egypt in their bodies, who are now lying there in their forms, have long since returned to earth, have long since returned! So that they have lived, or are living now, and their earlier forms are there. These earlier forms not only have an effect on the people who have returned, but when a person has returned, they also have a destructive effect on other people who are in the vicinity of such a preserved form. So that in reality an enmity actually comes from every mummy against human life. There is no other possibility: an enmity comes from them for human life. People actually do not pay attention to all this. And that is why it can of course also happen that mummies, which belonged to particularly ambitious people with great power and in which much secrecy has been kept, are said to be able to survive for a long time and to have a harmful effect, can actually have such a bad effect that if you come close to them, you can get sick and possibly even die. Hence these inexplicable things that are now coming out.

Now the third point remains: according to this information, it is extremely difficult to get to these graves today. It is indeed terribly difficult. And when we hear about the old mysteries today – as we often do – it is also the case that one can ask: Where are these mysteries? Yes, one would first have to dig deep into the rocks to find caves; in these caves one would see, if one could decipher them, all kinds of interesting writing. Today, all of this is basically covered by rocks, rocks that have grown together so much, with scars, these scars that arise when you work on rocks, have grown together so much that today, if you look at it superficially, you don't even notice that these rocks didn't come from nature, but were actually worked by human hands. And it was the case that the Egyptians wanted the graves to be protected. So they carved them deep into the rock and then made artificial structures over them, which gradually transformed over the millennia to look like natural rock formations or hills.

This leaves only one question, but it will lead you to understand much of the history that would otherwise remain a mystery. Well, I would like to know how it would be possible for a number of people today, no matter how many, to muster such forces as one must imagine were necessary to build these things! Even to destroy them would take as much time as you said! Just imagine, the Pharaohs – as the Egyptian kings were called – had the power to influence people through their strong spirituality. If you can influence people through material things, you can certainly influence people through words. We do not do that today because today people should be convinced of what they hear. But those ancient Pharaohs had tremendous power. Therefore they could have an enormous effect on people's strength, on their ability to work. But now you have to take another phenomenon into account to understand this. You see, the average person can lift and move certain things, and so on. But have you not already seen when someone goes mad that tremendous strength grows in him? You can sometimes be amazed at the strength a person gets for lifting things he would otherwise not be able to lift, for carrying things he would otherwise not be able to carry at all! And what strength he gets when he wrestles with you! You can easily have overcome him when he was not yet crazy; when he goes crazy, he immediately overpowers you. That is how man's strength grows when he has gone mad.

Now the Egyptians were not like that. But they were not as level-headed as we are today either. They lived in a dream-like existence and had enormous strength. And today, people have no idea how few people were needed in ancient Egypt to roll a huge stone, sometimes very high, and bring it to its destination. Man today can no longer imagine that there were times when five people could take an enormous boulder from afar and carry it high up. The powers of people in ancient Egypt were just tremendously great. And of course that could only be achieved by developing the powers of these people by virtually making them into slaves. But slavery was not only used for this purpose; this became apparent when humanity had already weakened and the intellect had already awakened. In the period that followed the Egyptian period, physical strength was already diminished with the advent of the intellect. Slavery takes on the appearance of wanting to keep it going and demanding the right to keep it going. But in the past it was different; then they made the whole nature of man dull and dull and dreamy, because in this way they could increase his physical strength. And with such artificially developed physical strength, things like these royal tombs were created, for which, today, such a huge amount of work is needed just to destroy them!

Not true, the most erroneous views are being spread about all these things for the reason that today, mostly the most materialistically-minded people are approaching these things. They cannot understand what is actually there. Someone digs up a royal tomb and must die. People are terribly surprised by this because they do not know that this was actually intended by the ancient Egyptians, that he would die. They had the means to work through time.

Just imagine this: Let us say you are in Basel and you have a radio telegraph; someone in Berlin intercepts the telegram and hears what you are saying in the radio telegraph. Right, that is far away in space, very far away. Why? Because in our radio telegraph, which we have discovered, we overcome space and are able to act through space. What is transmitted by radio appears quite elsewhere. The radio message goes through space and comes to life in another corner. Yes, gentlemen, imagine, here you release the radio message: Whoever hears what I say dies! And now imagine that a very nervous person, a terribly impressionable person, hears this here. He hears: “Whoever hears what I say will die.” Of course, he must already be very nervous, but he can also really die from fright, especially if the person speaking, the person giving the radio message, is a madman. For the forces that live in the speech of the madman are much more overpowering than the forces that live in the speech of the prudent. So if a madman speaks and someone hears his words, they can die.

Now the Egyptians had the possibility of preserving such things in their graves, of placing such sayings in them. They do not work through space, but through time. And when the Englishman pokes his nose into it, he does not know that the words put into the spices are working in the smell that goes into his nose.

The person who listens nervously to the radio telegraph and hears the radio message from the madman must at least die of fright. But the other person dies without even hearing anything, because it is in the smell. He dies from it. Into this, the “radio message” - if I may use the expression - is conjured up; and one actually puts oneself into temporal telepathy with what the ancient Egyptians did. They wanted to kill the one who poked his nose into it. This only happens because they have known the art of speaking the appropriate words into the spices so that they work.

You see, when you approach what can be known spiritually, you will no longer be amazed at things. But the strange thing is that man, by going everywhere and making his investigations, sometimes comes across, as these last cases show, in a rather unpleasant way, how the spirit works. Those upon whom the spirit has the strongest effect, in that it kills them, would, if they could spread wisdom after their death, speak the truth! Well, that does not work. So we have to express it ourselves, the counsel from the spiritual world.

Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone come up with anything today?

Mr. Pea: I would like to ask how it is that people today look at the starry sky the way they do, and yet the ancient Babylonians looked at it quite differently?

Dr. Steiner: Well, the question belongs there, to say something at all about the whole turnaround that has occurred in the way the world is viewed. You have this astronomy course here with Dr. Vreede, and you will see how difficult it actually is today to get through the computational and mathematical considerations.

You see, if you want to understand these things, you have to imagine, above all, that the ancients were indeed much, one might say, more spiritual than the present people. For a relatively long time, people were aware of those effects in nature that are actually quite unknown today. I would like to draw your attention to a few things in this regard. For one cannot understand what the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians wanted with their star science if one does not understand certain things that are actually quite unknown today.

For example, Rousseau still recounts the following: In Egypt, that is, in a warmer region, of which we have also heard such remarkable things in the last lesson, he had managed, by looking at them in a certain way, for example at toads that came towards him, by staring into their eyes, to make the toads stand still and unable to move at all. The toads were paralyzed. He always succeeded in doing this in warmer regions, in Egypt, for example. There he was able to paralyze the toads and later also kill them. But he wanted to do the same in Lyon. There a toad came towards him. He looked at it, stared at it, and lo and behold, he was paralyzed! He could no longer move his eye, was paralyzed, as if he were dead. It was only when people came and got a doctor, and he was given viper venom, snake venom, which just pulled him out of the cramp, that he came out of it. Then the story had turned. So you see, you just have to go from Egypt to Lyon for such effects, emanating from nature beings, to simply reverse themselves.

We can therefore say that there are indeed effects that are very closely related to human will, because it is an expression of human will. There are such effects. And these forces are also there. Because what was there a century ago is still there today, will always be there as long as the earth exists. But people today no longer want to know about such things and no longer care about them.

But, you see, gentlemen, this is still connected with a few other things. We have to take into account the place where they are made if we want to understand how certain things are. So in a sense we have to consult geography. But not the kind of geography that is valid today, because it does not talk about the difference between the effects of toads, starting from humans or towards humans, but it only talks about very external things.

Now I will tell you another example along these lines. You see, in the 17th century there was a scholar, van Helmont. This scholar still had much of what had been known earlier. For actually the things of earlier knowledge were only completely lost in the 19th century. In the 17th century they were still quite present, and in the 18th century they began to decline. But it was only in the 19th century that people became quite clever in their own opinion!

Van Helmont reflected on how one could know more than one can have through the ordinary human mind. Today, people do not think about how one could know more than one can know through the ordinary mind, because they believe that the human mind can know everything. But van Helmont, who was a doctor, did not think much of this human mind. He wanted spiritual knowledge.

But to gain spiritual knowledge in a spiritual way, as we try to do today in anthroposophy, was not yet possible at that time. Mankind had not progressed that far. So van Helmont used even older methods. He did the following, which I certainly do not recommend anyone imitate. It can't be done. And it wouldn't be as effective today as it was back then. But van Helmont did it.

You see, he took a certain plant that is a poisonous medicinal plant. It is prescribed for certain diseases. He took that. Of course, being a doctor, he knew that he could not eat this plant because it would kill him. But he licked the tip of the root, the lower part of the root. And now he describes the state he entered into in the following way. He says he felt as if his head had been switched off completely, as if he had become headless. He had become completely headless from it. Of course, his head had not fallen off, but he no longer felt it. So he could no longer know anything through his head. But now his abdominal area began to function like a head. And lo and behold, he received great revelations in the form of images, what we today in anthroposophy call imagination, in the form of images from the spiritual world. And that gave him a great jolt in life, a terrible jolt; because now he knew: you can not only say something about the spiritual world through the intellect, but you can also really see the spiritual world. He did not think through the nervous system, which is in the metabolic-limb system of man, but he looked at it and really saw the spiritual world. He thus received imaginations of the spiritual world.

This lasted two hours. After these two hours, he had a slight dizzy spell. Then he recovered. Now you can imagine that this, of course, gave his life a significant jolt; because from that moment on, he knew that one can see the spiritual world. But he knew something else as well. He knew that the head with its thinking is an obstacle to seeing the spiritual world.

Of course, we do not do it by licking a plant root like van Helmont – some people believe that, but it is nonsense – but through spiritual exercises, the thinking of the head itself is eliminated. The head is there only to grasp what is seen with the rest of the human organism. Thus the same process is evoked in a spiritual way that van Helmont evoked in an ancient way.

Now I am not telling you everything that would be necessary to refer you once more to spiritual training; that can be done on another occasion. But today, in answer to Mr. Erbsmehl's question, I am telling you that the two things I have told you are connected with the influence of the stars. And since the influence of the stars is denied altogether today, people no longer look at these things.

Van Helmont, on the other hand, had experienced this great shock in his life, and because he liked it, he wanted to repeat the experience more often, and he nibbled at the tip of the plant root again and again. But he did not achieve the same result.

Yes, but what does it mean that he did not achieve the same result? You see, it means that van Helmont did something later on that was no longer quite in accordance with the earlier thing. Van Helmont himself has no explanation for this. Of course I cannot tell you when van Helmont first nibbled on the tip of the plant root, because he does not give the date. But from what can otherwise be known from spiritual science, the following can be said.

You see, the first time van Helmont nibbled on the tip of the root, there was definitely a full moon. And he didn't pay attention to that. Later he didn't do it during a full moon anymore, and then he didn't succeed in the same way anymore. Something remained with him from the first time; he was always able to see something in the spiritual world. But he never managed to have such a jolt again as the first time.

Now, in the 17th century, he no longer knew that this was dependent on the moon and believed that it came from the plant root alone. But in older times, such things were known quite precisely. And therefore, in older times, this view was also very much alive everywhere, that the stars have a certain influence on the life of humans, animals and plants.

If one were to examine how such things happen, one would have to say: We do not eat poisonous plants, but we do eat plants, and we also eat the roots of plants. And while poisonous plants can only be used for healing, the other plants, which are not poisonous, are used as food. You see, gentlemen, the thing is this: When you eat a plant root, it is just as the poisonous plant root is under the influence of the moon. The moon has an influence on the growth of plant roots. Therefore, certain plant roots are very necessary for a certain human constitution. You know, for example, that there is also a population of the intestines, that is, the digestive organs, worms that are very troublesome. Now, for people who are prone to worms, beetroot is a good food. When the beetroot enters the intestines, the worms become angry, are paralyzed and then leave with the intestinal waste. So you can see that the root also has an influence on the life of these lower animals, the worms. The beetroot root does not poison us, but it poisons the worms. And again, you will find that the greatest effectiveness in expelling the worms comes from those plant roots that we eat during the full moon. Such things must be taken into account.

Now, you see, you can say: If you study the plant root, it turns out that the plants give us something that has a very strong effect on the metabolic limb system. You could even provide great help to people who have certain illnesses by giving them a root diet, by eating roots and by doing it in such a way that you give them at the time of the full moon and let them rest at the time of the new moon.

Now, you see, everything that can be observed in plants also has a meaning for humans, namely for human reproduction, for human growth. Children who have an addiction to staying small could also be nursed back to health with root food so that they would grow more easily; you just have to do it at the appropriate time in youth, between birth and the age of seven. The forces of the moon have a great influence on everything in the plant world and everything in the animal and human world that has to do with reproduction and growth. So you have to study the moon not only by pointing a telescope at it, but by studying what it causes on Earth. And with the Babylonians and Assyrians, those who were the scholars there, who were then called initiates, knew exactly: this plant is so under the influence of the moon, another so, and so on. They did not speak of the moon as a mere sphere, frozen up there in space, but they saw the effects of the moon everywhere. And these moon effects are mainly seen on the surface of the earth. They do not go deeper into the earth. They go just far enough to stimulate the roots of plants. They are not stuck in the earth at all.

You can find proof, for example, that the moon's forces do not go into the earth at all if you ask swimmers who swim in moonlight. They soon go out again because they always have the feeling that they are sinking. The water is pitch black. It does not go into the water, it does not go deeper at all, it does not connect with the earth, the moonlight. And so you see that the matter is such that the animals and plants are under the influence of the moonlight, which does not even come from the earth, but only from the very outermost surface to the roots of the plants. Now, this gives you a first insight into the starry sky.

Let us now turn to the example I gave you of Rousseau, who could paralyze, even kill, toads in the hot zone, but who himself became paralyzed in the temperate zone, in Lyon. What is the reason for this?

Yes, gentlemen, you just have to consider: when the Earth, which is a sphere, is almost a sphere, when it is illuminated by the sun, the sun's rays fall almost vertically in the hot zone. There they have a completely different effect than in the temperate zone, where they fall obliquely on the earth, at a completely different angle. And just as growth and reproduction in plants and in humans are influenced by the moon, so what its inner animal powers are, what is transmitted to the gaze, is influenced by the sun. These animalistic, bestial forces, which are indeed deeds, depend on the sun. So the sun, with its forces, causes humans in Egypt to be easily fascinated, paralyzed, even killed by toads, while in temperate zones they must yield to the influence of the toads themselves. So that depends on the sun again.

And then you will know that sometimes thinking itself, the whole inner life, is more difficult, sometimes easier. This again depends on Saturn, depending on where it is.

And so we have stellar effects for everything that occurs in human, animal, and plant life. Only the minerals are earthly effects. Therefore, with a science that is limited only to the earthly, one cannot possibly come to really understand the human being in any way. And one cannot know what the stars do if one does not look at the deeds of the stars.

Just imagine – today it's not so bad, but in the past it could still happen – that someone was a great statesman because of me. One could have asked those who lived with him in the house, who cooked for him, the cook, for example, who was not at all interested in statecraft, what the man does. She might have said: He has breakfast, lunch, and dinner; otherwise he does nothing at all, and during the rest of the time he goes out. Otherwise he does nothing. She would simply not have known what else he does.

Today's scholars only talk about the stars in terms of what they can calculate; they only know that. The others, the earlier people, were interested in what else the stars do. And that is why they had such a star science. They knew that the moon has a relationship to the plant in man, the sun to the animal in man, and Saturn has a relationship to the completely human in man. And so they went further.

Now they said to themselves: So the sun has a relationship to the animal in man. When the sun shines completely vertically, then man in the hot zone can have a strong effect on animals.

Now, you see, in Europe, for example, there is a strong effect of man on horses; but it will never be as intimately connected with the horse as it is with the Arabs, in the hot zone, because this relationship between man and animal cannot take place there. It depends on the vertical incidence of the sun's rays, on the effects of the sun.

Please continue, gentlemen. In Babylonia and Assyria, people knew that certain effects and forces emanated from the sun. But now people have observed the sun (it is being drawn). They said to themselves, there is the constellation of Leo, a group of stars out in the sky, and there is the constellation, let's say, of Scorpius. Now there is a certain time of the year when the sun is in the constellation of Leo, that is, it covers the lion, and you can see the lion behind the sun. At another time, the sun covers the constellation of Scorpius, or Sagittarius, or some other group of stars.

Now the Babylonians and Assyrians knew that these effects, which emanate from people onto animals, are strongest when the sun is in front of Leo; they become weaker when the sun moves on and is in Virgo or Scorpius. So they not only knew that there is a relationship between the planets and what people do, but they also knew that there is a relationship between the position of the sun and whether it covers Leo or covers Scorpio, because that is when these things change.

What do we do today? Today we simply calculate: the sun is in the zodiac in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Pisces and so on; we calculate how long it will be in that constellation, when it will be in it and so on. We know that on March 21, the sun is in the constellation of Pisces, but that's all we know. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, for example, still knew that when Saturn is in a certain constellation, called the Pleiades, the human head is at its freest. They knew all this. They could easily judge this because they lived in a hotter area than we do and developed a certain science from which they understood the whole human being from the heavens.

If we can say that this science was such that it was applied to people – well, this science has gradually been forgotten. But in those days, the planetary system was understood, and the fixed starry sky was also understood. It was known that depending on whether a planet is here or there, it means this or that for human life. It was known that when the sun is in Leo, the sun exerts the strongest influence on the human heart.

The thing is this: people have now tried to see how it is with minerals. They have said to themselves: the stars affect plants, animals and humans; they do not affect minerals. Only the earth affects minerals. But the minerals in the earth did not just come into being today; they came into being much earlier and were also plants in ancient times. All minerals were plants. You know from the bituminous coal that it was a plant. But just like the bituminous coal, all other minerals were once plants. The moon had an influence on them, and in even earlier times, the sun also had an influence, and in still earlier times, Saturn also had an influence. And now they wanted to know which mineral, in much earlier times, when it was still a plant, had an influence from the sun. So they examined the effect of the mineral on humans and found out, for example, that when the sun is in front of Leo and has a strong influence on the heart, the same effect on the heart is produced as when gold is administered to humans. From this they concluded that the sun once had a great influence on gold. Or when Saturn is in the Pleiades constellation, then the strongest influence is on the human head. It becomes free. And then they tried to find out which mineral, when it was still an animal – because before they were plants, the minerals were animals – could have had the strongest influence from Saturn. Then they found that it was lead. And in this way one finds out that lead also has the effect of making the human head freer. Therefore, someone who gets a dull head and for whom this is caused by the fact that he carries out certain digestive processes, which should no longer take place in the head, through illness with the head, must be given lead.

And so we get a metal for each planet. And that is why the Babylonians and Assyrians wrote the sun with this sign:®. But they also wrote gold with this sign. They knew that the stars no longer have any influence on the minerals now that the earth is there, but they once had it. They wrote the sun and gold like this:®. We write the sun and the gold with the letters that are in our alphabet; but the ancients always made this sign:®. They also did not write “lead”, but they made this sign:, and that means both Saturn and lead. It would not have occurred to anyone in ancient times to write Saturn or lead with ordinary letters. If he wanted to write that, he wrote this sign Ahin. If he wanted to write “silver,” he wrote this sign: C. That means both the moon and silver. So that the Earth, insofar as it is metallic, was also related to the stars.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, you don't really know very much about man and his relationship to the universe if you can't go into such things.

Now, on to the next point. These things were generally known in ancient times. The fact of the matter is that when Christianity first spread, such knowledge was also spread throughout the more southern regions of Europe. For example, there is a book about nature from the first Christian centuries that contains much of this. Today, we need to know it again, otherwise we cannot find the confusing information there, because it is quite confusing; but it contains much of such ancient wisdom. But then came the time when Christianity limited itself only to the intellect, and gave up everything else for the dogma. That was the time when everything of such an ancient science was eradicated in Europe. Between the 5th and 11th or 12th centuries, work was actually done to eradicate this ancient science in Europe. And to a high degree, they succeeded. You see, it was like this: the people who practiced this ancient science in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Spain, that is, in southern regions, these people were at the same time already quite spiritually and physically depraved people. The history of Rome at that time is actually a terrible one; they were morally completely corrupt people. They still had the old science, but they could no longer maintain themselves as human beings, figures such as the autocrats Nero or Commodus.

The following story can be told about Commodus, for example, the Roman Caesar. This Commodus, like all Roman emperors, was an initiate. But what does “initiate” mean in this case? It is the same as if someone today bears some title by name. Every Roman emperor was considered an initiate from the outset because he was an emperor. This does, however, show that in those days science was held in very high esteem. Except for Augustus, the Roman emperors did not have this science. But they too were initiated into the mysteries; they were even able to initiate others themselves. Now there was a certain degree where the person being initiated had to be struck on the head. This is a symbolic act. The emperor Commodus gave this blow in such a way that the person concerned collapsed dead. You couldn't punish it because it was the emperor Commodus. Just as they were as “initiates”, they were as human beings.

Further north, there were still people who, although they later developed into the Central European culture, were still quite uncivilized at that time. But the Germanic peoples later conquered Italy, Greece and Spain. Only those who worked with pure logic, with pure thinking, were preserved there. That was to be only dogma. The other should not be understood. Thinking was limited only to the most external things. And so it has come about that what was old knowledge has been eradicated everywhere by schools and monasteries. And one can see how, in fact, only by devious means, I would say, through contraband, some of this Babylonian science has come to Europe. But as a rule it did not travel far. In Babylonia, such science was cultivated for a relatively long time.

But even into the Middle Ages there was a Greek empire in Constantinople. Yes, you see, gentlemen, they were strange figures! Just as the Polish Jews sometimes come to us with their caftans and their old scrolls, which are also not very well regarded sometimes, but are profoundly knowledgeable in Judaism, such figures also arrived in Constantinople again and again at a time when everything was being eradicated. They arrived with large, mighty parchment scrolls on which they had written many things. Now, you see, these parchment scrolls were taken from these strange figures in Constantinople and opened there. And so everything that came from Babylonia and Assyria was stored in Constantinople. And no one took care of it. And in Europe, everything was eradicated. It was only in the 12th and 13th centuries and later in the Middle Ages, with the decline of the empire, that these parchments were freed again, and many people stole them. They then traveled around Europe. All that was not yet deciphered by the learned but by the unlearned came from these parchment scroll.

And so a little knowledge was spread again in the Middle Ages. Such a little knowledge then had a stimulating effect on others again, otherwise there would not have been a van Helmont, Paracelsus and so on, if these people had not brought the parchment scrolls they had stolen to Europe and sold them there for a lot of money. As a result, a lot of things came to Europe again. And many secret societies still exist today because of all the knowledge that came to Europe. There are all kinds of orders, freemasons, odd fellows and so on; they would have no knowledge at all if it had not been brought to Europe from Constantinople in the parchment scrolls that were sold for a lot of money back then.

But this knowledge was not appreciated. If you were a learned canon like Copernicus, you did not go to the people who had such parchment scrolls. You were not allowed to do that. You would have lost all respect. Yes, but as a result, the old science also lost all respect. And a man like Copernicus first established the kind of science that we still have today, really still have today.

But then something very strange happened, gentlemen. The most beautiful thing about it is that Copernicus now founded a certain astronomical science, and it was already so that he no longer knew everything that had been known about it in the past, just as we no longer know it today. But the following period did not even understand what Copernicus said. Two sentences of Copernicus were understood; the third was no longer understood. Because if one understands the two sentences of Copernicus, then one believes that the sun is in the center, around the sun Venus, Mercury, Earth and so on revolve. That is taught today in all schools. But if you understand the whole of Copernicus, it is not at all like that. Copernicus himself still draws attention to the fact that the sun is stationary (it is drawn), with Mercury behind it, Venus behind it, the earth here and so on. In reality, all this revolves with the sun through space in such a spiral. You can read that from Copernicus if you want. So there is the strange fact that even Copernicus trampled on the old science, but that the more recent ones have not even understood Copernicus. Now people are beginning to understand Copernicus, that is, to see that he said three sentences, not just two; the third sentence was too difficult for people to understand. And so, little by little, astronomy has become what it is today: a mere calculation.

And now you can imagine: what remained of the old science was not achieved in the way we want to achieve something today. We have to achieve something today with the full clarity of mind. The ancients proceeded more instinctively. And so it is no longer understandable what the ancients meant by knowledge.

A few years ago there was a very interesting example of this. A Swedish scholar came across an old alchemical book that contained all sorts of information about lead and silver. It said that if you add lead to silver, this will happen, and if you add gold, that will happen, and so on. What did the scholar do? He said: Since we have written these things down, let's try to reproduce them! And he imitated them in his laboratory, took lead as it is available today, silver as it is available today, treated them in the fire as described there – nothing came of it!

Nothing could come of it, because what he read there were such signs. Now he believed that this sign © means gold; so I take gold and process it chemically. This sign r. means lead; so I take lead and process it chemically.

But the terrible thing was that the man with whom the Swedish scholar read this, the alchemist, did not mean the metals in this case, but the planets, and meant that if you mixing solar forces with Saturn forces and moon forces – what is described here actually refers to the human embryo – when solar and lunar forces act on the child in the womb, then this and that happens.

Now it happened to this Swedish scholar that he wanted to do in the retort with the outer metals what the old alchemist refers to as germination in the human womb. Of course that could not be right, because he should have seen the development in the human womb; then he could have figured it out. You see, so little is understood today of what was actually meant in this ancient science.

All of this will now show you how this question, which Mr. Erbsmehl asked, is actually to be answered. It is actually to be answered in such a way that one becomes aware: It is all well and good and right with modern science. Today, one can calculate exactly the position of a star; one can calculate the distance between it and another star, and one can also see through the spectroscope what color the light rays have, and from that one can deduce the material composition of the stars. But how the stars affect the earth is something that must first be researched again! And this must not be researched in the way that many people do today, by simply taking old books. Of course, it would be easy if one could simply take old books and find out what people no longer know today. But that is no longer of any use with Paracelsus, because people no longer understand him even when they read him with today's eyes. Rather, it is a matter of learning anew how to research what influence the stars have on people. And that can only be done with spiritual science, with anthroposophical spiritual science.

Then you come back to researching not only where the moon is, but how the moon is connected to the whole person. You realize that the child experiences the influence of the moon for ten lunar months, so ten times four weeks in the womb, and experiences the influence of the moon in such a way that during this time the full moon is experienced eight, nine, ten times. Now, the child swims in amniotic fluid and is therefore a completely different being before it is born, protected from the forces of the earth. That is the important thing, that it is protected from the forces of the earth, and since it also has the influence of the other stars, it has the influence of the moon.

You see, it should be the case that today at our universities and at our schools, and even at the elementary schools in a certain way, as far as that can be, things would be studied quite differently, that above all the human being would be studied, the human heart, the human head, and in connection with that the stars would be studied. And at the universities, there should first be a description of how the human germ develops from the very small human seed through the first, second, third, fourth, fifth week and so on. This description exists, but the other description, of what the moon does during the same period, does not exist. Therefore, one can only have a science of the physical development of man if, on the one hand, one describes what happens in the mother's womb and, on the other hand, one describes the actions of the moon.

And again, one can only truly understand how, for example, teeth change around the seventh year if one not only describes - as is done today - how the milk tooth is, the other grows in after it, and the milk tooth is pushed out, but if one again has a sun science; because this depends on the forces of the sun.

And likewise, when a person becomes sexually mature, today one describes the purely physical processes. But these depend on Saturn; one needs a Saturn science. So one cannot proceed as one does today, describing each thing separately. Because then, of course, it turns out as it did in a hospital in a large European city. A man came to the university hospital with a spleen disease, as he believed. He asked: “Which department should I go to with a spleen disease?” He was told that he should go to any department. Unfortunately, he mentioned in passing that he also had a liver disease. He was told: “You can't have anything from us, you have to go to a completely different hospital, that's for people with liver disease, and the ones we have here are only for people with spleen disease.” He was now “between two bundles of hay”, like the well-known donkey, between two bundles of hay that were the same size and looked exactly the same. It is a famous logical image of the freedom of will! They said: What does a donkey do when he is between two bundles of hay that are the same size and smell the same? If he wants to choose the left one, then he thinks: the right one tastes just as good; if he wants to choose the right one, he thinks: the left one is just as good. And then he goes back and forth and dies of hunger between these two haystacks! So it was with the two diseases, he did not know where to go, and actually could die between his decision inside whether he belonged to the department for liver diseases or to the department for spleen diseases!

I only mention this to show that today everyone only knows a very small part of the world. But you can't know anything like that today! Because if you want to know something about the moon today, you have to go to the observatory and ask the people there. But they don't know anything about the origin of man. So you have to ask a gynecologist, an obstetrician, a female professor. But he doesn't know anything about the stars. But the two things belong together.

This is the source of the misery of today's knowledge: that everyone knows a piece of the world, but no one the whole. That is why it is, and it is based on it, that science today, when it is presented in popular lectures, is so terribly boring. Of course, gentlemen, the subject must be boring if you only tell people what is just a small part of the subject.

Imagine you want to know what a chair looks like that is not here, and someone describes the wood to you; but you want to know how it is designed. Then you will be bored if the person only describes the wood of the chair to you. So today it is boring to learn, as it is called today, anthropology, the science of the physical human being, because what is important is not described. And if it is described, it has no relation to the matter at hand.

So star science will only come into its own when it is combined with human science. And that is what it is about; that is the way I can answer this question for you today in a way that is appropriate to the subject. It is really the case that one must understand such important things as those I have told you about Rousseau and van Helmont - which are there, and which cannot be understood from the earth at all. People have become materialistic even in terms of words. For example, what was it called when someone could paralyze animals with his gaze? It was called magnetism. Yes, but later on the word magnetism was only applied to iron, to the magnet. And when people talk about it in science today, they only talk about leaving it with iron and not abusing magnetism. Only quacks still talk about magnetizing a person; but they can no longer imagine what it means. To see through such talk, a spiritual science is needed.

Next time at nine o'clock on Wednesday.

Well, gentlemen, we still have the last questions left over from the Jewish Sephiroth tree. In this Sephiroth tree, the Jews of antiquity actually enclosed their highest wisdom. And one could say: they enclosed in it the wisdom of the relationship between man and the world. We have often emphasized that the human being does not only consist of the visible parts that can be seen with the eye, but that the human being also consists of invisible, supersensible members. We have called these supersensible members the etheric body, the astral body, the ego or the ego organization. Now, all these things were known in ancient times, not in the way we have today, but people knew about them instinctively. This ancient knowledge has been completely lost. And today we believe that something like this Jewish Tree of Life, the Sephiroth Tree, is actually a fantasy. But it is not.

Now let us try to understand what the ancient Jews actually meant by this Sephiroth tree. They thought of it like this: Man stands there in the world, but the forces of the world act on him from all sides. If you look at man as he stands in the world (it is drawn), we can imagine him schematically drawn. This is how we imagine a material human being standing in the world. The ancient Jews imagined that the forces of the world were acting on him from all sides. Here I draw an arrow that goes into the heart: Thus the forces of the world act on man; here below the power of the earth,

Now the Jews have said: First of all, three forces act on the human head – I have indicated these in the drawing with these arrows: 1, 2, 3 – three forces on the human center, on the chest, on breathing and blood circulation mainly (arrows 4, 5, 6 of the drawing). Then three more forces act on the limbs of the human being (arrows 7, 8, 9), and a tenth force, which acts on the human being from the earth (arrow 10, from below). So ten forces, the ancient Jews imagined, act on the human being from the outside.

Let us first consider the three forces that come, so to speak, from the farthest parts of the universe and act on the human head, actually making the human head round, like an image of the whole round universe. These three forces, 1, 2, 3, are the noblest; they come, so to speak, if you want to use a later expression, with a Greek expression, for example, from the highest heavens. They shape the human head by making it a round image of the whole round universe.

Now, however, we must develop a concept at the same time, which could disturb you if I simply tell you. You see, in these ten concepts that the Jews have placed at the pinnacle of their wisdom, the first one at the top (1) has been terribly misused; for later, those people who succeeded in seizing power dragged the symbols of that power and the words for that power down into the outer realm of power. And so certain people who have appropriated the power of the nations and transferred it to their descendants have appropriated what is called a crown. In ancient times, a crown was a word for the highest spiritual gift that could be bestowed on a person. And the crown could only be worn by someone who, as I have explained to you, had gone through initiation, that is, someone who had attained the highest wisdom. It was a sign of the highest wisdom. I have already explained to you how the orders originally all meant something, but how they were later created out of vanity and no longer meant anything. In particular, however, we must consider this in relation to the term 'crown'. For the ancients, the crown was the epitome of all that superhumanity from the spiritual world has to bestow upon humanity. No wonder that the kings placed the crown on their heads. They were, as you know, not always wise and did not always have the highest gifts of heaven united in them, but they placed the sign on their heads. And when something like this is spoken according to ancient customs, it must not be confused with what has become of it through misuse. So the highest, the highest gifts of the world, the highest gifts of the spirit, which can descend upon man, which he can unite with his head when he knows much, that was called Kether, the crown, in ancient Judaism. Now, you see, that was the highest. That was what spiritually formed the head from the universe.

And then this human head still needed two other forces. These two other forces came to it from the right and from the left. It was thought: the highest comes down from above; from the right and left come the two other forces, the two world forces, which are spread throughout the universe. Now, the one that goes in through the right ear was called Chokmah = wisdom. Today, if we wanted to translate the word, we would say: wisdom. And on the other side, from the world, came in: Binah. Today we would say: intelligence (2 and 3 of the drawing). The ancient Jews distinguished between wisdom and intelligence. Today, every person who is intelligent is also considered to be wise. But that is not the case. One can be intelligent and think the greatest stupidity. The greatest stupidities are thought up very intelligently. In particular, when one looks at much of today's science, one has to say that this science is actually intelligent in all fields, but it is certainly not wise. The ancient Jews distinguished Chokmah and Binah, the ancient wisdom, from the ancient intelligence at an early stage. So the human head, everything that actually belongs to the sensory system in the human being, and also the nerves that are spread out in the sensory system, all this was designated by the three terms Kether, Chokmah, Binah - crown, wisdom, intelligence.

Thus, according to the view of the ancient Jews, the human head is constructed from the universe. There was therefore a strong awareness - otherwise such a doctrine would not have been developed - that man is a member of the whole universe. We can ask, for example, about the human body: What about the liver? Well, the liver gets its veins from the blood circulation; it gets its strength from the human environment. The ancient Jews said: Man receives the forces from the environment, which then, first in the mother's womb and later, cause his head to develop.

Now, there are three other forces (4, 5, 6 in the drawing); these have more of an effect on the middle person, on the person in whom the heart is, in whom the lungs are. So they have an effect on the middle person; they come down less from above, they live more in the environment. They live in the sunshine that moves around on the earth, they live in wind and weather. The three forces that the ancient Jews mentioned come into consideration here: chesed, geburah, tiphereth. If we want to express this in today's terms, we could say: chesed = freedom; geburah = strength; tiphereth = beauty.

Let us start here with the middle power, with Geburah. I have told you that I want to draw the arrow in such a way that it goes into the heart! The power that man has, this heartiness, soul power and physical power at the same time, is indicated by the human heart. This is how the Jews imagined it: When the breath enters a person, when the breath enters the heart, not only the physical breathing forces enter from the outside, but also the spiritual power, Geburah, which is connected with the breath. We would therefore say, if we wanted to express it more precisely: the life force, the force through which he can also do something = Geburah. But on the one side of Geburah is what was called Chesed, human freedom. And on the other side is Tiphereth, beauty. Man is indeed the most beautiful thing on earth in his form! The old Jew imagined: “When I hear the heartbeat, I hear the life force that comes into man. When I stretch out my right hand, I feel that I am a free man; when the muscles stretch, the power of freedom comes. The left hand, which moves more gently and can grasp more gently, brings what a person does in beauty.

So these three forces: Chesed = freedom, Geburah = vitality, Tiphereth = beauty, correspond to that in man which is connected with breathing and blood circulation, with everything that is in motion and always repeats itself. The movement of sleeping, the change between day and night, also belongs to this. This also belongs to the movement; man also belongs to this.

But then, humans are also beings that can change their position in space, that can walk around, that do not have to stay in one place like plants. The animal can also walk around. Man has this in common with the animal. The animal has no Chokmah, no Tiphereth, nor Chesed, but it does have Geburah = life force. And the three that I have described, man has in common with the animal only in that he has the others.

This, that one can go around, that one is not bound to one place, the Jews called: Netsah, and that means that one overcomes the firmness of the earth, that one moves (arrow 7 of the drawing). Netsah is overcoming. Now, the one that has more effect on the center of the human being, where his center of gravity is - it is interesting, you know: that is the point, which is located here; it is slightly higher in the waking state and lowers in the sleeping state, which also testifies that there is something outside when we are sleeping - that which works in the center of the body, which also brings about reproduction in humans, which is therefore connected with sexuality, the ancient Jews called Hod. Today we would describe it with a word that would express something like compassion. You see, the expressions are already becoming more human. So Netsah refers to the outer movement - we go out into space - and Hod refers to the inner feeling, the inner movement, the inner compassion with the outer world, that is all Hod (arrow 8). Then under 9: Jesod; this is now the one on which the human being actually stands, the foundation. The human being thus feels bound to the earth; the fact that he can stand on the earth is the foundation, is Jesod. That he has such a foundation also comes from the forces that approach him from outside.

And then the forces of the earth itself work on him (Arrow 10), not only the surrounding forces, but the forces of the earth itself work on him. This was then called Malkuth. We would translate it today as: the field in which the human being works, the earthly outside world; Malkuth - the field. It is difficult to find the right expression for this Malkuth. One could say: realm, field; but all things have actually been misused, and today's names no longer describe what the old Jew felt: that the earth actually has an effect on him.

We need only imagine that we have the center of the human being here; a thigh bone begins on each side of the human being – this goes up to the knee, where the kneecaps would be. All these forces also act on these bones; but the fact that it is actually pierced like this, that it is actually a tube, is due to the penetration of the earthly forces. So everything where the earthly forces penetrate, that is what the old Jew called Malkuth, the field.

So you see, you have to get close to people if you want to talk about this Sephiroth tree! The Jews called the ten Sephiroth together: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netsah, Hod, Jesod, Malkuth. These ten forces are what actually connects man with the higher, with the spiritual world. Only the tenth power, Malkuth, is sunk into the earth. So basically, this is the physical human being (pointing to the drawing), and the spiritual human being surrounds this physical human being, first as the earth forces below, but then as the forces that are already closer to the earth, but still work in from the surroundings: Netsah, Hod, Jesod. So all of this belongs spiritually to man, as these forces take effect. Then there are the forces that affect his blood circulation and breathing: Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth. And then the noblest forces that affect man, that affect his brain system: Kether, Chokmah, Binah. So that the Jews actually thought of man as connected with the world on all sides, as I have colorfully depicted for you here. Man is indeed such that he also contains a supersensible element within him. And they imagined this supersensible element in this way.

But now we can raise the question: What else did the Jews actually want to achieve with the ten sephirot, that they used to explain man's relationship to the world? Every Jewish pupil had to learn the ten sephirot, but not just so that he could list them; you would have a completely false idea if you thought that the teaching in the old Jewish schools was such that the main thing I have drawn on the board was the most striking thing. If one only wants to answer the question, “What is the Sephiroth tree?” one could quickly have finished it; you would have known it in a flash. People today are satisfied with asking, “What is the Sephiroth tree?” This and that is in it, what I have told you now. But that is not in relation to man! Instead, they just give you ten words and all kinds of fanciful explanations for them! But in relation to the human being, what I have told you is the right thing. But that was not the end of it in schools; rather, the Jewish pupil who was to learn science in the sense of the time had to learn much more about it.

Just imagine, gentlemen, you had only learned what the alphabet is and you would know if someone asked you: What is A, B, C, D and so on? - so the letters A, B, C, D and so on. You would have been able to list the twenty-two or twenty-three letters in a row. You wouldn't be able to do much with that! If any man could only enumerate the twenty-three letters, he could not do much with them, could he? But an ancient Jew who could only say: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netsah, Hod, Jesod, Malkuth, so these ten Sephiroth could have enumerated, would have been regarded just the same. Anyone who had only answered in this way would have seemed to the Jews like someone who could say: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and so on. You have to learn more than just the alphabet, don't you; you have to learn to use the alphabet to read, you have to learn how to use the letters to read. Now, gentlemen, just think about how few letters there are and how much you have already read in your life! You just have to consider that. Take any book, take, I mean, for example, Karl Marx's “Capital” and look at it when you have the book in front of you: there is nothing on the pages but the twenty-two letters, nothing else! There are only the letters in it in the book. But what is inside is a lot, and it is all produced by the fact that the twenty-two letters are jumbled up: sometimes the A is before the B, sometimes before the M, sometimes the M before the A, the L before the I and so on, and that's how the whole complicated thing in the book comes about. If someone only knows the alphabet, he picks up the book and perhaps says: I understand everything in the book: there is A, B, C, only arranged differently; I know everything in the book. But he cannot read everything that is really written there inwardly, according to the meaning. You see, one must learn to read with what the letters are; one must really be able to jumble the letters in one's head and mind in such a way that meaning arises from them. And so the ancient Jews had to learn the ten sephiroth; for them, they were letters. You will say: Yes, they are words. But in the beginning, letters were also designated by words! This was only lost by the people when the letters came to Europe, in Greece.

It was not until the transition from Greek to Roman culture that something very significant happened. The Greeks called their A not A, but Alpha, and Alpha actually means: the spiritual man; and they called their B not B, but Beta, that is something like a house. And so every letter had a name. And the Greek could not have imagined that the letter is something else than what is called by a name. It was only when the transition from Greek culture to Roman culture took place that people no longer said Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and so on. They no longer referred to the letters by their names, where each name indicated what such a letter meant. Instead, they said: A, B, C, D and so on, and the whole thing became abstract. Just as Greek culture was dying out and merging with Roman culture, the great cultural diarrhea began in Europe. In the midst of this huge diarrhea, the spiritual aspect of the path from Greek to Roman culture was lost.

And you see, Judaism was particularly great then. When they wrote down their Aleph, their first letter, they meant the human being. Aleph is that. They knew: wherever they placed this letter for the sensual world, what they expressed with this letter must apply to the human being. And so each letter that represented the expressions of the material world also had a name. And the names: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, Netsah, Hod, Jesod, Malkuth, were the names for the spiritual letters, for that which one had to learn in order to read in the spiritual world. And so the Jews had one alphabet: Aleph, Beth, Gimel and so on - an alphabet with which they grasped the outer world, the physical world. But they also had the other alphabet, where they had only ten letters, ten Sephiroth, and with that they grasped the spiritual world.

You see, gentlemen, when I list the names for you, Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed and so on, well, that's like A, B, C, D and so on. But then such an old Jew would have known how to say, as we jumble the letters, Kether, Chesed, Binah. And if he had said: Kether, Chesed, Binah, if he had rolled the dice like that, he would have said: In the spiritual world, the highest spiritual power brings about intelligence through freedom. - And with that he would have designated the higher beings who do not have a physical body, in whom the highest power of heaven brings about intelligence through freedom.

Or he would have said: Chokmah, Geburah, Malkuth - that would have meant: Through wisdom, the spirits bring forth the life force through which they work on earth. - He knew how to jumble all these things together like we jumble letters. So these disciples of the ancient Jews understood spiritual science in their own way through these ten spiritual letters. This tree, the Sephiroth tree, was therefore the same for them as the tree of the alphabet with its twenty-three letters is for us. These things have developed in a very strange way, you see: in the first two centuries after the emergence of Christianity, people knew about all these things. But when the Jews were scattered throughout the world, this way of knowing through the ten Sephiroth was also scattered. Individual Jewish students, who, as you may know, were then called Chachamim when they became students of the rabbi, these Chachamim still learned these things; but even there it was no longer really known how to read through these ten Sephiroth. For example, in the 12th century, a great dispute arose over two sentences; the first sentence was called: Hod, Chesed, Binah. Maimonides held on to this sentence. His opponent, on the other hand, claimed: Chesed, Kether, Binah. So people were already arguing about these sentences. You have to know: These sentences are derived from the Sephiroth tree; one person read it this way, another that, and put the elements together in different ways. But this art of reading had actually been forgotten since the Middle Ages. And the interesting thing is that later, in the middle of the Middle Ages, a man appeared, Raimundus Lullus – a very interesting person, this Raimundus Lullus!

You see, gentlemen, getting to know a person like that is actually extremely interesting. Imagine there was someone among you who was quite curious. He would say to himself: Now that I've heard about Raimund Lullus, I want to read up on him! First, take the encyclopedia, but then take any books that mention Raimund Lullus: Yes, if you read what is written about Raimund Lullus in today's books, you will split your sides laughing, because he would have been the most ridiculous person you could ever imagine! People say: This Raimundus Lullus, he wrote ten words on pieces of paper, and then he took something like you have in a game of hazard, a kind of roulette, where you spin, where you jumble up the story, and he would have always jumbled up these ten pieces of paper, and what would have come out, he would have written down, and that would have been his world wisdom. Well, when you read something like that, that words were simply written on ten pieces of paper and mixed up, and the man wanted to find something special by doing that, you have to hold your sides laughing, because it's a ridiculous person who would do something like that.

But that was not the case with Raimundus Lullus. He actually said the following: You can still go as far as you like with all that your earthly alphabet gives you, but you still cannot find the truth. And now he said: Your ordinary head is not good enough to find the truth. This ordinary head is like a roulette wheel that you spin, but there is nothing in it, so nothing can be found to win. Lullus told his fellow human beings: You have actually all become empty-headed, your head is nothing more, there is nothing more in it. And you must put such concepts as these ten sephiroth into your heads one day; you must learn to turn your heads from one of the sephiroth to the other until you learn to use the letters. That is what Raimundus Lullus told them. It is also written in his writings. He only used a picture for it, and the philosophers took the picture seriously and believed that he really meant a kind of roulette where you turn around to mix the tickets, while this roulette that he meant is supposed to be the supersensible recognition in the mind!

This Tree of Life, this Sephiroth Tree, is therefore the spiritual alphabet. People who lived in the West, in Greece, had a spiritual alphabet even in ancient times. And in the time of Alexander the Great and Aristotle, ten concepts were also given there in the Greek way. You can still find them today in all school logics: Being, property, relationship, and so on, and also ten such names, only that they are different because they are suitable for the West. But in the West these ten Greek letters of the spiritual alphabet have been understood just as little as the ones mentioned before.

But you see, it is actually quite an interesting story that is taking place in humanity. Over in Asia, those who still knew something learned to read in the spiritual world through this Sephiroth tree. And in the first centuries of Christianity, people who still knew something about the spiritual world learned to read according to the Aristotelian Tree of Life - over in Greece, in Rome and so on. But gradually everyone – those of the Sephiroth Tree and those of the Aristotle Tree – forgot what these things actually are, and could only list the ten terms. And now we simply have to use these things in such a way that we learn to read in the spiritual world, otherwise little by little people will be forgotten. You see, the following is a very interesting sentence. When a Jewish sage wrote or said: Geburah, Netsah, Hod, one would have to translate today as follows in German: the life-force hatches the dreams in the kidneys. But when one says today: the life-force hatches the dreams in the kidneys, one means physical forces, physical effects. But when the ancient Jew said Geburah, Netsah, Hod, he meant that what is in man as a spiritual being brings about what appears in dreams. Everywhere it was a spiritual assertion that was expressed by what arose from the random throwing together of the letters.

It is indeed only through spiritual science that it is possible today to get any information about these things. Because no one will tell you today that these ten sephiroth were such letters for the spiritual world. You won't hear it anywhere else, no one really knows it today! So you can say that the situation is such that today's science no longer knows most of the things that were once known in humanity, and they must first be regained.

Take this letter that I have drawn for you here: Aleph 8. What does this Aleph mean for the sensory world? Well, it represents a person. This is how he stands, sending out his power. That is this line (drawing). He raises his right hand: that is this line; he stretches out the other hand: that is this line. So this first letter Aleph expresses man. And every letter expressed something – even in Greek – just as the first letter expresses “man”.

You see, gentlemen, today people no longer have any sense of how things are connected. The first letter for man was called Aleph by the Hebrews, Alpha by the Greeks, and by this they meant what moves spiritually in man, what is spiritual behind the physical man. But now you also have an old German word. First of all, it is used when a person has special dreams. When a spiritual person presses him, then this is called the nightmare, the nightmare. One says that something comes over the person that possesses him. But then, from nightmare, emerged elf, and then elf, the elf - these spiritual beings, the elves; the human being is only a condensed elf. The word Elf, which goes back to Alp, may still remind you of Alpha in Greek. You only have to omit the A to get Alph – ph is the same as our F – a spiritual being. Because the F has been added, we say: the Aleph in man, the Alp in man. If you omit the vowels everywhere, as is customary in Jewish, you get directly Alph = EIf for the first letter. People pronounce: Elf for this spiritual being. One speaks of elves. Of course, today one says: These are beings that the ancients invented out of their imagination. We no longer believe in it. But the ancients said: You only need to look at the human being itself to see the alph. The alph is just inside the body, and it is not a fine, ethereal being, but a dense physical being inside the human being. But people have long since forgotten how to understand the human being.

And so you experience the most droll thing, gentlemen. Just imagine that in the second half of the 19th century the following came about - I don't want to say anything against it, such things can happen -: a table was taken, people sat around it, let's say eight people; they place their hands, which then touch at the outermost ends, on the table top, and then the table starts to dance! Then they count the dance steps of the table, and form words out of them, also out of letters. These are spiritualistic sessions. What do people believe? They believe: Well, when we think, then nothing comes out of real knowledge; real knowledge must fall to us from somewhere. Now, in truth, it is so that the people who say that could certainly say it about themselves, because they are mostly those who are thoughtless and do not want to reflect, who would like the truth to come to them from somewhere without their own work. So eight of them sit around a table, then they have the table turned over, the first time A, the second time B, then C and so on, and from that they then form words – and those are then spiritualist revelations. Isn't that so, the wisdom came to them; they did not achieve it themselves!

But look, what should one actually say to such people? Such people want to recognize the spiritual world; that is their honest intention, to recognize the spiritual world. You cannot see the spirits; you cannot see or hear them because they have no body. So people think: they can use the table as a body, and in this way they can make themselves a little understood. Incidentally, it usually comes out as very general things that can be interpreted in different ways! But in any case, you have to say to these people: There you are, eight people sitting around the table; you want a spirit to come that makes itself heard. But aren't you spirits yourselves? You are spirits yourselves, sitting around there! Look at yourselves and seek the spirit within yourselves. There you will be able to find a much greater spirit. You will not assume that you will only be seen when you strike through a table, but when you use your limbs, your voices, and above all your powers of thought in a human way! Therefore it is indeed the case, and there is no need to doubt it, that when eight people sit around a table the table will begin to dance because the subconscious forces are acting on it. That is how it is, but it does not come out as something that would not come out in a much higher sense if a person were to exert his own Alpha or Aleph within himself.

But in the transition from Greek to Roman culture, people have forgotten Aleph. The first letter means A yes, only believe, the first letter means only A, that is, keep your mouth shut! But nothing comes of it. Once a wife got so fed up with her husband constantly lecturing from science. He had learned a lot and always lectured. She found it terribly annoying. And so one day she said to him: “You always want to lecture!” - “If you want to lecture, then shut up!” - Yes, actually the content has been completely lost. The Greeks did not think of one A, one Alpha, without thinking of the human being. They were immediately reminded of the human being. And they did not have a beta without remembering a house in which man lives. The alpha is always man. They imagined something similar to man. And at beta, they imagined something that is around man. Then the Jewish Beth and the Greek beta became the envelope around the alpha, which is still inside as a spiritual being. In the same way, the body would be the Beth, the Beta, and the Alpha would be the spirit within. And now we speak of the “alphabet” - but for the Greeks this means: “man in his house”, or also: “man in his body”, in his covering.

Well, gentlemen, it is actually terribly funny. Take a dictionary in your hand today, then look up all the wisdom that mankind has in the alphabet. If someone - you won't do it - starts at A and stops at Z, then he would have all the wisdom in himself. Yes, but according to what can this wisdom be arranged in man? According to the alphabet, according to what can be known about the human being. It is very interesting: people have spread all wisdom because they no longer knew that it actually points to what comes from the alphabet. If you translate alphabet, it comes out, if you put it a little differently: human wisdom, human knowledge - again expressed with a Greek word: anthroposophy, human wisdom. And that is what every encyclopedia says. Actually, every encyclopedia should include anthroposophy, because it is only arranged according to the alphabet, according to human wisdom, “the human being in his body.” It is terribly funny: actually every encyclopedia represents a skeleton, where in the alphabetically arranged science the old wisdom has disappeared. All flesh and blood has gone, all the muscles and nerves have fallen away. Now go to the encyclopedia; it contains only the dead skeleton of the old science. Now a new science must arise that does not just have the dead skeleton, like the encyclopedia, but really has everything about the human being again, flesh and blood and so on: that is anthroposophy! Therefore, one would like to throw all these encyclopedias to the devil, although they are needed today, because they are the dead skeleton of an old science. A new science must be founded!

You see, gentlemen, that is what you can learn from the Sephiroth tree if you understand it in the right way. It was very useful of Mr. Dollinger to ask this question, because it has taken us a little deeper into anthroposophy.

Next time on Wednesday at nine o'clock.

Mr. Burle: April 22 was the [200th] birthday of Kant. If I may ask Dr. Steiner to tell us something about Kant's teachings, what the differences would be, and whether they would be a contemporary anthroposophical teaching.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, gentlemen, if I am to answer this question, then you will just have to follow me a little today into a field that is difficult to understand. But Mr. Burle, who also asked the question about relativism, always asks such difficult questions! And so today you may have to be prepared for the fact that things are not as easy to understand as what I usually report. But you see, Kant cannot be presented in an easily understandable way because he is not easily understandable in himself. It is true that today the whole world, which is interested in such things at all (I don't want to say interested, because in reality very few people are interested in it, but the whole world pretends to be interested in it), talks about Kant as if he were something that concerns the world very much in the most fundamental sense. And you know, of course, that a whole series of articles have been written for this 200th birthday, which are supposed to make clear to the world what an enormous significance Immanuel Kant had for the entire intellectual life.

You see, even as a boy at school, I often heard from our teacher of literary history: Immanuel Kant was the emperor of literary Germany! – I once misspoke and said: the king of literary Germany. He immediately corrected me and said: the emperor of literary Germany!

Well, I have been studying Kant a great deal at the moment and – as I mentioned in my biography – I had a teacher of history for a while who actually only ever read from other books; I thought to myself, I can read that at home myself. And once, when he had stepped out, I looked up what he was actually reading and got hold of it myself. That was more economical. I got Kant's Critique of Pure Reason from Reclam's Universal Library; I unbound it and stapled it to my schoolbook, which I had in front of me during the lesson, and now read Kant while history was taught by the teacher. That is why I dared to talk quite a bit about Kant, who everyone actually always talks about in such a way that when you say something that has to do with the spiritual, people say, “Yes, but Kant said...” As one always says in theology: Yes, but the Bible says – so many enlightened people actually say: Yes, but Kant said. – I gave lectures twenty-four years ago; I met a person sitting in the auditorium who always slept, always listened asleep; sometimes, when my voice rose a little, he woke up, and especially at the end. I also said something about the spiritual there – he woke up again, jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and shouted: But Kant said! – Well, it is true that Kant makes an enormous amount of essence out of it.

Now let us try to imagine how Kant actually viewed the world. He said, with a certain amount of justification, that everything we see and feel, in short, everything we perceive through our senses, in other words all of nature outside of us, is not reality but appearance. But how does it come about? Yes, it arises from the fact – and this is the difficult part, so you must pay close attention – that something, which he called the “thing in itself”, that is, something completely unknown, of which we know nothing, makes an impression on us; and this impression is what we actually see, not the thing in itself.

So you see, gentlemen, when I draw it for you, it's like this: there is the human being – you could just as easily do it with hearing and feeling, if we want to do it with seeing – there is the thing in itself somewhere out there. But we know nothing about it, it is completely unknown, we know nothing about it. But this thing in itself now makes an impression on the eye. We don't know anything about that either, but it makes an impression on the eye. And inside the human being, an appearance is now created, and we inflate this appearance to the whole world. (Pointing to the drawing): We know nothing about the red, only about what we have as an appearance; what I now draw as violet, we know something about. So actually, according to Kant, the whole world is basically man-made. You see the tree. You know nothing about the tree itself; the tree only makes an impression on you, that is to say: something unknown makes an impression on you, and you form this impression into a tree, and you place the tree in your perceptions. So consider, gentlemen: here is a chair, an armchair - a thing in itself. What is actually there, you do not know; but what is there makes an impression on me. And I actually put the chair there. So when I sit on the chair, I do not know what kind of thing I am actually sitting on. The thing in itself, that which I sit on, that is actually what I put there.

You see, Kant speaks of the limits of knowledge in such a way that you can never know what the thing in itself is, because everything is actually only a world made by man. It is very difficult to make the matter seriously understandable. And when you are asked about this Kant, it is indeed the case that if you really want to characterize him, you have to say some very strange things. For when one looks at the true Kant, it is actually difficult to believe that this is the case. But it is the case that Kant simply asserts from theory, from thinking: No one knows anything about the thing in itself, but the whole world is made only from the impression we receive from things.

I once said: if you don't know what the thing in itself is, then it could be anything; it could consist of pinheads, for example! – And that's how it is with Kant. You could easily say that, according to him, the thing in itself could consist of anything. But now comes the rest: If you stop at this theory, then all of you here, as I see you here, are only my appearance; I have placed all of you on the chairs here, and what is behind each of you as a thing-in-itself, I do not know. And again, when I stand there, you also do not know what kind of thing-in-itself it is, but you see the appearance that you yourself place there. And what I am talking about is what you are listening to yourself! So, what I am actually doing there – the thing in itself, what that is actually doing there, you all don't know; but this thing in itself makes an impression on you. You then project this impression here; you basically hear what you yourself are doing!

Now, taking this example, if we speak in a Kantian sense, we could say something like the following: You sit out there having breakfast and say, “Yes, now we want to go into the hall and listen to this and that for an hour.” We cannot know what the thing in itself is that we hear; but we will look at the stone there, so that we have this phenomenon - at least for an hour - and afterwards we will listen to what we want to hear. That is actually what Kant says first of all, because he claims: We never know anything about the thing in itself!

You see, one of Kant's successors, Schopenhauer, found the matter so clear that he said: There's no doubt about it! - That is absolutely certain, he says, that when I see blue, something out there is not blue, but the blue comes from me when a thing in itself makes an impression on me. If I hear someone out there moaning and suffering pain, then the pain and the moaning come not from him but from me! That, says Schopenhauer, is actually quite clear. And when a person closes his eyes and sleeps, then the whole world is dark and silent; then there is nothing there for him.

Now, gentlemen, according to this theory, you can create the world in the simplest way and then remove it again. You fall asleep, the world is gone; and you wake up again: and you have recreated the whole world - at least the one you see. Apart from that, only the thing in itself is there, of which you know nothing. Yes, Schopenhauer found that quite clear. But Schopenhauer did feel a little queasy about it. He was not entirely comfortable with the assertion. So he said: At least something is outside - blue and red, and all cold and warmth is not outside; when I feel cold, I myself create the cold - but what is outside is the will. Will lives in everything. And the will, that is a completely free demonic power. But it lives in all things.

So he has already put a little something into “the thing in itself”. He also regarded everything we imagine as a mere appearance that we ourselves make; but at least he has already endowed the thing in itself with the will. There were many people and there are still many people today who do not really realize what the consequences of Kant's teaching are. I once met a person who was really - as one should be when one has a doctrine - completely imbued with this Kantian doctrine, and he said to himself: I made everything myself: the mountains, the clouds, the stars, everything, everything, and I also made humanity myself, and I made everything in the world myself. Now, however, I don't like what I have made. I created everything; but now I don't like it. Now I want to get rid of it again. - And then he said that he had started by killing a few people - he was just insane; he said that he started killing a few people in order to fulfill his desire to get rid of the people he had made himself. I told him he should just think about what kind of difference it makes: He has a pair of boots; according to Kant's teachings, he also made them. But he should just think about what, in addition to what he is now doing as an appearance of the boots, the shoemaker has also done!

Yes, you see, that's how it is: the most famous things in the world are often the most nonsensical! And people cling to the most nonsensical with the greatest obstinacy. And, curiously enough, it is the enlightened who cling to it.

What I have told you in a few words, which are already quite difficult to understand, must be read in many books when reading Kant; for that is what he has now peeled apart in long, long theories; and he begins his book “Critique of Pure Reason” - that is what he calls it - by first proving that Space is not outside in the world, I make it myself, I spin it out of myself. So first of all: space is an appearance. Secondly: time is also an appearance. Because it is said: there was once an Aristotle – yes, but I put him into time myself, because I make all of time myself!

Now he has written this great book, the “Critique of Pure Reason”; it makes quite a nice impression. Now if some Philistine comes along and gets hold of a thick book called Critique of Pure Reason, he'll think it's really something, because it's terribly clever. You become a kind of god on earth yourself when you read something like that! But then, after the introduction, it says: Part One. Transcendental Aesthetics. – Well, no, it says: Transcendental Aesthetics. – If someone opens my Philosophy of Freedom, then the chapter title might just be: Man and the World. – Oh, Man and the World, that's something ordinary, you don't even read that. But transcendental aesthetics! – When the philistine opens such a book, he does so with the feeling that it must be something quite tremendous! He does not usually think about what transcendental aesthetics is, but that is just as well for him; it is a word that makes him trip over his tongue a little when he speaks it. That is the main title.

Now comes the subtitle: First Section. The transcendental deduction of space. - Now, you can't think of anything better for a Philistine than to have a chapter like that. And afterwards it begins in a way that he doesn't really understand. But for more than a hundred years everyone has been saying: Kant is a great man. - So when he reads that, he gets a little something out of it himself, and so he gets a little delusions of grandeur.

Then comes the second section: the transcendental deduction of time. - If you have now fought your way through the transcendental deduction of space and time, then comes the second major section: the transcendental analytics. - And in the transcendental analytics, the main thing is to prove that man has transcendental apperception.

Well, gentlemen, I was asked, and I have to tell you these things, the story of transcendental apperception. You have to read through many hundreds of pages to get everything that is contained in this chapter on transcendental apperception. With transcendental apperception, it is meant that man makes his ideas and is a unity in this presentation. So if everything is just an idea, the whole world, then actually now through this transcendental apperception the whole world must be spun out of the nothingness of one's own being. Yes, that's roughly how it is presented there.

So now we come to it: In the chapter on transcendental apperception, Kant spins the whole world with all its trees, clouds, stars and so on out of himself. Yes, he spins them out – that's what he says. But what he actually spins out and what one always has to deal with in this whole wide chapter are the same ideas, only translated a little later, which I recently wrote down for you on the Sephiroth Tree, but only in the form of a mere alphabet, not in such a way that one can read with it, know something! And what's more: at least there it was something very concrete. But Kant spins it out in such a way that he says: the world consists, first, of quantity, second, of quality, third, of relation, fourth, of modality. Now, each of these concepts in turn has three sub-concepts; for example, quantity: unity, multiplicity, allness. Now, quality has: reality, negation, limitation, and so on. There were twelve concepts – three times four is twelve – and you can spin the world out of them. Good old Kant didn't spin the world out of them at all, but actually only spun out twelve concepts with transcendental apperception. So he actually only created twelve concepts, not the world.

If there were any truth in the story, something would come of it! But the Philistines don't even notice that nothing comes of it, that only twelve terms come out, but they now go around the world with a full stomach and with Kantian philosophy, saying, “Nothing can be grasped!” Well, that can be understood with the Philistines; they feel honored when they are told, If they do not understand anything, it is not because of them, but because of the whole world. If you believe that you know nothing, you are right; but that is not because you can do nothing, but because the whole world can know nothing. - And so these twelve concepts come out. That is then the transcendental analytics.

But now the really difficult chapters are coming. Then there is the big chapter entitled: Of the Transcendental Paralogisms. - That's how it goes on in general. In Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” you get title after title! It says: There are people who claim that space is infinite. This proves how people who see that space is infinite prove it. But there are also people who say: space is limited. This is also proved, just as the people prove it. So you will find in the “Critique of Pure Reason” - in the later chapters it shows two opposing sides everywhere - on the one hand it is proved: space is infinite; on the other hand it is proved: space is finite. Then it is proved again: time is infinite, is an eternity. Then it is proved that time had a beginning and will come to an end. And so on, gentlemen. Then it is proved that man is free. And on the other hand, man is not free.

What does Kant mean by providing the evidence for these two opposing assertions? He means to say: we cannot prove anything at all! We might just as well assert: space is infinite as well as finite; time is eternal, time will come to an end! - We might just as well say: man is free, or: he is unfree. - So that boils down to the fact that in modern times you have to say: think as you want to think, you will not arrive at the truth, but for you humans everything is the same.

Then you also get instructions on how to think in this way, taught in transcendental methodology. In this way, one can first take on a book by Kant. So one can ask: Why did Kant actually undertake all this? Then one comes to what Kant actually wanted. You see, up to Kant, people who did philosophy didn't really know much either, but at least they claimed: There is some knowledge about the world that can be known. This was countered by what had already come from the Middle Ages, because, as I have shown you, in the Middle Ages the old knowledge was lost. What had already been grasped in the Middle Ages as a thought was that one can only know something of what the senses represent, and cannot know anything of what is of the spirit. You have to believe that. And so, through the Middle Ages and up to Kant, the assertion arose: You cannot know anything about the spiritual; you can only believe something about the spiritual.

The churches, of course, got away very well with this teaching that one cannot know anything about the spiritual, one must believe that, because then they can dictate what man should believe about the spiritual!

Now, as already mentioned, there were philosophers – Leibniz, Wolff and so on – who, up to Kant, asserted that at least some of the spiritual things in the world can be known by mere reason. Kant now said: It is all nonsense to believe that one can know anything of the spiritual, but one must merely believe all of the spiritual! Because the spiritual lies in the “thing in itself”. You cannot know anything about the 'thing in itself'. Therefore, everything that refers to the spiritual must be believed. And Kant also betrayed himself when he wrote the second edition of his 'Critique of Pure Reason'. In this second edition there is a curious sentence in it; it says: 'I had to stop knowing in order to make room for believing.' That is the confession, actually, gentlemen! That is what led to the unknown thing in itself! That is why Kant called his book “Critique of Pure Reason”: reason itself was to be criticized, that it cannot know anything. And in this sentence: “I had to abandon knowledge in order to make room for faith,” in this actually lies the truth of Kant's philosophy. But that opens the floodgates to all faith. And in fact all positive religion could refer to Kant! But those people who do not want to know anything at all can also refer to Kant, who say: Why do we not know anything? Because one cannot know anything! - You see, so actually the teaching of Kant has become a support of faith. Therefore, it was quite natural that I myself had to completely reject Kant's teachings from the very beginning; although I read the whole Kant as a schoolboy, I always have to completely reject Kant's teachings for the simple reason that one would then simply have to stop at what people believe about the spiritual world and never have any real spiritual knowledge. Kant is actually the one who excludes all spiritual science the most and only wants a certain belief.

So Kant first wrote this first book: “Critique of Pure Reason.” In this “Critique of Pure Reason” it is thus proved: we know nothing of the thing in itself. We can only have a belief about what the “thing in itself” is.

Then he wrote a second book: “Critique of Practical Reason.” He then wrote a third book: “Critique of Judgment,” but that is not so important. So he wrote “Critique of Practical Reason” as his second book. There he has now outlined his own belief. So, first of all, he wrote a book of knowledge: “Critique of Pure Reason”; in it he proved that one can know nothing. Now the Philistine can put the book down; it is proved to him that one can know nothing. Then Kant wrote the “Critique of Practical Reason”; there he now builds his faith. How does he build his faith? He says: If man looks at himself in the world, he is an imperfect being; but to be so imperfect is not really human; so there must be a greater perfection of man somewhere. We know nothing about it; but we believe that there is a greater perfection of man somewhere within the earth, we believe in immortality.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is indeed quite different from the scientific considerations I give you for what survives in man when he passes through death! But Kant does not want any such knowledge at all; he simply wants to prove from man's imperfection that man should believe in immortality.

Then he proves in the same way that one should only believe that one cannot know anything about freedom, but should believe that man is free; because if he were not free, he would not be responsible for his actions. So one believes that he can be responsible for being free.

Kant's doctrine of freedom often reminded me of another doctrine that a professor of jurisprudence always mentioned at the beginning of his lectures. He said: “Gentlemen, there are people who say: Man is not free. But, gentlemen, if man were not free, then he would not be responsible for his actions. But then there could be no punishment either. But if there are no punishments, then there can be no science of punishment. I present the science of punishment myself – so then I could not exist either. But I do exist, so there is also a science of punishment, consequently there is also a punishment, consequently also a freedom – so I have proved to you that there is a freedom! What Kant says about freedom reminds me very much of the professor's speech. And Kant speaks of God in the same way. He says: We cannot know anything about any power in itself. But I cannot make an elephant; so I believe that someone else can make it, someone who can make more than I can. So I believe in a God.

Now Kant has written this second book, the “Critique of Practical Reason”. In it, he says that we as human beings should believe in God, freedom and immortality. We cannot know anything about it, but we should believe it. Just think about what an inhuman idea this actually is: first, it is proven that knowledge is actually nothing; secondly, that one should believe in God, in whom one cannot know anything, in freedom and immortality! So Kant is basically the greatest reactionary. People use fine words; that is why they called him the destroyer of everything. Yes, knowledge, he destroyed everything, but only as one destroys toys. Because the world still remains, of course! And faith, he actually supported it in a very considerable way.

This went on throughout the entire 19th century and into the 20th, and today, of course, people everywhere are writing about Kant's 200th birthday! And in reality, Kant is an example of how little people actually think. Because what I have told you now is simply a pure presentation of Kant's teachings! But what people say – that Kant was the greatest philosopher, that Kant cannot be refuted, and so on – well, if you take this example, you really get a good idea of how Kant, in particular, can be used by opponents of spiritual science. Simply because they can then say: Yes, we do not start from religion, but we start from the most enlightened philosopher! But it is really the case that Kant could just as easily be the starting point for the most dogmatic teacher of religion as for any enlightened person.

Then Kant wrote other works, one of which was about the question: How will metaphysics be possible as a science in the future?, in which he actually proves again that it is impossible and so on. You actually have to say: All of science in the 19th century actually suffered from Kant; Kant was basically a disease of science.

Now, if you take Kant as an example of how nonsensical intellectual development sometimes is, then you have taken him in the right way. But then you will also say to yourself: one really has to be careful in knowledge, because the world is terribly bent on perpetrating the very greatest nonsense in knowledge. And you can well imagine the difficult position in which a representative of spiritual science finds himself: not only do you have the representatives of religion against you, but also all the other philosophers and those who have been infected by them, and so on. Every philistine comes and says: Yes, you claim this about the spiritual world; Kant has already proved – so they say – that one cannot know anything about it! – That is actually the best general objection one can make. Some people say: I don't want to hear anything at all about what Steiner says, because Kant has already proved that one cannot know anything about all this.

Are you satisfied?

Mr. Burle says he mainly wanted to hear what Kant meant. It is as Dr. Steiner says: one hears so much about Kant, but nothing positive. It is true that one has to work hard to understand it.

Dr. Steiner: The matter then had consequences. In 1869, a book appeared by someone who was inspired by Kant, 'The Philosophy of the Unconscious', which in turn caused a huge stir. And Eduard von Hartmann was already a very clever person! If Eduard von Hartmann had lived before Kant, if Kant had not had such an influence on him, much more would probably have come of him. But he could not actually go beyond this strong prejudice that one has of Kant. So it was, just as Schopenhauer before, also clear to Eduard von Hartmann that one knows nothing of the whole world but one's own ideas, that which one puts out there oneself. But in addition, he had accepted the Schopenhauerian doctrine that one must equip the thing in itself with the will. Now the will is everywhere inside. I once wrote an article about Eduard von Hartmann, and in it I also mentioned Schopenhauer. Now Schopenhauer said: We know nothing of the thing in itself; we have only ideas about it. Only the ideas are intelligent; the will is stupid. So that actually everything we know about ourselves is nothing more than the stupid will.

In the article in which I mentioned Schopenhauer, I said: According to Schopenhauer, everything in the world that is clever is actually the work of man; because man creates everything in the world; and what is behind it is the stupid will. So the stupidity of the deity is the world. But they confiscated it at the time! It was supposed to be published in Austria.

The thing is this: Eduard von Hartmann assumed that the thing in itself must be endowed with will; but the will is actually stupid, and that is why things are so bad in the world. And that is why Eduard von Hartmann became a pessimist, as they say. That is why he had the view that the world is no good, is not good, but is basically bad, very bad. And not just what people do, but everything in the world is bad. He said: You can calculate that the world is bad. You just have to put on one side, on the debit side, everything you have in life in terms of happiness and pleasure and so on, and on the other side, everything you have in terms of suffering and so on: There is always more on the other side. The balance is always negative. So the whole world is bad. - That's why Hartmann became a pessimist.

But you see, Eduard von Hartmann was, first of all, basically a clever person and, secondly, someone who then also drew the consequences. He said: Why do people still live? Why don't they prefer to kill themselves? If everything is bad, it would be much wiser if one day general human suicide were decided upon; then all this that is created would be gone. But Eduard von Hartmann said, on the other hand, “No, you can't manage to set such a general day of world suicide. And even if we set it - people have emerged from animals; the animals would not kill themselves; then people would emerge from the animals again! So we can't manage it that way. Therefore, he came up with something else. He said to himself: If you really want to wipe out everything in the earthly world, then you can't do it by people committing suicide, but you have to thoroughly exterminate the whole earth. We do not yet have the necessary machines for this today; but people have already invented many machines; therefore, all wisdom must be applied to inventing a machine that can be used to drill into the earth, so that one goes deep enough, and then, by means of a special dynamite or similar device, blows up the whole earth, so that the debris flies out into the world and turns to dust. Then the real ultimate goal will have been achieved.

Yes, this is no joke, gentlemen! This is really the teaching of Eduard von Hartmann, that one should invent a machine that can, one might say, blow up the whole Earth, atomizing and splintering the Earth.

Interjection: In America, they want to build cannons that can shoot the moon down!

Dr. Steiner: But what I have told you is a real philosophical teaching from the 19th century!

Now you will say: There was such a clever man - how can that be? He must have been stupid to have said that! - No, truly, Eduard von Hartmann was not stupid, but he was cleverer than all the others. I can prove that to you right away. But precisely because he was cleverer than the doctrine inspired by Kant, this stupidity arose from the machine with which one is to hurl the world into nothingness. This was asserted by a very clever man, only thoroughly corrupted by Kant.

Now he has written this “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. In this “Philosophy of the Unconscious” he said: Yes, it is quite true that humans have developed from animals; but spiritual forces were also involved. Now these forces are forces of will, not clever but stupid forces. And he presented this very cleverly, and in doing so he presented something that contradicted Darwinism.

Now, back then – just imagine, this was in the 1860s! – there was this clever philosophy of the unconscious by Hartmann and the Darwinism that Haeckel, Oscar Schmidt and others represented, but which was the cleverest thing since sliced bread for the rest of humanity. Now all those who were again stubborn Darwinists, came forward and said: This Eduard von Hartmann, he must be thoroughly refuted; he knows nothing about science! But what did Hartmann do? The following shows what he did at the time. After the others had shouted themselves hoarse – that is, on printing paper – a book also appeared: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Darwinism”. A thorough refutation of Eduard von Hartmann from the point of view of Darwinism! – But no one knew who it was from.

Well, gentlemen, now the natural scientists were all pleased, because it contained the refutation of Eduard von Hartmann. Even Haeckel said: “Let such a person who has written this against Hartmann call himself to us, and we will consider him one of our own, a naturalist of the first rank!” And sure enough, the book was sold very, very quickly and a second edition appeared: the author named himself - it was Eduard von Hartmann himself! He had written it against himself. But now they stopped praising him; the matter did not become very well known! So he proved that he was cleverer than all the others! But you see, the news that people are given is silent about these stories. But such a piece in the history of ideas must be told; then one comes to this: Eduard von Hartmann was a person who was corrupted by Kant, but who is extremely clever.

Now, if I told you that he wants to blow up the world with a big machine that someone is supposed to invent, you might quite rightly say that he may have been terribly clever, Eduard von Hartmann, but for those of us who have not yet studied Kant, it seems like a stupid thing to do after all. And you might well believe that, however cleverly I describe Eduard von Hartmann, he must have been stupid. You could easily believe that. But then you would have to tell and think that the others were even stupider; and then I am satisfied for my own sake! But it can be proved historically that the others were even more stupid than one who proves that the earth should be blown up.

It is important to know such a thing, because today there still exists this peculiar worship of everything that is printed. And since Kant appeared in the “Universal Library” - I was only able to read him because of it, because otherwise I couldn't have bought him; but he was cheap, even though the books are so thick - since then, there's been even more of a devil's mess with Kant than before, because since then everyone has been reading Kant. That is, they read the first page, but they don't understand anything. Then they hear that Kant is “the emperor of literary Germany”; so they think: Gosh, now that we know about Kant, we're smart people ourselves! And most of them are such that they admit: Yes, I have to say that I understand Kant, because otherwise the others will say I'm stupid if I don't understand Kant. In reality, people don't understand him, but they don't admit that; they say, “I have to understand Kant because he's very clever.” So I say, “I understand something very clever when I understand Kant!” Then it also impresses people.

But really, gentlemen, although it was difficult to present this question in a somewhat popular way, I am nevertheless glad that it was chosen as the question, because it showed what is actually going on in the so-called intellectual life of people, and how careful people actually have to be when something like this affects them, which itself leads to the fact that now in all newspapers a lot is made of the 200th birthday of Kant. I am not saying that Kant should not be celebrated – others are celebrated as well – but the truth is as I have told you.

We will continue our discussion next Saturday at nine o'clock.