The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we shall study the human being in regard to his form, and from this standpoint widen and deepen what we have recently considered. If we envisage, to begin with, the fact that the human form, of course, depends in the widest sense on the whole life of man, we should then consider first of all man's life as a whole, in order to grasp the human form from within, in a concrete way. To begin with, the human being forms part of the whole universe, of the whole cosmos. And if you bear in mind that in regard to the formation of the head, the human being is in reality an image of the sphere, of the cosmic universe, you will find, as it were, that as regards the head, he is placed into the whole universe. But we can only understand the way in which he is placed into it, and is at the same time a self-contained being, by bearing in mind man's connection with the whole environing world.

Let us first consider the human form by saying: With his whole thinking, insofar as it is connected with the head, man turns towards the whole cosmos, and by bringing his head through birth, from the spiritual world into physical existence, the human being, enclosed within his body, may in a certain way look back upon his real, inner soul-spiritual being, as it existed during the time when he was not enclosed within a body. Perhaps we obtain the best picture of what I mean by this, when we consider how the human being attains knowledge by looking back, as it were, into his own self. For when we occupy ourselves with arithmetic and geometry, we look back into ourselves. We recognize the laws of geometry simply because we are human beings able to draw the spatial laws out of our own being. But on the other hand, we know that these laws fill out the whole universe. Consequently, when we look out into the world, we have something which we necessarily perceive through the eyes; but everything is arranged geometrically, also the eyes, which are focused geometrically. We may therefore say: insofar as man faces the world with his thinking that is connected with his head, he takes back, as it were, into himself, what is spread out in the universe. Let us therefore imagine this first stage of fitting himself into the cosmos by saying: man takes in the universe, he looks back upon the universe, as it were. By looking back upon ourselves, we discover the universe. (See Table).

This is man's most external connection with the universe out of which he is built.

We proceed further by envisaging in the second place how the human being activates within him what he takes in from outside. Consider that when the child is born, everything which it experienced from death to a new birth lives within its being; if the child could develop a consciousness in this direction, it would be able to look back on the experiences which it had before birth. But these prenatal experiences then begin to be active in the child. The human being does not only look back into his own self in order to discover the universe anew within himself, but he also looks out into the environing world. He sees the world that surrounds him. We may therefore say: He does not only take in the universe, but he looks out into the universe around him (see Table) and takes in the mobility of the universe. He grows inwardly mobile.

You only need to clasp your left hand consciously with your right one; you only need to touch yourself—in order to remain completely within yourself. You do something with your right hand, but you are taking hold of something which is your own self. You now touch yourself in the same way in which you feel about and touch an external object. Every perception of the Ego, of one's inner being, is really based upon this: To take hold of one's own self. We also do it indirectly with the eyes. When we envisage any point outside, the axis of the right eye crosses that of the left eye, in the same way in which our hands cross, when the right hand clasps the left one. Animals have less inner life, because they touch themselves much less. We may therefore say that the third thing is: To experience or touch ourselves (see Table). In reality, we are still in the external world, when we thus grasp ourselves. We are not yet within our skin.

But let us now envisage the boundary between the outer and inner life. Let us indicate this process by moving the right hand, clasping the left one, up and down, so as to describe a surface. This surface is everywhere on ourselves. With our body's covering sheath we enclose our inner being. We may therefore say that the fourth thing is to encompass ourselves. (See Table).

If you penetrate in a living way through feeling into your form, insofar as it is enclosed by the skin, you will obtain this process of encompassing yourself.

First:	We take in the universe and look back.
Second:	We look out into the universe. We take in its mobility.
Third:	We grasp ourselves. (Touch ourselves.)
Fourth:	We encompass ourselves.

These four things place before us the gradual process of man's formation from outside towards inside. We have, to begin with, the whole universe; but we are still outside. Then the imitation of the universe; but we have not yet reached our own being, for we imitate the universe. If we touch ourselves, we reach ourselves from outside. Only in the fourth stage we encompass ourselves.

In the fifth stage, we must seek something which is inside, which fills us out, surging and weaving through us. We may therefore say: Five: That which fills us out, surging and weaving through us.

Then comes the sixth stage: Through the fact that we do not only have a skin, but that it is filled out, and through the fact that we were thus able to penetrate into our own being, a process begins which dissolves the form, devolving it into something which does not only fill out the human being inwardly, but makes him like a fruit that has ripened. Let us follow the fruit's development to the point where it is just ripening; if it surpasses this point, it dries up. We may therefore say: Six: Ripening.

Imagine this ripening process. By growing mature, we begin, as it were, to decay inwardly. In a very small measure, we cease to become human beings. Although we are human beings, we become inwardly dust, so to speak. We grow mineralized. With this we again fit ourselves into the external world. We are completely within our being, with that body which fills us out. Then, when we become dust inwardly, we again fit ourselves into the mineral world. We become, as it were, a body which has weight. We may therefore say: Seven: We fit ourselves into the inorganic world.

I have once described to you that when we weigh a human being, he stands there like a mineral. This led us to the point of being able to say that he fits himself into the inorganic world. We might also say: He fits himself into the external forces of nature.

Eight: At this stage, we do not only fit ourselves into the external world, but we take in the external world. We breathe, we eat, we absorb the external world. In a preceding stage, we merely developed within us forces which already existed within us; this stage of development consisted essentially of this. Then comes our inner life, but there we take into ourselves the external world. When we reach this moment, we should, above all, realize quite clearly that everything a human being takes in from outside, is like something which should not really form part of him. There are many erroneous conceptions in the world regarding this process of absorbing substances and forces from outside. In reality, everything we eat, is a tiny bit poisonous. For life consists in taking in nourishment and our not allowing it to become completely one with us: we offer resistance, and life really consists in this resistance, this defense. But of course, the substances which we take in as nourishment are so slightly poisonous that we are able to offer resistance. For if we take a real poison, it destroys us, because we are unable to defend ourselves against it.

We may therefore say: When the external world penetrates into us, a kind of poisonous sting enters into us. (See Table.) We must use strong expressions which do not exist in ordinary speech and ordinary knowledge. When I explain these things to you, you must therefore try to grasp what I really mean.

Five:	That which fills us out.
Six:	Ripening.
Seven:	Fitting ourselves into the inorganic world and seeking the balance.
Eight:	Poisonous sting.

This brings us to the point of absorbing what is outside. Consequently we began with the forming of man out of the universe, proceeded to the forming of man from within, and arrived at the point where his inner life develops by offering resistance to the external world. (See Table.)

But the human being forms himself (at least, his life and to some extent also his real form) in accordance with his external attitude, his external activities. But in the present time, our activities no longer have a real connection with the human being; we must go back into earlier times if we wish to grasp man in his real connection with his environment, in which he participates in the world's processes. At this point we may say: The ninth stage represents one of man's activities. He participates in the external world, by taking his place culturally in the external life on earth. He is, to begin with, a hunter. Nine: Hunter.

He then progresses in his activities. He becomes a breeder of animals. This is the next stage. Ten: A breeder of animals. Eleven: He becomes a farmer; that is the next stage of perfection. And finally, Twelve: He becomes a trader. Later on you will see that I do not include the activities which followed. They are of secondary nature. Man's primary occupations are: Hunter, breeder of animals, farmer and trader. This characterizes man in regard to his form and the way he lives upon the earth as a hunter, breeder of animals, farmer, or trader. These are forms of human activities, of human occupations upon the earth.

Nine:	Hunter.
Ten:	Breeder of animals.
Eleven:	Farmer.
Twelve:	Trader.

The following drawing [The drawing, showing the earth in the universe, cannot be reproduced.] might be made, as an illustration for the schematic table. Let us say, to begin with, that here we have the earth. Let us suppose that we have the human being upon the earth. In regard to these four form principles, he would be dependent on the earth's circumference; that is to say, he would be formed from out the earth's circumference. Here (above), man is formed from within. Let us leave this aside for the moment, and consider how the human being is formed by the earth, as a hunter, or breeder of animals; the result would be the very opposite. For example, if here, at this point, we have the influence of the constellations; that is to say, an influence coming from the circumference, then the constellations below the horizon (for the earth covers them) would be able to influence man only by sending their influence through the earth. Here the human being would have to adapt himself to the earth in regard to his stars. And what lies in the middle, would offer him the possibility to develop himself inwardly.

We may therefore say: The four upper members of man's formation lead him out into the universe; the last four members lead him to the earth, and the stars come into consideration insofar as they are covered by the earth. In the four central members the stars and the earth maintain a balance.

Man dwells in his inner being.

You see, even in ancient times these things were felt and people said that a certain portion of the starry sky influenced man so as to form him from outside, from the universe. Of course, one had to accept different stars according to the seasons. The constellations change. But let us take, on a large scale, the epoch in which we are living. If we adopt the standpoint of a Greek reflecting over such things, we might say: The stars in the proximity of Aries send their influence from outside, also those in the proximity of Taurus, and similarly the stars near Gemini and near Cancer. These constellations, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer enable man to look back, to be inwardly mobile, to take hold of himself and to encompass himself. (See Table.)

The other stars, on the opposite side below, which are covered by the earth, enable man to be a hunter through the influence of Sagittarius. He is able to live as a breeder of animals by taming the goat: Capricorn. He is able to live as a farmer, by—well, let us first take the simplest farming existence—by pouring out water, by walking over the fields with urns and pouring out water: Aquarius. And he becomes a trader through the influence of a star region holding that which carries him over the sea. For in ancient times every ship had the form of a fish. And two ships sailing side by side, traveling as trading vessels over the sea, are really the symbol of trade. So that by designating a ship as a “fish,” we would obtain here, as a twelfth sign: Pisces.

In the middle we have what lies in between, filling out man; that is to say, the influence of the blood, which fills the human being. How may this blood, contained in man, best be symbolized? Perhaps by taking the animal with the most intensive heart activity, the lion, Leo.

The maturing process—ripening: it suffices to look at the fields, at the ripening wheat or corn: the ear of corn represents the condition in which the fruit reaches the stage of maturity:

It is the Virgin with the sheaf: Virgo. The chief thing here is the sheaf.

And if we consider the moment when man once more fits himself into the external world, or in other words, seeks to establish the balance, we have Libra. And where he feels the poisonous sting, where he feels that everything is slightly poisonous, Scorpio.

During past epochs, people really experienced man's connection with the universe and with the earth; but modern people are no longer able to interpret such things. They say: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and draw the corresponding signs**, but in reality they do not have the slightest idea of what these things really mean. For it is necessary to consider them in the right way. If you look at an old picture of Aries, you will see that this is not a materialistic or naturalistic reproduction; its characteristic trait is that Aries is always looking back; this gesture of Aries looking back is the essential thing in the picture. We have this gesture of Aries in the human being who is looking back on himself, on the universe that lives in him. Aries should therefore not be viewed merely in a naturalistic-materialistic way. The picture reproducing Aries, the sign for Aries, is not materialistic or naturalistic, but its essential characteristic lies in the gesture of looking back.

If you look at old pictures of Taurus, you will find that he is always looking sideways and jumping. Also in this case the gesture is the essential thing, the gesture of looking around and activating the universal principle that lives within. Here, too, the gesture is the chief thing.

And if you look at Gemini, you will be confronted by one man on the right and another on the left, yet they are always depicted in such a way that the right hand of the man on the right is clasping the left hand of the man on the left. Again, it is the gesture which should be considered. It expresses the fact that man is touching himself, feeling himself. The right and left side of man are set forth as independent beings, because in a certain way man is still outside and takes in his prenatal being by touching or feeling himself.

Cancer is the self-encompassed being, closed to the external world. Modern people also view the sign of Cancer materialistically, naturalistically. But to the people who took Cancer as the symbol for encompassing oneself, the chief thing was that Cancer, the crab, can put its claws round its victim, thus encompassing it. This is contained in the word Cancer, which encompasses man. Cancer is the encompassing element. It is really the symbol of the human being who closes himself within his own self, who does not only touch or feel himself, but who closes himself from outside within his inner being.

Leo, with the strongly developed heart system, is the true “heart animal.” The lion may be considered as the “heart animal.” The lion's qualities set forth the fifth member which should be borne in mind.

On the stage of maturity, we find Virgo, the virgin with the sheaf, and the essential thing is the sheaf, in which the fruit is on the verge of drying up. And Libra, the scales, expresses that we seek to establish the balance. Scorpio is, of course, the poisonous sting. And Sagittarius is in reality an animal form ending in a human being armed with bow and arrow. The Zodiac sign for Sagittarius is a human being sitting like a centaur upon an animal's body. It symbolizes the hunter.

Capricorn is really a goat ending in a fish tail—something which we do not find in nature. For a goat with a fish tail does not exist. But man, the breeder of animals, makes wild beasts as tame as fishes. This is consequently an artificial symbol. Aquarius stands for agriculture. In this sign people, of course, see water and so forth, and this is spiritually justified. But in this Zodiac sign you will always find a striding character: A man striding along with two urns and pouring water out of them. He is watering the earth and is therefore a gardener, a farmer. Pisces, the fishes, is a sign which I have already explained; it symbolizes trade, for in the past, the ships were adorned with the heads of fishes, for example of dolphins—even though dolphins are not fishes—but the ancients thought that they were fishes. This symbol therefore indicates the character of trading.

We should not consider things schematically or superficially, as is so frequently the case today, but we should set out from this development of the human form, and from there endeavor to grasp man's connection with the universe and with the earth. This will gradually reveal the human being, from the aspect of his form, as a member, a part of the whole cosmos.

Let us now consider the question from the following aspect. If, to begin with, we take everything from the standpoint of the ancient Greeks—Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Aquarius, Pisces—we may say, when looking upon the human form: In regard to the shape of the head (consider everything I have already explained to you) the human being is formed from outside, from the cosmos. Then forces begin to work inside. They give man the possibility to become symmetrical. But in regard to the influence of the last groups of stars, we must reverse everything. The human being is also subjected to the influence of the earth. He is influenced by forces. If this is indicated more thickly on the drawing*, we may draw the other forces more thinly on the other side and say: If a human being particularly unfolds all that corresponds to Sagittarius, shown here (you know that this is the Zodiac sign of the upper thighs), he will have especially strong upper thighs and be a hunter. If he is a breeder of animals he must often bend his knees. If he is a farmer he must walk and is therefore depicted as a striding man, etc. And in regard to trading: If we look for a symbol connected with the human being himself, we come across the feet. These, in any case, are formed from outside.

In the middle we find the region where man forms himself. If I draw this form, it results spontaneously from the twelve Zodiac signs. We may therefore say: Here (in the middle), the universe or the stars send their influences more into man's inner being. Here (above), they influence him from outside, and here (below), they compress him. But you will recognize in this drawing the shape of the human embryo. When you draw the human embryo, you must draw it in this way, if you include the Zodiac; it can only be drawn in this way, in accordance with its own laws. When you draw a figure encompassing an angle of 180 degrees, you obtain a triangle. When you draw the Zodiac, transforming it so that it reveals its laws in regard to the earth, you obtain through inner laws the shape of the human embryo. This would constitute a direct proof that the human embryo is formed out of the whole universe, that it is the product of the cosmos.

I told you just now that we should adopt the standpoint of the Greeks, but today we can no longer set out from Aires; we must set out from the sign of Pisces. We now live for many centuries under the sign of Pisces. It is the sign which marks man's transition to intellectualism. But if you go back to the point where it was still justified to set out from Aries and it was possible to speak of the Zodiac in the old meaning, you will not obtain more than the callings represented by Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces; namely, hunter, breeder of animals, farmer, and trader. Everything connected with industrialism, etc., already pertains to the epoch of Pisces, and it is a repetition.

Consider the following: We now live in the age of Pisces. During this age developed everything which constitutes the present civilization of machines. But if we go back to the epoch of Aries, we still find the four honest callings, and although they had already become more complicated and modified, they placed man into nature. And by going back still farther, to the epoch of Taurus, to the third, second, first post-Atlantean ages, to the last Atlantean epoch and to the last but one Atlantean epoch, etc., we would finally come to Pisces. There we would find that man was a completely etheric being and that he had not yet come down to the physical world. In the age of Pisces we find that he was an etheric being and in the present time he is really repeating what he already passed through at that time, when he developed into a human being. Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, he is repeating this stage, but in an abstract way. In the past, he grew concretely into his human development. Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, he is growing into his abstractions, for a machine is also an abstraction. Since the return of the age of Pisces, man has really sailed into the forces which dissolve him. And when he will reach Aquarius this dissolution will have progressed in an essential way; he will then above all be unable to have the slightest connection with the universe unless he clings to the spiritual world. Just because of this repetition, man must penetrate into the spiritual world.

This also shows you that in reality man is a threefold being; he is formed out of the cosmos insofar as he has a head; he develops within his own self and is only in correspondence with the external world insofar as he has a thorax; he develops his extremities and his metabolic processes by inserting himself into the earthly sphere.

Also from another aspect we have before us a threefold being. Consider that when the human being reaches birth, the first four force impulses lie within him; he unfolds them, but even then he is in a certain sense a complete human being, except that the other eight members are still in a rudimentary stage. The head is a complete human being; the other members attached to it, are rudimentary. The thorax, too, is a complete human being, but the first four force impulses and the last four are rudimentary. Also the limbs form a complete human being, but the thorax and the head attached to it are rudimentary. Three human beings are thus contained in man. The first one, the head, is in reality the transformation of the preceding incarnation. The thorax man is in reality the present incarnation as such. And what the human being does, the way in which he is active in the external world, particularly what comes to expression in his limbs and in his metabolic processes, carry him across into the next incarnation. Man is therefore a threefold being also in this connection. The human form may thus be studied as a complete whole.

We should really say: If we wish to make a drawing of the human being we should have to draw his head. We then have before us a complete human being. You will gather this from the following fact: In the lower jaw you really have the legs, except that there they are turned backwards and the head is sitting on its legs. The head is a complete human being, but its legs are reversed; they form the lower jaw and man is sitting on it, so that here I can draw a complete human being in a sitting posture.

Also the thorax is a complete human being. The arms are, as it were, the external representatives of etheric eyes. And again, the limbs are a complete human being. There, for example, the kidneys would be the eyes. Also in regard to the human form we thus have three human beings which are linked together. They interpenetrate in such a way that the human being that has hidden itself into the head which has become a sphere, reveals to us what penetrated into the present life from the preceding incarnation; the human being in the thorax is really the human being of the present incarnation, and the human being running about is the one that penetrates into the next incarnation.

But in a certain sense we may say: Also man's whole attitude in the present reveals this threefold character. Take the limbs and the metabolic processes. In regard to these, man is able to produce a complete human being. You only need to consider the human germ, the human embryo in the mother's body, in order to obtain metabolic man with his limbs, seeking to become a complete human being. Take thoracic man and observe how the head and the thorax still form a whole in the child, during its infancy. This threefold aspect thus appears also in the growing human being.

When man outgrows infancy he must be educated. The human being living in the head is the educator and educates the other human being—the childish head teaches the child (“Kindskopf den Kindskopf”)—for in reality the human being always remains a child in regard to his head. He only grows old, that is to say, middle-aged, in regard to the middle part, the thoracic man, and quite old in regard to the metabolic-limb man. People notice this, as they grow old. Even in accordance with the old riddle, “When young, it walks on four legs; in middle age on two, and in old age on three,” people notice that they grow old in this connection. Also in regard to his head, man always remains, as it were, the result of his past incarnation. The head really remains a child throughout life. Indeed, we may say: The science of education should try to solve the problem of how the childish head, which is the teacher, should treat the childish pupil in the right way.

These things are apparently humoristic, but they conceal a deep truth which should be borne in mind, in order to obtain a correct view concerning man.

Consider that in reality man's head is the passenger conveyed by the remaining human being—a passenger who is a spy. The head's legs are always in a sitting posture, the head does not even attempt to walk independently. It is always being carried, like a man traveling by coach. In reality, the head is the passenger in man.

Thoracic man is instead the human being's nurse. And limb-man is the worker, who is employed as a slave, for it is really he who is passing through life. We are head, as far as Cancer. We have this from heaven, without any cooperation on our part. Here (in the center) we must breathe and eat; this is our nurse. And the real worker belongs to the sphere of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

You see, this enables us to obtain man's form in its connection with the whole universe. It is only necessary to take things quite earnestly, even if they are set before you more lightly and not pedantically. They will show you that everything I have explained to you today contains, on the one hand, the possibility to grasp the human form out of the whole cosmos, but on the other hand lies what may fill us, I might say, with great reverence for the primeval wisdom of men who were able to place into their Zodiac symbols such a tremendously significant science of Man, drawn out of their instinctive clairvoyance. Today, we have instead a science in which people stare at Aries without knowing that its characteristic lies in the fact that it turns backwards; that the characteristic of Gemini lies in the fact that they touch each other, clasp hands, and so forth. Everything in the Zodiac symbols is immensely profound, deeply significant—each gesture, every single sign. And when the gesture itself is not the essential thing, as in Leo, then the symbol is chosen in such a way that the sign itself, I might say, expresses the gesture; the Lion is chosen, because he has the strongest heart pulsation. The Lion is the representative of the forces which fill out the human being.

In this way it is possible to draw to the surface again the primeval wisdom of the ages, by finding it within ourselves.

We have been studying how the living form of man, his soul and his spirit, are related to the cosmos. The various aspects of this subject presented in recent lectures may be summarized in somewhat the following way:—

In the deep foundations of man's being lies the will. In many respects the will is the most mysterious and secret element in human nature. It is obvious that aberrations, inclinations that often run counter to the world's well-being surge up from fathomless depths of the moral life; everything experienced by the soul in the form of pricks of conscience or self-reproach streams up from the deep ground of the will.

The reason why the will is so mysterious and secret is that in many respects it is a highly indeterminate force; there is in it an instinctive element over which we have little control and which drives us hither and thither on the turbulent waves of life often without our being able to claim that any conscious impulses are racing effect. In another respect too, namely in respect of our knowledge of the operations of the will, it has again and again been emphasized that these operations of the will are as withdrawn from human consciousness as the experiences of deep, dreamless sleep; so that in this respect too, the will is an indeterminate, mysterious element.

But when we think of man's spiritual nature we cannot conceive that this spirituality is active in him only during his waking hours or in his conscious mental life; the fact is that this spirituality is at work in him during sleep too, within that part of his being where his will lies and which, like the experiences of deep sleep, is wrapt in unconsciousness.

Spirit is therefore also present and at work in the sleeping human being. Two aspects of the will can be distinguished.—There is first of all the will which—unless we are out-and-out idlers—spurs us to activity from the time of waking until that of falling asleep. True, we cannot perceive the will in actual operation, but the effects rise into our consciousness inasmuch as we can form mental concepts and images of them. We do not know how the will-impulse works in us when we are walking; but we can see ourselves stepping forward. We form mental images of the workings of our will and in this sense are conscious of its effects. That is one aspect of the will.

The other aspect is that the will is also active in us while we sleep; for then inner processes are taking place, processes that are also operations of the will, only we are not aware of them—precisely because we are asleep. But just as the sun also shines during the night on the other side of the earth where we are not living, so does will stream through our being while we are asleep, although we have no consciousness of it.

Thus two kinds of will can be distinguished: an inner will and an outer will. The workings of the outer will are made manifest to us while we are awake; those of the inner will take effect while we are asleep. Strictly speaking, the inner will is not revealed to us; nevertheless when we look back, its effects can be apprehended afterwards, as having been part of the condition of sleep.

The will is present as it were in ocean depths of the soul. It surges upwards in waves. But just because we must admit that the will is at work during sleep, when the bodily part of our being is engaged in purely organic activity, neither pervaded with soul nor illumined by spirit, it follows that the will as such has to do with this organic activity. The will that is working while we are asleep has to do with organic activity, inasmuch as organic processes, life-processes take place in us. These processes are essentially connected with the will.

But during waking activity too, that is to say when our will is in flow, life-processes are taking place. The will takes effect in the processes of internal metabolism. So that here again we can point to organic activity.

Out of the ocean-depths of will in the human being, waves which come to expression in the form of feeling, surge upwards. We know that feeling is a dimly apprehended experience, that so far as actual consciousness is concerned it has really only the intensity of a dream. But at any rate it is clearer than the workings of will. It raises into greater clarity what lies in the ocean-depths of man's being. Feeling brings a certain light into, intensifies, consciousness; the two poles of the will rise into this intensified consciousness and in it both the inner will and the outer will are made manifest.

Thus we distinguish two kinds of feeling, as we did in the case of the will: an inner will in the sleeping state, an outer will in the waking state. One kind of feeling surges upwards from the will that is connected with man's sleeping condition. This kind of feeling lives itself out in the antipathies—taking the word in the widest sense—unfolded by the human being. This is feeling which tends towards antipathy. Whereas the will that is involved in outer activity and therefore leads man into the external world, manifests in all those experiences of feeling which have in them the quality of sympathy. The dreamlike experience of feeling which comes to expression in sympathies and antipathies aroused by different forms of life, by forms of art or of nature, or in sympathies and antipathies connected more with the organs and arising in us through smell or taste or through a sense of well-being or comfort—all this weaving activity belongs to the soul. Will therefore reveals itself in organic activity, feeling in activity of the soul.

If the life of soul is studied from this point of view, great illumination will be shed upon it. Waking life arouses in us sympathy with the surrounding world. Our antipathies really come from more unconscious realms. They press upwards from the sleeping will. It is as though our sympathies lie more on the surface, whereas antipathies rise up through them from unplumbed depths. Antipathies repel; antipathies draw us away from the surrounding world; we isolate ourselves, shut ourselves within our own being. Inwardly up-streaming antipathies are the antecedents of human egotism. The greater a man's egotism, the more strongly is the element of antipathy working in him. He wants to isolate himself, to feel enclosed within his own being.

In normal life we do not notice the constant interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the life of soul. But we become aware of it when our connection with the outer world becomes abnormal, and when the antipathetic element that derives from sleep also works in an abnormal way. This happens when our breathing, for example, functions irregularly during sleep and we have nightmares. In a nightmare, the soul is putting up an antipathetic defence against something that is trying to penetrate into us, preventing us from full experience of our egohood.

We are gazing here into deep secrets of human experience. If a man unfolds the element of antipathy in his life of feeling so strongly that it plays into his waking life, his whole being is permeated with antipathy which then lays hold of his astral body; his astral body is steeped in the element of antipathy; antipathy streams out from him like an abnormal aura. It may then happen that he begins to feel antipathy to people to whom his attitude was otherwise neutral, or indeed even to those he loved or knew intimately. These conditions can give rise to persecution mania in all its forms. When feelings of antipathy not to be explained by outer circumstances are experienced, this is due to the overflowing antipathies in the soul, that is to say, to an abnormal intensification of the one pole in the life of soul which forces its way upwards out of sleep. If this antipathy gets the upper hand in a human being, he becomes a world-hater, and such hatred can assume incredible proportions. The aim of all education and all social endeavor should be to prevent human beings from becoming world-haters.

But think of it.—If what surges up from the ocean-depths of man's being can promote overweening egotism when it gets the upper hand—and persecution mania in all forms is nothing but superabundant, excessive egotism—if all this is possible, what is there to be said of the inner will itself, which a beneficent creation conceals by means of sleep? We have no knowledge at all of how this inner will permeates our limbs, our entire organism. The most that can be said is that now and then, through strange dreams, something comes up into the consciousness of what lies in the will that works in our organism during sleep. What lives in this will lies—and rightly so for the ordinary consciousness—on yonder side of the Threshold. He who comes to know it, learns to know the force by which the human being can be led to uttermost evil. The deepest secret of human life is that we have the counterbalance of our organic activity in the very forces which, were they to gain control in the conscious life of a man, would make him into a criminal.

Let it be remembered that nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. What is radically evil when it breaks into our conscious life, is the counterbalance for our spent life-forces when it take effect in its right place, namely as the regulator of organic activity during the sleeping state.

If you ask: What is the nature of the forces which make compensation for the spent life-forces?—the answer is: They are the forces of evil. Evil has its mission—and it is here. If this becomes known to anyone through spiritual training, it is for him as it was for earlier seers, something of which they said: Of its essential nature it is not lawful to speak, for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it, and sinful the ear that hears of it.—Nevertheless man must realize that life is a process fraught with danger and that evil lies in its deep foundations as a necessary force.

Now these waves of the will surge even higher—into the conceptual life, the mental life. The sleeping will lights up in feeling, and when it surge upwards into mental life, it becomes still clearer but at the same time denuded qualitatively—it becomes abstract. In feeling fraught with antipathy there is still a certain lively intensity. When this element of antipathetic feeling surges into the conceptual life, it comes to expression in the form of negative judgments, judgments of rejection or denial. Everything we negate in life, everything the logician calls “negation”, negative judgment, is the uprush of antipathetic feeling, or of the inner will, into the conceptual life.

And when sympathetic feeling—which has its origin in the will of waking life, in the outer will—rises up into the conceptual life, our judgments are affirmative. We have arrived at something which, as you see, lives in us as abstraction only. In feeling, inasmuch as we unfold sympathies and antipathies, there is still intensity of life. Whereas in acts of judgment—which are a mental, conceptual activity—we are, as it were, immobile, contemplative observers of the world. We affirm and negate. We do not come to the point of actual antipathy; we merely negate. It is an abstract process. We do not rouse ourselves to antipathy: we merely say, no. In the same way we do not rouse ourselves to sympathy: we merely say, yes. We are raised above our relation to the outer world—to the level of abstract judgment.

This, then, is a purely mental, concept-forming activity, which can be called spiritual activity. But will, feeling and conceptual activity can surge even higher—into the domain of the senses. When negative judgment surges into the domain of the senses, what is the result? The condition wherein we perceive nothing. If we think of it in relation to the most obvious process of perception, we can say: It is the experience of darkness—where we see nothing. On the other hand, affirmative judgment becomes experience of light. The same could be said with regard to the experience of silence, or of tone and sound. To all the twelve senses it would be correct to apply what has here been said in connection with the experiences of light and of darkness.

And now let us ask: What, in reality, is this activity in the domain of the senses? I We have spoken of organic activity, activity of the life of soul, spiritual activity. Spiritual activity is merely a concept-forming activity but it is still our own. What takes place between the senses and the outer world is in truth no longer our own activity, for there the world is playing into us. It would be quite correct to depict the eye as an independent entity; what takes place in the eye is that the outer world penetrates into the organism as it were through a gulf. We are no longer standing in the world with our own activity, but this is divine activity. This divine activity weaves through the world surrounding us. Darkness inclines in the direction of negation, light in the direction of affirmation.

The influence of this divine activity upon man in his relationship to the world was an especially vivid experience in the wisdom of the second Post-Atlantean epoch.—God in the Light—that is to say, the Divine with a Luciferic quality; God in the Darkness—the Divine with an Ahrimanic quality.—Thus did the ancient Persians experience the world. And to them the sun was the representative of the outer world. The sun as the divine source of Light—so it was experienced in the second Post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand in the third Post-Atlantean epoch (Egypto-Chaldean) men experienced more strongly the sphere lying between judgment and feeling. At that time they did not feel so intensely that the Divine in the outer world is experienced in light or darkness, but rather in the impact between conceptual activity and feeling. Experience of divine activity among the Egyptians and Chaldeans caused men to bring an element of antipathy into negative judgments and sympathy into affirmative judgments. And only when we are able to decipher and understand the pictorial or other records of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch shall we realize that all were created and shaped out of sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. When you look at Egyptian statues, figures on tombs, and so forth, you can still feel that their forms give expression to sympathetic affirmation or antipathetic negation. It is simply not possible to create a sphinx without bringing into it sympathies and antipathies inhering in the conceptual life. Men did not experience merely light and darkness but something of the element of life that is present in sympathies and antipathies. In that epoch the sun was experienced as the divine source of Life.

And now we come to the Greco-Latin epoch when man's experience of direct communion with the outer world was largely lost. In my book Riddles of Philosophy, I have shown that although in that age man still felt his thoughts as we today feel sense-impressions, he was already approaching the condition in which we live at the present time, when owing to the development of the ego we no longer feel any really living connection with the external world, when with our ego we are practically asleep within the body, are in a state of slumber. This condition was not so pronounced in the Greeks, but to some extent it was certainly present. To understand the Greek nature we must realize that the Greek had already begun to live very intensely in his body—not as intensely as we do, but nevertheless intensely.—Not so the ancient Persians. The wise men among them did not believe that they were living enclosed within their skins but rather that they were borne on the waves of the light through the whole universe. In the Greek, this experience of cosmic life was already losing intensity, falling into slumber within the body. When we ourselves are asleep, the ego and astral body are outside the physical body; but our waking, in comparison with that of the ancient Persians, really amounts to sleep. When the Persians woke from sleep—I am speaking of course of the ancient Persians as described in my An Outline of Occult Science, it was as though the light actually penetrated into them, into their senses.

We no longer feel that at the moment of waking from sleep we summon the light into our eyes. For us the light is outside, phantomlike. Nor could the Greeks any longer see in the sun the actual source of Life; they felt that the sun was something that pervaded them inwardly. They felt the element in which the sun lives within the human being as the element of Eros—the element of Love. Thus: the sun as the divine source of Love. Eros—the sun-nature within the human being—this was what the Greek experienced. Then, from about the fourth century A.D. onwards, came the time when, fundamentally speaking, the sun was no longer regarded as anything but a physical orb in space, when the sun was darkened for man. To the ancient Persians the sun was the actual reflector of the Light weaving through space. To the Egyptians and Chaldeans the sun was the Life surging and pulsating through the universe. The Greeks felt the sun as that which infused Love into the living organism, guiding Eros through the waves of sentient existence.

This experience of the sun sank more and more deeply into man's being and gradually vanished into the ocean-depths of the soul. And it is in the ocean-depths of the soul that man bears the sun-nature today. It is beyond his reach, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it; it lies in the depths of being as a mystery of which the ancient teachings said: Let it not be uttered—for sinful is the mouth that speaks of it and sinful the ear that hears of it.

In the fourth century A.D. there were schools which taught that the sun-mystery must remain untold, that a civilization knowing nothing of the sun-mystery must now arise. Behind everything that takes place in the external world lie forces and powers which give guidance from the universe. One of the instruments of these guiding powers was the Roman Emperor Constantine. It was under him that Christianity assumed the form which denies the sun.

Living in that same century was one whose ardor for what he had learnt in the Mysteries as the last remnants of the ancient, instinctive wisdom, caused him to attach little importance to the development of contemporary civilization. This was Julian the Apostate. He fell by the hand of a murderer because he was intent upon passing on this ancient tradition of the threefold Mystery of the Sun. And the world would have none of it.

Today, of course, it must be realized that the old instinctive wisdom must become conscious wisdom, that what has sunk into the subconsciousness, into purely organic activity and even into sub-organic activity, must once again be lifted into the light of consciousness. We must re-discover the Sun-Mystery.

But just as when the Sun-Mystery had been lost, bitter enemies rose up against the one who wished this mystery to be proclaimed to the world, and brought about his death, so again enemies are working against the new Sun-Mysteries which must be brought to the world by spiritual science. We are living now at the other pole of historical evolution. In the fourth century A.D. there was sunset; now there must be sunrise.

In this sense Constantine and Julian the Apostate are two symbols of historical evolution. Julian the Apostate stands as it were upon the ruins of olden times, intent upon building again out of these ruins the forms of the ancient wisdom, upon preserving for humanity those ancient memorials which Christianity, assuming a material form for the first time in the days of Constantine, had destroyed. Countless treasures were destroyed, countless works of art, countless scripts and records of the ancient wisdom. Everything that could in any possible way have given men an inkling of the ancient Sun-Mystery was destroyed.

It is true that in order to reach inner freedom, it was necessary for men to pass through the stage of believing that a globe of gas is moving through universal space—but the fact is that physicists would be very astonished if they could take a journey in space; they would discover that the sun is not a globe of gas giving out light—that is nonsense—but that it is a mere reflector which cannot itself radiate light but at most throw it back. The truth is that in the spiritual sense, light streams out from Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and the Moon.

Physically it appears as though the sun gives the planets light, but in reality it is the planets that radiate light to the sun and the sun is the reflector. As such it was recognized by the wise men of ancient Persia with their instinctive wisdom, and in this sense the sun was regarded as the earthly source of Light—not indeed as the source itself, but as the reflector of the Light. Then, among the Egyptians and Chaldeans, the sun became the reflector of Life and among the Greeks, the reflector of Love.

This was the conception that Julian the Apostate wanted to preserve—and he was done away with. In order to reach freedom it was indeed necessary that men should hold for a time to the superstition of the sun as a globe of gas in space, giving out light—a superstition enunciated as a categorical truth in every book of physics today. But our task must be to penetrate to the reality.

In truth, Julian the Apostate and Constantine stand before us as two symbols ... Julian the Apostate was bent upon preserving those ancient memorials of the world which could, in a certain way, have made it possible for the true Sun-Mystery to find its way to men. Indeed during the first centuries of Christendom, Christ was still a Sun-Figure—an Apollo.

This Sun-Mystery was felt to be the greatest spiritual treasure possessed by mankind. And it was symbolized by what was known as the Palladium. It was said that the Palladium had once been in Troy and that the priests of the Mysteries there saw in it the means whereby, in sacred ritual and cult, they revealed to the people the true nature of the sun. Then the Palladium was taken to Rome, and its presence there was a secret known to the initiate in Rome. The initiated priests of the Romans, and even the first Emperors—Augustus, for example—worked in the world out of a direct consciousness that the greatest of all treasures was represented in Rome, at all events in an outer symbol, inasmuch as beneath the foundations of the most venerated Roman temple, lay the Palladium, its existence known only to those who were initiated into the deepest secrets of Roman existence and destiny. But in a spiritual sense it had become known to those whose task it was to bring Christianity to the world. And out of the knowledge that the Palladium was guarded in Rome, the early Christians made their way thither. A spiritual reality lay behind these journeys.

But when, under Constantine, Christianity was secularized, the Palladium was taken away from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople, and he caused the Palladium to be buried in the earth under a pillar erected there by his orders. Thus it transpired that in its further development Roman Christianity was deprived of the knowledge of the Sun-Mystery by the very Emperor who established Christianity in Rome in its rigid, mechanical forms. In the secularization of Christianity brought about by Constantine, the cosmic wisdom was lost to Christianity—and this comes to expression in the removal of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In certain Slavonic regions—people always interpret things according to their own conditions—a belief reigned for centuries, lasting indeed until the beginning of the twentieth century, that in a none too distant future the Palladium will be removed from Constantinople to another place—to a Slavonic town, as the people believed. At all events the Palladium is waiting, expecting to be removed from the darkening influence shed upon it by Constantinople to that locality which, by its very nature, will bring it into complete darkness. Yes, the Palladium goes to the East, where the decadence of the ancient wisdom still survives but is passing into darkness. And in the further evolution of the world, everything depends upon whether—just as the sun is the reflector of the light bestowed upon it from the universe—the Palladium-treasure is illumined by a wisdom born from the riches of the knowledge living in the West. The Palladium, the ancient heritage brought from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, and which, as it is said, will be carried still farther into the darkness of the East—this Sun-treasure must wait until it is redeemed spiritually in the West, released from the dark shadows of a purely external knowledge of nature. Thus the task of the future is bound up with the holiest traditions of European development.

Legends are still extant, even today, among; those who are initiated into these things—often they are quite simple people going about here and there in the world. These legends tell of the removal of the Palladium, the treasure of wisdom, from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople when Roman Christianity was secularized; they tell of its future removal to the East when the East, denuded of the ancient wisdom, will have fallen into utter decadence; and they tell of the necessity for this sun-treasure to receive new light from the West.

The Sun-Mystery has disappeared into the nether regions of human existence. Through spiritual-scientific development we must find it again. The Sun-Mystery must be found again—otherwise the Palladium will vanish into the darkness of the East. It is wrongful today to utter a saying as untrue as Ex Oriente Lux. The light can no longer come from the East, for the East is in decadence. Nevertheless the East waits—for it will possess the sun-treasure, even though it be in darkness—it waits for the light of the West. But today men are groping in darkness, arranging conferences in the darkness, are looking expectantly towards—Washington! Only those “Washingtons” that speak with the tones of the spiritual world—not conferences looking for the darkness that surrounds the Palladium, for an open door for trade in China—only those conferences will bring salvation which are conducted in the West in such a way that the Palladium can be kindled once again to light. For like a fluorescent body, the Palladium, in itself, is dark; if it is suffused with light, then it becomes radiant. And so it will be with the wisdom of the East: dark in itself, it will light up, will become fluorescent when it is permeated by the wisdom of the West, by the spiritual light of the West.

But this the West does not understand. Only when the Palladium legend is brought into the clear light of consciousness, only when men can again feel true compassion for one like Julian the Apostate who felt constrained to ignore the age in which the light of freedom could germinate in the darkness, who longed to preserve the old instinctive wisdom and therefore met with his death—only when men realize that Constantine, in giving an externalized form of Christianity to the Romans, took from them the light, the wisdom, and sent Christianity into the darkness—only when men realize that the light whereby the Palladium can again be made to shine must be born out of modern nature-knowledge in the best sense—only then will an important chapter of world-history be brought to fulfillment. For only then will that which became Western when the Greeks see Troy on fire, become Western-Eastern. The light that flamed from Troy is present even to-day; it is present but it is shrouded in darkness. It must drawn forth from the darkness; the Palladium must again be illumined.

If our hearts are in the right place, knowledge of the course of history can fire us with enthusiasm; and this same enthusiasm will give us the right feeling for the impulses which spiritual science would fain impart.

If we first take a look at the historical development of humanity, we see what we have been talking about: a descending line from the original wisdom that was instinctively adopted by man, which at the same time had something invigorating for humanity, and then became paralyzed . at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. And then follows the ascending current of development, in which we are immersed, which begins in the manner already described several times from the Mystery of Golgotha. Now it is a matter of properly considering what initially emerges as a certain inner characteristic of historical development, for our time, in which we are immersed and which we must understand.

In our time there are the most diverse phenomena that live in the feelings and perceptions of human beings, which can even be said to make people healthy and sick in a certain way, but which are not brought to consciousness, which are not properly connected with the great principles of development. We must turn our attention to these phenomena of the present, for it is on this alone that the recovery of much within human development into the future depends.

There are many things we could mention. Today, we want to highlight one in particular: the difficulty we have today in establishing a true understanding with the youth of today. This difficulty in communicating with young people as an adult today is also the basis of our anthroposophical educational endeavors. We see a distinct youth movement emerging today. As soon as children reach the age of sexual maturity and then a little beyond, they develop a life of feelings and emotions that is extremely difficult for adults to understand today, but which is even more difficult to deal with. We see how agitation movements are emerging among young people, how revolting feelings are asserting themselves against all parental or educational authority. And when we look at all this with an unbiased mind, we cannot deny the justification for much of it. We have to admit that something is alive in today's young people that has lost touch with the outer life and also with the revelations of the inner life in adults. — In this respect, many things appear to the philistine today in such a way that when he notices them, he simply begins to rant in a peculiar way. He may not always mean it, but he starts ranting. He says: Today's youth have lost all sense of authority, they have almost become Bolsheviks; they rebel against everything that older people find reasonable, they disobey. These are all things that make life today hopeless. And especially among teachers, among those teachers who would like to preserve the old ways, such statements are very, very common. Again, such a thing can only be understood from an awareness of the developmental impulses of humanity.

Since the 15th century, we have seen a development of humanity towards intellectualism, towards an intellectual understanding of the world. We are not always aware of how strongly we actually live in this intellectualism today, in this purely intellectual, increasingly abstract form of world view. Although people always believe that they start from experience, from reality, from practical life, in reality they actually only start from conceptual life, from definitions, instead of from facts. People believe they have understood something when they have formed a concept of it. We often speak of how we understand death. Now, although it sometimes happens in a rather complicated way, death is understood as the end of a being, of a form. When this form dissolves into itself, when it can no longer hold together, then we say it dies, and we form a concept that is supposed to answer the question: What actually is death? And then we apply this concept, which we have grasped and also defined very precisely, to plants, to animals, to human beings. We say: plants die, animals die, human beings die. But the fact that this coming to an end of the inner cohesion can be something quite different in plants, in animals, in humans, is not taken into account because one gets stuck on the external side of the matter. It is just as I have often said: someone says that a knife is for cutting meat, and then he gets a razor and uses it to cut meat; a knife is a knife. This is more or less how we deal with the concept of death, life and so on today. We live in abstractions, in intellectualism. This is particularly noticeable in scientific life, where one does not start from facts, but from the comprehension of concepts, from defining.

Now, the abilities that a person needs to lead such a life in concepts do not actually come into play until the age of fourteen or fifteen, when sexual maturity really sets in. It is virtually impossible, when looking at life impartially, to speak of a child having an inclination towards an intellectualistic view of the world. The child is simply not able to think about the world in such a way that it can grasp the abstract. The child develops a completely different life in the soul. The child brings with it developmental forces, inner formative forces from its prenatal life, from the life between death and a new birth. These shape the physical organism, especially in the first seven years of life, but then to a somewhat lesser extent, and also significantly, even up to sexual maturity. And as long as the physical organism is being shaped in this way, it is quite impossible for the human being to develop into pure intellectualism. Now, in its development, humanity has increasingly come to a point where everything one gets from the world, everything one is educated in, are intellectual concepts. We receive the soul's garments, so to speak, in such a way that we can only grow into them in our fourteenth or fifteenth year. It is only an appearance when, for example, we say that we mainly want to look at things with children. What we allow to develop for them in this observation is what they only really grow into in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The consequence of this is that in today's adults there is no living connection between what actually occurs as soul life after sexual maturity and what was there before. They only remember superficially what they experienced as children. They do not delve into their childhood experiences. They do not delve into these childhood experiences to such an extent that they exult inwardly at the joys they experienced as children or become intensely sad at what went against them. They actually forget childhood, not for the intellect but for the feelings and will, so that they do not look back on childhood in a living way.

But the child itself does not yet have the disposition for intellectualism; it has within itself the forces that are still working on the organism. This actually makes it a completely different breed of human being, and hence the impossibility of understanding adults and children. Teachers talk to children in such a way that they are terribly clever, these teachers – but children are wise. The teachers are clever and the children are wise, and cleverness cannot understand wisdom, cannot build a bridge from one to the other. If we had to do with our cleverness all that children do with their inner organism, yes, we would of course not be able to cope at all.

Jean Paul was right when he said that we learn far more in the first three years of our lives than in the three academic years. Anyone who has gone through their academic years with an open mind and can look back on their childhood years in a corresponding way knows that this is absolutely true; for the three academic years are concerned only with cleverness – let us say it is so – but in any case they are not concerned with wisdom. But the three childish years, the first even most, really move in wisdom. There wisdom works on the human being, even if it remains in the subconscious, wisdom works on the human being. Then, of course, it subsides later, but it is still present and we then experience what we are experiencing today: the revolting feelings of youth towards adults. One really only understands this when one looks back at the ages of humanity when it was different. And it was different in the developmental period of humanity that extends into the fourth post-Atlantic period. And I will describe how it was different.

Take an ancient Egyptian from an earlier period or a member of the Chaldean tribe of humanity: they did not perceive mineral nature in the same way as we do. He perceived it quite differently. He perceived it in such a way that when he saw ordinary ground, he perceived it relatively neutrally; but he perceived it quite differently, vividly, when he saw mountains or a flowing river. Then all life stirred within him. He received insights into what he actually needed in terms of insights from the outside world. He felt, let us say, when he saw a crystal, that the crystal told him something, that it revealed a secret of nature to him. Today, however, we are driven to mineralogy, to crystallography, in an intellectualistic way. There we are to learn all kinds of things about edges and angles and the like. That is all well and good, but it cannot be compared to what people once felt when they looked at a crystal. Then they really spoke to him of elemental beings; then he felt that he is not alone in the world, that there is something in nature that speaks to him. And even more so when a person approached plants. Certainly, one approached the grass that surrounds us more or less neutrally. But if, let us say, one saw a bilsenkraut plant on the wayside and walked past it, then one had a certain experience. The henbane has a certain shape; today the teacher, the botanist, introduces a child to this shape: it is described. This is an intellectualistic way of approaching the subject, and when this intellectualistic approach is adopted, one actually remains more or less neutral towards almost all plants. You like them, an aesthetic element comes into it, but the very living thing that was there once does not come into it. Because if you go back in time, if you were an ancient Egyptian or an ancient Chaldean, if you passed a henbane plant, you would go pale. If you passed a foxglove plant, you would blush. If you passed a colchicum, you would feel your skin stiffen. So you didn't walk through the world indifferently. You felt how you participated in the blood circulation and - in today's language we can call it that - in the nervous experience, which expressed itself externally in form. It was a living participation with nature.

And when people saw animals, they experienced the form of the animal very intensely in their own inner overall perception. They therefore understood nature quite differently. They understood it directly with the whole human being. When someone saw a snake, they felt something like an urge to writhe in their whole organism and to escape with their soul from all kinds of things that were unpleasant to them. The whole thing that is expressed in the Bible: the snake was the most cunning of all animals – that was an inner experience when looking at the snake. The mineral kingdom spoke to the human being from the outside. The animal kingdom spoke in such a way that this speaking was equivalent to experiencing the form of the animal.

All this has been lost to humanity, and in its place has come a kind of feeling of being cast away from nature, a feeling that nature has closed its windows. You can no longer see into it. You stand there alone. This is part of the natural development of humanity. What an older humanity experienced in nature is now present to a high degree in the needs of the child. And we should just pay attention to how the child actually asks. It does not ask in such a way that our present-day intellectualized answers really fit the child's questions. They do not fit at all. The child usually feels unsatisfied. And when we come across children who ask questions and feel satisfied with intellectual answers, this is something that occurs today, especially in a distorted and false education, to the detriment of developing humanity. When a child claims to be satisfied with our intellectualized answers, this actually corresponds to a certain coquetry that develops in the child. In reality, the child does not feel satisfied at all when given the answers we are accustomed to today, and we only train it to feel satisfied often, thereby making it actually untrue inwardly, inwardly coquettish. It then coquettishes with the satisfaction. This indicates that something lives in the child that is similar to what all of humanity had in ancient times as co-experience with the cosmos, and which has been dulled by the intellectualized soul life of more recent times. If this were to continue as it is today, the gap between adults and children would become ever deeper and deeper.

A well-known socialist agitator once wrote an essay that was much resented, about revolutionizing children. That was long before the war – it was downright demanded that children should be revolutionized. Well, yes, today they want to revolutionize everything, so why not children too? But if all this happens without an understanding of human nature, it can only lead to the greatest disaster, and it does lead to the greatest disaster. We must realize that, however necessary intellectual development, development towards the abstract, was for humanity, it has nevertheless thrown man out of nature, and today we grow up satisfying our head with the development of the intellect, while leaving the rest of the human being, especially the rest of the soul life, which works very strongly in the subconscious, unsatisfied. This becomes apparent to anyone who can observe the whole human being with the means of spiritual research, especially today in the sleeping human being.

This sleeping human being of today, so to speak, has nothing of what he actually needs. He has the great disadvantage that from falling asleep to waking up, he not only sleeps physically, as he should, but also sleeps spiritually in a certain way. In the case of the elderly person, it was the case that he awakened spiritually when he fell asleep. Of course, this did not merge into ordinary consciousness, but he awakened spiritually in such a way that he absorbed certain forces through consciousness that he could not absorb in ordinary consciousness. Today, human beings have lost these powers. Man is in the outer world, and yet, with his soul, he is not in it. He can no longer blush when he looks at the purple foxglove, he can no longer turn pale when he looks at the henbane. He can no longer feel so vividly that it is a blessing to be born near oak forests, because the oak pours courageous strength into people, as was the case with the ancient Germans. These things cannot be grasped merely in the abstract, as we do today, when we retell, correctly philistine retell, how the ancient Germans loved the oaks. It is philistine how we tell it today, because we have no idea what effect the oak had on older people, how the seventeen- to eighteen-year-old lad, when he awoke to certain forces, could not help but feel stiff in the knees, in the loins, how he tightened his neck, how that was a matter of course.

Please do not misunderstand me; I do not think that we should broach this subject today. It is out of the question, because it would be unnatural if we wanted to broach it. It is something that has disappeared from humanity, that no longer exists. But we must recognize that the need for it has nevertheless remained in the subconscious soul life, that this need is there.

So what did the ancient man say to nature? He said: I was born - he did not express it in words, of course, but it was in his feeling - I was born; what lives in me is rooted out there in the stones that tell me something, in the plants that make me blush and turn pale, make me taut and so on, in the animals that fill me with inner strength or make me limp; I am rooted in there. There I will be received again with my soul when my body falls away from me. And it was a feeling, as they, let us say, could have the plants when they bloom. If the plant could develop a soul life when it blooms, it would say: I must now develop the germ into the fruit; there it is over with me, there it does not go further, there I must let my leaves wither and finally fall off. But then, if it were developing its soul life, the plant would turn gratefully to the earth and say: Yes, but there is the earth, which takes in my germs, which develops my germs. There I live on. — This is roughly how the ancient human being felt about all of nature. He did not merely derive his soul existence from his physical inheritance, but he knew himself rooted in all of nature. And in that he knew himself rooted in all nature, he also knew how he is received into all nature when his body has fallen away from him. He regarded all nature as the blossoming plant regards the earth that receives its germ. This world, which the old man felt around him, is actually no longer there, it is dead, it is dead. And this is a basic feeling of modern man, even if it is not understood, that he feels thrown out of nature.

And now we want to put something completely different before our soul. We want to imagine an initiate in the fourth post-Atlantic period, who is initiated into the beginning of intellectual life. What is generally understood by intellectual life today was, in a sense, the result of a certain initiation for the fourth post-Atlantic period. Certain initiations were aimed at bringing people to an understanding of intellectualism. You see, such an initiate was, of course, brought to the consequences of intellectualism, whereas today, people get stuck in the fear of intellectualism – they do not go to the consequences. But such an initiate was led to understand this. In ancient times, it was simply the case that man felt that there was a soul in all of nature. He lived with his soul life in such a way that he knew that in death he would be taken up again by the soul in the cosmos. A tragic mood already prevailed over many initiations of the fourth post-Atlantean period, and the initiates of this kind of mystery had actually lost all hope in nature. They expected nothing of what nature could say to man. They said that nature had ceased to speak to man, that nature had ceased to receive man in death. A completely different world must come, so that man with his soul life can again have hope. And it was made clear to these initiates: He who looks into nature finds nothing in nature that could give him such hope. He had to see in nature that there is nothing that saves man spiritually, not only physically, where he has descendants, but that saves man spiritually. That wisdom takes on an intellectual form was something these initiates came to know. It is already a commonplace for us, but these initiates came to know how wisdom is transformed into an intellectual form. And that created in them a tragic mood, that was what made them hopeless. For the old initiates experienced one thing with full consciousness: they knew that wisdom is not merely something that lives abstractly in man; wisdom is light in man, in that man thinks, makes images within himself. For the same thing that is inwardly images within man is outwardly the light that quickens. Our concepts cannot create light – so these initiates said to themselves – that is why they themselves have taken on the form of death, that is why our concepts are dead. And that was the tragic wisdom of a large part of the mysteries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, that the sentence was felt: Man's wisdom can no longer be light, it becomes dark in man; for light is creating. The abstract thought is uncreative, is dead.

And now imagine such an initiate, educated entirely in this view: there can only be consolation for man again when, from some corner, comes the conviction: wisdom can shine again, wisdom can become light again, it is not dead, it is something that can be seen outside. It can become light. You see, this comfort came to Paul when he experienced the event of Damascus. Only then did he grasp the mystery of Golgotha. Only then did he understand: through Christ, something has come into the world that cannot only be thought, that shines, that in turn has the power of light, and thus has creative power. And from that moment on he knew: although nature is dead to man, Christ is on earth with his power. He has penetrated it. And in Christ mankind can now find what it used to find in nature. That was Paul's great experience before Damascus. And then he understood: people have lost nature as a consolation, nature has become aesthetic to them. But the Christ enters. The Christ, properly understood, gives that which lived there in the whole complex of the speaking minerals, the plants that make one blush and pale, the animal nature that looks and searches within the human being. A spiritual cosmos has connected with the earth. The power of the sun, which previously appeared to man in minerals, plants and animals, is now there in a moral way. It is there for inner experience. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

What are people talking about when they discuss the interpretation of what the Christ proclaimed: the end of the earth is here, a new kingdom is arising. Yes, those who have understood that the ears of grain will henceforth be five times as rich in the fields, that the grapes will be five times as large on the vines – we know that this is how it was understood – do not understand what was meant; that in fact a saturation of purely natural existence had come with what lies in the descent of the Christ to earth. This was revealed to Paul with the event of Damascus. And so we must see this second world, a second, completely new world has come with the Christ. It is not just this abstract concept, as it is often viewed, but it is a completely new world, a world that, when properly understood, gives what nature used to give. Intellectualism laughs when one speaks of gnomes in minerals, but this is supposed to express nothing other than what I said earlier: the minerals spoke to you – or that there are undines in plants. People who can no longer turn pale or blush at the sight of plants cannot, of course, know about the Undines either, for the concepts of reason, the definitions, say nothing about the Undines. But the blush and the pallor, that which lies in the blood, speaks of it, spoke of it once. Today it speaks of it only unconsciously. But all this can be revived when the Christ enters humanity as a real experience. And in the Christ, old age will be able to communicate with youth again. For the Christ cannot be grasped by the intellect. You see, today we judge the world intellectually, we speak of right and wrong, of true and false. But this is only significant for the physical world in which we live between birth and death. People to whom one must speak about the higher worlds do not want to enter into what is essential. Certainly, one must carry the concepts of true and false, of logically right and wrong, up into the higher worlds as well. But that is not the essential. The essential is that something living must be added, that the concepts of 'healthy' and 'ill', for example, must be introduced. Here in the physical world, something is either right or wrong; for the higher worlds, what is right is also healthy. We experience it as vividly as we experience health in the physical world as something that encompasses the whole person. And what is wrong, what is incorrect, is what is sick there. We would actually be better off speaking of health and sickness in the ordinary world if we want to describe things accurately than if we speak of right and wrong. We also need to develop some sense of how to look at what is healthy and what is sick. Here we judge logically according to right or wrong; in the higher worlds we sense: something is growing there, it is developing. We do not speak of mere rightness, we sense that as healthy. And when we grasp a concept about it, we also feel this concept as something healthy, not just as something right. And in the same way, we sense what is wrong in the spiritual world as being sick. Now, in the physical world we are content with right or wrong — we are predisposed that way. This is not the case for history. For history, we cannot make do with the concepts that newer historians have developed based on the model of pure physics. We have to speak of a health at the starting point of humanity. In the Greco-Latin period, we have to speak of a disease of culture. And we have to speak of the therapy of history by developing the effectiveness of the mystery of Golgotha. We must therefore speak as we speak of the healthy and the sick person, we must present history according to the model of an illness and a cure.

Rankesche history, for example, is infinitely abstract compared to reality. And this kind of history, as it is written today, is more or less like a doctor approaching a sickbed or a healthy person and simply wanting to reason with them. We must approach history with an eye for health, illness and healing. And that happens when we look at history in such a way that we start from health in primeval times, gradually see a real cultural illness, and feel the great therapist who, through the mystery of Golgotha, has really brought healing from outside the earth. In this way, the study of history is brought to life. But in this way, too, the Christ is placed in the historical evolution. Only the historical evolution has a possibility of approaching the Christ, which proceeds as physiology and pathology must proceed in relation to the material. It must be possible to bring into spiritual life those concepts that today can only be used in the physical life, and even there only poorly, because, for example, one examines the person after he has died and deduces the most important laws for his life from the corpse. So one handles it poorly, but at least one handles it. But when considering history, this has been completely forgotten. At most when people see very special states of emergency, such as, let us say, when a sect appears that whips itself, then one speaks of something pathological, or when things come to it, as it has already happened during the last years, for example, that someone once started shooting at Venus with machine guns because he believed that it was an enemy balloon approaching. This is called a war psychosis. So in special cases one speaks of the healthy or the sick taking effect. But one does not consider the healthy and the sick in the great process. Therefore one cannot come to a real understanding of the principle of healing, of the great historical therapy that appeared with the Mystery of Golgotha. Of course, one can say that people today are still actually quite ill. Well, but that does not apply, because one should have an idea of what it would be like if the Mystery of Golgotha had not occurred. And if people believe that it only depends on faith, then they are also mistaken, because it depends on the objective that has occurred in the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. Of course, faith also helps the sick person, but the doctor's skill is also essential. Therefore, it was a mistake to look for the actual phenomenon of Christian piety merely in faith. That would be like saying: the medicine can stay where it wants, you just need to teach the patient to believe that he can get well through this medicine.

We have come to abstractions everywhere, to an inability to see how what a person experiences within is connected to what is happening objectively outside. And so it will be necessary for our ideas to become more and more alive. For with the dead ideas with which we have gradually become accustomed to looking at the outer world, the Mystery of Golgotha will not arise. In the face of these, Christianity would fade more and more. The Christ would become more and more the mere man Jesus, as He has already become for many theologians. Christianity would disappear. A real revival of Christianity presupposes that the whole development of humanity and of human views will be permeated with more living concepts than is possible through intellectualism. We had to have intellectualism for the sake of human freedom. But we must bring intellectualism out again for the sake of the human being, so that this human being can come to life again. For freedom, a dying was necessary, because freedom can only come from the activity of the will in the dead, that is, from the highest application of the will. When the life in us overpowers us, consciousness fades, in which only freedom can flourish. But once intellectualism is there, life must come to intellectualism, that is, the concrete concepts of healthy and sick must come to the abstract concepts of true and false.

And we need the application of these concrete concepts to history first of all. Then we will be able to find the Mystery of Golgotha as the most important component of the historical development of the earth.

Those who look at the historical development of humanity only in terms of the sequence of cause and effect, as is customary today, will not be able to gain from history itself that which it can be in terms of forces, of impulses for the individual human being, if one tries to penetrate into the true essence of this historical becoming. Historical development can only reveal itself to someone who is able to perceive a wise working through the succession of facts. Today it is almost the case that one is of the opinion that anyone who sees a wise event in the context of the world and especially in the historical development of humanity is indulging in superstition and attributing to things something that only he himself has thought up. However, one must not impose one's own ideas onto things. One must not force one's way of thinking onto things, but one must try to let things speak for themselves. If one is open enough, one will perceive something like an active wisdom everywhere in historical development, especially at significant turning points in human evolution.

Now, one of the things that has emerged from history is, above all, the establishment of the individual festive days of the year, especially the great festive days. It is striking when we realize that Christmas is a so-called fixed feast, falling every year near the winter solstice, on December 24 and 25. In contrast to this, Easter is a so-called movable feast, which appears to be arranged according to the constellation of the sun and moon, the observation of which is thus, to a certain extent, brought in from the extra-terrestrial cosmos. It is the case that if a person takes these festive days of the year seriously, they have a meaning for their life, they are significant in their life. That is what they should be. Meaningful, penetrating thoughts should arise on these festive days. Profound feelings and emotions should well up from the heart and soul. It is precisely through what we experience inwardly during such festive seasons that we should feel connected to the passage of time and to that which is effective in the course of time.

Now, these festive seasons have been fixed for certain historical reasons, and one has to reflect on such a fact that Christmas is an immovable festival and Easter is a movable one, that Christmas falls at a time when the earth is, so to speak, most closed off from the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos. When the sun has the least effect on the earth, when the earth, out of its own forces, which it has retained from the summer and autumn season, produces its own covering for the shortest days, when the earth, out of itself, makes what it can with its own forces with the least influence from the cosmos, we celebrate Christmas. |

When the time begins again when the earth experiences the most significant influences from the extraterrestrial cosmos, when the warmth of the sun, the light of the sun, causes vegetation to grow out of the ground, when heaven, so to speak, works together with the earth to weave the earth's garment, then we celebrate Easter. And in that such conceptions have emerged from the thoughts of humanity, not in an abstract way conceived by the one or the other arbitrarily, but from thoughts that have, as it were, permeated humanity through long epochs, that have developed themselves, into the historical evolution something has flowed that, when recognized, at the same time evokes the possibility of deeply venerating it, the possibility of looking back to the times of our ancestors with reverence, devotion, and love. And by drawing attention to something like this, one can indeed say: Contemplation of the active wisdom in historical becoming allows those forces and impulses to emerge from this history that can then, in the right way, become rooted in the human soul and work in the human soul in the right way.

Christmas, as we celebrate it today at the shortest time of the year, on December 24th and 25th, has only been celebrated in the Christian Church since the year 354. It is not usually thought about in a forceful way that even in Christian-Catholic Rome in the year 353, Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, was not celebrated on that day. It is one of the most interesting aspects of historical reflection to see how this Christmas celebration has become established, out of a historical instinct and from deeper sources of wisdom, which may have worked largely unconsciously.

Something similar, but fundamentally different, was celebrated before: January 6, which was the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ. And this Feast of the Epiphany of Christ meant the remembrance of the baptism of John in the Jordan. This Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated in the first centuries of Christianity as the most important. And only from the time I have indicated does the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ, the Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan, so to speak, wander through the twelve holy nights back to December 25 and is replaced by the Feast of the Birthday of Christ Jesus. This is connected with deep, meaningful inner processes of the historical development of Christianity.

What does the fact that in the first centuries of the Christian worldview the memory of the baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated indicate? What does this baptism of John in the Jordan mean? This baptism of John in the Jordan signifies that from the heights of heaven, for extraterrestrial, cosmic reasons, the entity of the Christ descends and unites with the entity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan therefore signifies a fertilization of the earth from cosmic expanses. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan signifies an interpenetration of heaven and earth. And in celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, we celebrated a supersensible birth, the birth of the Christ in the thirty-year-old man Jesus.

In the first centuries of Christian development, attention was focused primarily on the appearance of Christ on earth, and of less importance, alongside this view of the appearance of an extraterrestrial Christ-being in the earthly realm, was the earthly birth of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who only received the Christ in his own body when he was thirty years old. This was the conception in the early centuries of Christianity. In these centuries, therefore, the descent of the supermundane Christ was celebrated. And an attempt was made to understand what had actually happened in the course of his incarnation.

If we allow the historical development up to the Mystery of Golgotha to take effect on us, it presents itself in such a way that in primeval times humanity was endowed with an original wisdom of a supersensible kind, an original wisdom that one must have the deepest reverence for if one is able to contemplate it in its entire inwardness, in its entire essence. In the first, only externally childlike appearing wisdom of mankind, an infinite amount is revealed not only about the earthly, but above all about the extra-earthly, and how the extra-earthly affects the earth. Then one sees how, in the course of the development of mankind, this light of primeval wisdom shines less and less in human minds, how people increasingly lose touch with this primeval wisdom. And this primeval wisdom has faded and disappeared from the human mind precisely in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. All phenomena of historical development in Greek and especially in Roman life show in the most diverse ways that precisely the best of humanity were aware that a new heavenly element must enter into earthly life so that the earth and humanity could continue to develop.

For the unprejudiced observer, the entire evolution of mankind on earth falls into two parts: the time that waited for the Mystery of Golgotha, waited not only in the simple, childlike minds of men, but waited with the highest wisdom — and in the part that then follows on from the Mystery of Golgotha, in which we are immersed and for which we hope for an ever broader and broader fulfillment, again in the supersensible world, again in the influence of the extraterrestrial cosmic reality on earthly events within the evolution of the earth. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha stands at the very center of earthly evolution, giving it its true meaning.

I have often tried to express this pictorially for my listeners by saying that one should look at something like the significant painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper in Milan, which unfortunately no longer exists in its artistic perfection. How one sees the Redeemer within His Twelve, how one sees Him contrasted on one side with John and on the other with Judas, and how one then has the whole thing before one in its coloring. And here, precisely with regard to this most characteristic image, when contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, one must say: If any being were to come down to Earth from a foreign heavenly body, it would in the outer reality, would be amazed, for we must assume that such a being from another planet would have a completely different environment around it, and it would be amazed at all the things that human beings have created on earth. But if he were to be led to this picture, in which this Mystery of Golgotha is shown in its most characteristic form, he would intuitively sense something of the meaning of earthly existence from this picture, simply through the way in which Christ Jesus is placed among his twelve disciples, who in turn represent the whole human race.

One can sense the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha actually gives meaning to the evolution of the earth from the most diverse backgrounds. But one only fully senses that this is the case when one can rise to the vision that with the baptism of John in the Jordan a supersensible being, the Christ, has entered into a human being. This is how the Gnostics saw it, not with the world view that we are again trying to gain today through anthroposophy, but with their world view, which was the last remnant of the ancient wisdom of mankind. One might say that so much of the instinctive wisdom of humanity remained that, in the first centuries after Christ's appearance, a number of people were still able to grasp what actually happened with the appearance of Christ on earth. The wisdom that the Gnostics had can no longer be ours. We must, because humanity must be in a state of continuous progress, advance to a much more conscious, less instinctive view of the supersensible as well. But we look with reverence at the wisdom of the Gnostics, who had retained so much of the first instinctive primal wisdom of man that one could grasp the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

From this comprehension of the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the central phenomenon of John's baptism in the Jordan, the first great festival was established. But it was already so arranged in the developmental history of mankind that the ancient wisdom was dying out and becoming paralyzed. And it was precisely in the fourth century A.D. that one could do nothing with this ancient wisdom. Yesterday I presented another point of view, showing how this ancient wisdom gradually darkened. In a certain sense, the fourth century is the one in which man made the first beginning of being completely dependent on himself, having nothing around him for his contemplation other than what the senses can perceive and what the combining mind can make of the sensory perception. In order to gain its freedom, which could never have been gained through dependence on unearthly things, if ancient wisdom had not been paralyzed, humanity had to lose ancient wisdom, had to be thrown into materialistic observation. This materialistic outlook first appeared at dawn in the fourth century A.D. and grew stronger and stronger until it reached its culmination in the nineteenth century.

Materialism also has its good side in the history of the development of mankind. The fact that man no longer had the supersensible light shining into his mind, the fact that he was dependent on what he saw with his senses in the world around him, gave rise to the independent power within him that tends towards freedom. It also appeared wise in the developmental history of humanity that materialism has emerged. But precisely at the time when materialism took hold of the earthly nature of man, it was no longer possible to understand how the influence of the extraterrestrial, the heavenly, in the symbol of John's baptism in the Jordan presented itself to humanity. As a result, people lost their understanding of the meaning of the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, and resorted to other explanations. All the feelings and emotions that were related to the Mystery of Golgotha were no longer associated with the supermundane Christ, but began to be associated with the earthly Jesus of Nazareth. And so the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ became the Feast of the Epiphany of the Child Jesus. Admittedly, the development has taken a course that has now reached a peripeteia, which must create new necessities in the striving of humanity for our present-day world view.

We see how, as early as the 4th century, human beings' full and wise comprehension of the impossibility of comprehending the appearance of Christ was already confronted with it. But human feeling, human perception, human emotion and will develop in the course of history at a slower pace than thoughts. While thoughts had long since ceased to be directed towards the appearance of Christ, hearts still turned to this appearance of Christ. Deeply intimate feelings lived on in Christendom. And these profound feelings now formed the content of historical development for many centuries. And these profound feelings expressed it - but as if from instinctive impulses - what a significant event the appearance of Christ was for the development of the earth. The festival of the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth was connected to the Adam and Eve Day, the festival of the beginning of the earth of mankind. Adam and Eve Day falls on December 24, and Jesus' birthday celebration on December 25. In Adam and Eve, people saw the beings with whom the evolution of the earth began, the beings who descended from spiritual heights, who became sinful on earth, who became entangled on earth in material events, who lost their connection with the supersensible worlds. The first Adam was spoken of in the Pauline sense; and the second Adam was spoken of as the Christ: that man can only be fully man in the post-Christian era if he unites within himself the forces that fell away from God through Adam and the forces that through Christ bring him back to God. This was expressed by bringing together the Adam and Eve festival and the Jesus birthday festival. The sense of this connection, which gives earthly life its true meaning, has been preserved in a heartfelt way over the centuries.

One example of this is the occurrence of the very heartfelt 'Paradeisspiele' (Paradise Plays) and 'Christi-Geburtspiele' (Plays about the Nativity), of which we have brought samples to be performed here, which date from the last Middle Ages, from the beginning of the modern era, when German tribes living in the western regions took them with them to the east. In present-day Hungary, such tribes settled. We find such tribes north of the Danube in the Pressburg area, we find them south of the Carpathians in the so-called Spiš area, we see them in Transylvania. We find mainly Alemannic-Saxon tribes in these areas. We then find Swabian tribes in the Banat. All these German tribes took with them the one thing from their original homeland that had been imbued with the most heartfelt sentiments, which united humanity during these centuries with the most important experience on earth.

But human wisdom increasingly took a course that also intertwined the Christ event with the materialistic conception of the world. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of a materialistic theology. The criticism of the Gospels begins. The possibility of having an inkling — as must be the case with supersensible representations — that what appears as an imagination of the supersensible is different depending on whether it is viewed from one point of view or another, is lost. One has no conception of the fact that the sages of former centuries must also have recognized the so-called contradictions in the Gospels and that they did not criticize them in a critical way. One sinks philistinely into these contradictions in the Gospels. One resolves the contradictions, one removes everything supersensible from the Gospels. One loses the Christ out of the story of the Gospel. One tries to make something out of the story of the Gospels, something like an ordinary, profane story. Gradually, one can no longer distinguish what the theological historians say from what a secular historian like Ranke says about the Mystery of Golgotha.

When one looks for the figure of Jesus in the famous historian Ranke, as he presents him as the simple but most outstanding human being who ever walked the earth, when one reads all the lovingly described in Ranke's profane history, one can hardly tell the difference between this and what the materialistic theologians of the 19th century had to say about Jesus. Theology is becoming materialistic. Precisely for enlightened theology, the Christ disappears from the view of humanity. The “simple man from Nazareth” is gradually becoming that which only those who undertake to describe the essence of Christianity want to point to. And Adolf Harnack's description of the essence of Christianity has become famous.

In this book, “The Essence of Christianity” by Adolf Harnack, there are two passages that could be truly devastating for anyone who has a sense for the real essence of Christianity. The first is that this theologian, who wants to be a Christian, says that the Christ does not actually belong in the Gospels, that the Son does not belong in the Gospels; only the Father belongs in the Gospels. And so Christ Jesus, who walked the earth in Palestine at the beginning of our era, becomes simply the human proclaimer of the Father's teaching. The Father alone belongs in the Gospels, says Adolf Harnack, and yet he believes himself to be a Christian theologian! One must say: the essence of Christianity has completely disappeared from this “Essence of Christianity”, I mean that which Adolf Harnack describes, and actually such a view should no longer call itself Christian.

The other thing that can have a devastating effect in this writing “The Essence of Christianity” occurred to me once when I was present at a lecture given in a society called the Giordano Bruno Society. In connection with the remarks of a speaker there, I had to say how the most important part of the essence of Christianity has disappeared from modern theology. I had to point to Harnack's remark in this book “The Essence of Christianity,” where he says: Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, the idea of resurrection, the Easter faith, emerged from this event; and it is this faith that we want to hold on to. — So the resurrection itself has become unimportant to modern Christian theologians. They do not want to concern themselves with this resurrection as a fact. Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, people have begun to believe that the resurrection occurred there, and it is not the resurrection that we want to hold on to, but this belief.

I pointed out at the time that the essence of Christianity had been expressed by Paul, who said, based on his experiences outside Damascus: And if the Christ had not been resurrected, we would all be lost. Not the man Jesus is the essential thing in Christianity, but the supersensible entity, which through the baptism of John in the Jordan entered into the man Jesus, which arose from the tomb at Gethsemane, and which became visible to those who had the capacity for such visibility. Paul, as the latest of them, saw it, and Paul refers to the risen Christ. I therefore had to point out at the time how the remark of one of the most famous modern so-called Christian theologians fails to see the very essence of Christianity, its supersensible nature. The chairman of the society replied to me in a most peculiar way at the time. He said that such a thing could not be contained in Harnack's book, for Harnack was a Protestant theologian, and if Harnack asserted such a thing, it would be on a par with an assertion that could only come from the Catholic side, for example, about the Holy Robe of Trier. For the Catholic, it is not important whether it can be proven that this holy robe in Trier really comes from Jerusalem, but rather that faith is attached to this holy robe. The chairman of this society was so embarrassed that he did not even admit that this remark was in Harnack's book. I told him that since I did not have the book at hand, I would write him the page number on a postcard the next day. This is also characteristic of the modern thoroughness with which books are read that have an importance in the first place. You read a book and believe that it makes a significant impression on life, and you do not even notice one of the most important remarks, but you think it is impossible that it could be in it. It is in it! All this proves to us how the supersensible Christ has been thrown out of the evolution of humanity by a theology that is becoming ever more materialistic, how people have clung only to the outward physical appearance of the man Jesus.

Now, the festive customs and dedications of the simple minds that resorted to Christmas plays were beautiful; they arose from sacred feelings. Even if people could no longer provide each other with more information about the full meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, they also had it in their hearts where they outwardly adhered to the material appearance of the child Jesus. And in this form, the celebration of the birth of Christ is beautiful and heartfelt.

The thought that destroys the Christ in the man Jesus is not beautiful and, from the highest point of view, it is not true, even from the Christian world view. It is as if the wisdom-filled guidance of humanity had first taken into account what had to happen in order for the materialistic view and thus the development of humanity to freedom to begin and continue. Just as materialism had to come in order to liberate humanity, so the Feast of the Epiphany, which can only be understood through supersensible vision and falls on January 6, had to be moved back to the Feast of the Nativity, December 25.

The twelve holy nights lie in between. In a sense, humanity made its way back through the entire zodiac by going through a twelvefold number, at least in the symbol, when this festival was moved.

Today, by summarizing everything that is connected with the Christ through the man Jesus, we can certainly unfold all the intimacy and depth of feeling for Christmas. And in my Christmas meditation yesterday, I wanted to express in words what is beneficial in this respect for the present time. But we must, after materialism has celebrated its highest triumphs in theology, after Christ Jesus has become, precisely for enlightened theology, only the simple man Jesus, again find our way back to the intuition of the supersensible, extraterrestrial Christ-being.

If you come with this point of view, then you will make enemies of precisely the materialistic theology of today. Just as the sun materially sends down its light from extraterrestrial cosmic expanses, so the spiritual sun of Christ descended to men and united with Jesus of Nazareth. Just as one can see the revelation of the soul and spirit in the outer physiognomy of man, in his facial features and in his gestures, so one can see the outer physiognomy in that which takes place in the cosmos, in the gestures that are into the cosmos through the course of the stars, in that which, as the inner warmth of the soul of the universe, manifests itself externally through the radiation of the sun, in that one can see the outer physiognomy of what permeates the whole world spiritually and soulfully. And in the concentrated spiritual descent of Christ upon the earth, one can see the inward aspect as the outward physiognomy of the concentrated rays of the sun streaming down upon the earth. And one will understand in the right way when it is said: The solar nature of Christ descended upon the earth.

We must come back to this supersensible understanding of Christ. We must learn to direct our thoughts back to the other birth, which took place as an extra-terrestrial birth through the baptism of St. John in the Jordan, despite the heartfelt devotion we wish to preserve for the birthday of Jesus, for which Christmas alone has become. We also want to learn to understand what takes place in the Jordan baptism of John in a meaningful historical symbol before our soul, as well as what happened in the stable of Bethlehem or in Nazareth. We want to learn to understand the words as they are communicated in the Gospel of Luke in the right way: This is my son, today he was born to me. — We want to learn to understand the Christmas mystery in such a way that it becomes for us again the source of understanding for the appearance of Christ on earth. We want to learn to understand the birth of the spirit in addition to the memory of our physical birth.

Such an understanding can only gradually arise from a general spiritual comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. We must gradually struggle towards a spiritual conception of the mystery of Golgotha. To do this, however, we need insight into the origin of such impulses within the earthly development of humanity, as there was in the 4th century AD, when the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ was moved from January 6 to the day of Jesus' birthday on December 25 out of the innermost need of developing humanity. One must learn to see how the wise guidance of human history works there. One must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Then one will recognize the wise guidance in human history without superstition, and without bringing one's own fantasies into it. One must learn not only to immerse oneself in history with abstract ideas and to look at cause and effect, but one must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Only then will we understand what makes our time a truly transitional time, a time in which a spiritual world view must again be wrested from the materialistic view, and a natural elevation to the supersensible must again be wrested. And an expression for this elevation to the supersensible will be a new understanding of the appearance of Christ on earth, the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus for the modern man who is really able to delve into the spirit of the time, Christmas has a twofold significance: it is that which has been approaching through recent history since the 4th century AD, that which has produced such wonderful has produced such wonderful beauties precisely in the simple, unadorned folk tradition, and that which still arouses our heartfelt delight today when we see it again in the renewal of folk plays such as we are attempting through our anthroposophical science. It is all that human warmth and affection has poured into life through the centuries during which the idea of Christianity has taken on more and more materialistic forms, until in the 19th century it has come so far that it must turn around through its own absurdity and return to the spiritual. This gives us, as people of today, the second thing about Christmas: in addition to the feeling that we have for the traditional Christmas that has been handed down since the 4th century AD, for this heartfelt feeling that we want to feel with, a new Christmas should be born from our contemporary understanding, a second Christmas to the old Christmas.

The Christ shall be reborn anew through humanity. Christmas is traditionally a celebration of the birth of Jesus; in spirit it shall become a celebration of the birth of a new conception of Christ, not new in relation to the first centuries, but new in relation to the centuries since the 4th century AD. And so Christmas itself should not be just a celebration of the memory of the birth, but, as it is experienced from year to year in the near future, it should become a direct, contemporary birthday celebration, the celebration of a present-day event. This birth of the new Christ-idea must come to pass. And Christmas must become so intense that every year at this very time man will be able to reflect anew and with special intensity on the fact that a new Christ-idea must be born.

Christmas must become a festival not of remembrance but of the present, a consecration of that which the human being experiences as a birth in his immediate present. Then it will truly enter into our more recent historical becoming, then it will strengthen itself more and more in this historical becoming of humanity, also into the future, which will have such need of it. Then it will become a consecration of the world.

I think that on a day marking the turn of the year, it is appropriate to speak about a turning point in the developmental history of humanity. Today, I will speak about the transformation of human knowledge in general in the time between the oldest period that humanity can look back on historically and our time. In the most ancient times, people were well aware that knowledge of the actual deeper essence of man can only be attained when hidden powers of knowledge in man are brought to the surface. People have always spoken of the fact that outer experience of the world can only bring the outer aspects of the human being to realization. Within the special processes of the mysteries, those people who sought such were offered the opportunity to attain such higher knowledge about the actual human being through powers otherwise hidden in the depths of the human being. It was perfectly clear, especially in those times when a certain instinctive primeval wisdom prevailed, that man's true nature is different from that which can be found within the sphere experienced by man in ordinary everyday life. Therefore, one has always spoken of an initiation or an initiation through which the deeper secrets of life, with which the human being is connected, can only become accessible to man.

Today, too, anthroposophical spiritual science shows that one must speak of such an initiation or initiation. But one can say: Today's human consciousness, which has been formed under very specific, strongly egoistic conditions, resists the fact that real human and world knowledge can only be found through such special preparations and developments within the human soul. Modern man wants to decide the highest questions of existence without applying such developmental principles, through what is given to him in ordinary life. And when he gets the feeling that he cannot decide such highest questions of existence with the ordinary powers of knowledge, then he asserts that human cognitive ability is limited in general, and that it would be absurd to go beyond the ordinary human limits of knowledge. There is also the prejudice against the principle of initiation or initiation that one says: Does what is to be said from the science of initiation have any value for those who cannot yet achieve such initiation in their present incarnation? How can such people be convinced of the truth of what comes from a specially prepared knowledge?

But this is not the case. And this last objection is as unjustified as possible. For how does that which approaches man through the science of initiation or initiation actually behave?

Imagine that the human being first goes into a dark room. He distinguishes, walking around, the objects by their forms through his feeling. Now suppose that this room is suddenly illuminated by a lamp, which is placed somewhere so that it is not noticeable in the room itself. All objects will appear different to the ordinary faculties of the person who has previously walked around in the dark room, touching everything, and thus gaining an insight into the forms of the objects in the dark room. All objects are now, under the influence of the light, without anything having been added, without anything now being inaccessible to the person standing in the illuminated room, different, will reveal their essence and at the same time the essence of light. When the science of initiation approaches man, he needs nothing more than to accept in a critical spirit what this science gives, and to consider it in such a way that he allows the science to throw light on what he knows, on the world that is accessible to him. This initiatory science does not want to bring anything other than what this world already is. But just as one cannot recognize what is in a dark room in the darkness, but can immediately recognize it in the light, so what is spread around man for the ordinary consciousness cannot reveal its own nature if it is not illuminated by what comes from the science of initiation. Man himself stands before man in the ordinary world. Man carries an immortal soul within him, just as the picture hanging on the wall in the dark room perhaps represents something that cannot be seen in the dark room. If the room is illuminated, it can be seen immediately. The initiate does not add the immortal soul to the human being; when the human being is illuminated by the science of initiation, it becomes visible to everyone. And only a prejudiced science can deny that the world in which man is continually in the earth-consciousness between birth and death, that this world itself, which can be reached by the ordinary healthy human understanding, verifies everything that the science of initiation says.

But the Science of Initiation itself has undergone a transformation. It was different in the early days of humanity, and now it appears before man in a transformed form. Between these two periods, however, there is a world development for man that begins around the 15th century, which is now coming to an end, and which, in relation to the spiritual light that the science of initiation seeks to be, was dark, was gloomy, but whose darkness is also deeply rooted in the nature of the whole evolution of the earth and of mankind. When we look back into ancient times, of which traditions still survived into the post-Christian era, but which also faded away in the 15th century, having become incomprehensible in this period, when we look back back into ancient times, we find that when man looked out into the world with his instinctive powers of knowledge, he saw not only what can be seen today by man with his senses and with his mind. Man saw spiritual things everywhere in the things of sense, and not abstract spiritual things, he saw concrete spiritual things, he saw real spiritual beings. Even in ancient Greece, man saw such concrete spiritual entities. And one can follow it right up to the transformation of sensory perception itself, how it was that man could see such spiritual entities. Today one thinks that the tapestry of the senses that spreads out before us has always been as it is today. But external science can show man that this is not the case.

The Greeks, for example, did not see the blue sky as blue as we see it today. They had no concept of the blueness of the sky. For them, it was shaded. Instead, they saw the so-called bright colors even more vividly, even more brightly, than we see them. This can already be gathered from literature. But for a sensory perception, for which it is so, the spiritual is spread out directly over the sensory carpet itself. First, I would like to say, the blue coloration of the world, the blue tinge, makes the outer spiritual recede. And at the same time that the instinctive consciousness of people outside perceived something elementary everywhere, man also perceived something elementary in his inner soul.

Today we speak of conscience, which tells us this or that. The Greeks spoke of the Furies. It was only in a particularly blatant case that the Greeks became aware that something like spiritual elemental powers approached them as something objective. But in ancient times, everything that we today assume simply comes from the human being was felt to be caused by an alien spiritual power approaching man. What is quite normal in one period of human development may not occur in the same way in another period. If a person today became aware of the moral voice in the same way as it was in the older days of Greek development, in the time when Aeschylus was still writing poetry, it would mean a mental illness today, and one would say, perhaps with an expression that is no longer felt to be quite right today: This person is possessed by an alien power. In ancient Greece, this kind of possession was quite normal. Today, we must feel that what was then perceived as coming from an alien power comes from within ourselves, from our conscience.

When the person who, from his instinctive consciousness, had the intuition that spiritual-elemental beings were at work in the outer world, and who also had the intuition that spiritual-elemental beings were at work within him, was accepted as a disciple in the mysteries, then these elemental spiritual beings were, as it were, illuminated by higher spiritual beings through a new insight. With instinctive awareness, one perceived nature spirits and certain demonic powers at work in human nature. Through initiation, one descended deeper into nature, one descended deeper into one's own human being. And the particularly significant, the highly important thing about someone who underwent the first stage of initiation in ancient times was that it was precisely through initiation that he ceased to perceive the elemental spirits within external nature and the demonic within his own being. We can say that what is ordinary for us today, what we carry around with us as our natural view of the outer and inner world, was something that the ancient mystery school student first had to acquire. This is how humanity advances: certain things that are natural later had to be acquired in earlier times through the science of initiation. And then, when through initiation man had come to an outlook on nature and man, which at that time was only there for the mystery school student, then in his own way he penetrated to the spiritual beings that direct both the inner being of man and the nature of outer nature. That is why the older principle of initiation was expressed in such a way that one said: one ascended from the ordinary view of life to the elements of earth, water, fire, air. In the ordinary view, one actually had elemental-air-spiritual, elemental-fire-spiritual, elemental-water-spiritual, elemental-earth-spiritual. Earth, water, fire and air were only perceived in their pure form through the first step of the science of initiation.

What is essential now is that in the progress of humanity, what we can call the soulless nature today, what we can call, if I may use the expression, the human being who is transparent to introspection, has taken the place of this vision of spiritual-soul elemental beings in the external world and also within the human being. When we look within today, we see only reminiscences of the outer world in the form of memory images. Everything else remains as invisible to man as a completely transparent body remains invisible. When the ancient man looked within, it was not so spiritually transparent to him. He saw spiritual and soul entities within himself.

If it had remained so, man would never have been able to gain full consciousness of freedom. For it is only since the old instinctive view of the spirit began to recede that full consciousness of freedom has begun to penetrate the sum of human spiritual and soul forces. Necessity rules in the world of the spirits. There is the activity of the spiritual beings, and that which arises from the activity of these spiritual beings determines the course of events. When one is in this world of spiritual beings, one's soul is interwoven in a realm of necessity. One only has the longing to explore the intentions and thoughts of the spiritual beings in whose realm one is interwoven, and to carry out that which is in line with the intentions and impulses of these spiritual beings. One has no intention of realizing one's own impulses. There is no cause for freedom at all. Only when one encounters inanimate nature, when one does not find the traces of spiritual entities in nature, then one comes to a realization about the outside world that no longer contains any reality, that only contains thought images. And thought images is everything that has been handed down to us since the 15th century by newer knowledge.

And just as mirror images have no compelling power over us, just as, for example, the mirror image of a person standing behind me, whom I then do not see, cannot get me into a fight, so too can thoughts show no real activity, no real forces. The thoughts that we carry within us – and humanity has only just begun to grasp such pure image-thoughts, which are reality-free, in the course of its development, and only from the 15th century onwards – these thought-images cannot therefore exert any compulsion or determination on a person. Even though they permeate human knowledge, people are not obliged to act in accordance with them. Just as a mirror image cannot offend me, so a thought cannot determine me. But just as I can determine myself through the sight of a mirror image, so too can pure mental images determine me. Therefore, thinking, which only since the 15th century has become a good of humanity, is the basis for the human experience of freedom. This is what I wanted to discuss in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in the early 1990s: that thinking is the basis of freedom. And spiritual science shows the position of this pure thinking in the overall development, in the overall being of the human being, how this pure thinking has entered into the historical becoming of humanity. This impulse of freedom entered humanity for the first time in the mid-15th century. It is here now. It had to be won through the contemplation of a soulless nature, of a human inwardness that is free of spirit. It had to be won at a time when the supersensible worlds were spoken of only in the traditional religious creeds and in the traditional philosophical world views, which no longer offered anything that could be directly experienced. If man had remained longer in this view of dead nature, of the spirit-free human self, he would have had to lose his connection with his own origin.

The time has been fulfilled and the days must come when people will again turn their attention to their spiritual and soul origin, that is to say that they will again become aware that in the world in which they find themselves there is not only soulless nature, and that man not only participates in soulless nature, but that man lives in a world that is filled with concrete spiritual beings. With the attained consciousness of freedom, man can again immerse himself in the world of necessity. For he will then be precisely the being within this world that is called to freedom, having once gone through the state in his physical embodiments in which he was left to himself with his physical body. But we can go back to exploring the divine origin of the voice of conscience after we have learned the sense of responsibility under the influence of the consciousness of freedom through that time when conscience appeared to man only as an inner voice, that is, in the image. The development of humanity was not intended, as many a haughty modern mind believes, for people to remain in a state of childlike comprehension of the external world for the longest time, and now they have finally come so far that all the knowledge that exists, even with its limitations, must remain as it is. No, it is not like that. The person who looks into the development of mankind with an unbiased mind finds that this development of mankind has progressed from stage to stage, that the kind of knowledge we have at present also represents a stage, and that in the future, man will face nature differently than he does today.

Just as we look back today to Thales, and if we are arrogant, say: Thales childishly sought the origin of everything in water; we know better today - and some people believe, precisely in this arrogance, that we know today from our results in the chemical laboratory, as one always must— if one stands on this haughty point of view, then one could actually be aware that one day people in future centuries, if they have the same attitudes, would look back on us and say: What childish ideas did these people of the 20th century still have from their laboratories, from their physics cabinets! But it is not so. These ideas, which seem so childish to today's arrogant man, and which he believes he has at most to take into account historically, represent important developmental impulses that humanity had to go through just as it had to go through the developmental impulse of today. And just as humanity has progressed beyond Thales, it will progress beyond Lavoisier, it will progress beyond Newton, it will progress beyond what is regarded as authoritative today, even beyond Einstein. The world must be thought of as a flowing entity in its spiritual and soul aspects as well, and the human being must be thought of as existing within this living river.

But it remains the case that in the outer world we do not find that which leads man to his own origin, but that at all times the awakening of hidden forces in man is necessary in order to find the way to the world of man's origin. If we simply look out into the external world with our ordinary consciousness and faculties, we do not automatically find elemental beings, and by looking into our own inner being, we do not automatically find demonic beings. Outside we find the laws of nature, and within we find something like conscience and the like. But if we really develop that which we can develop in our ability to comprehend and think in relation to the outside world, if we bring our thinking power to the point where it seems alive, as otherwise only sensory perceptions seem alive, then we find the possibility of perceiving spiritual essence in external nature again.

What was present in a kind of ancient, instinctive consciousness, which we can no longer use, becomes visible to us again, supersensibly visible, as we condense our thinking. With our thinking, which has become thin and pictorial, we no longer penetrate to the spirit of nature. But when we concentrate our thinking, when we make it strong, as the senses are otherwise, then we penetrate through the outer sensory carpet to what underlies the outer world as spirituality, and we go beyond the limits of knowledge rightly assumed for ordinary consciousness. And we must carry self-education so far that we learn, as it were, to look at ourselves in our will impulses as we look at another person. And if we not only learn to look at ourselves, but if we can shape will impulses out of consciousness in the way that these will impulses are otherwise only passively shaped in life, if we, in other words, not only out of an inner necessity, but out of insight into the world, which condenses into love , to love for this or that impulse, which is not only given to us by our freedom, but by the world order, the wisdom-filled world order, when we make ourselves the executors of the impulses necessary in the world for the orientation of the world. We attain a loving devotion to purely spiritual impulses. And when this has received the necessary training, then we also find the spiritual within, then we find harmony between the spiritual in outer nature and the spiritual within. For wherever the search for the spirit has been pursued far enough, the same results have been found. When the initiates of the ancient mysteries sought outwards and, as they said, found the upper gods, they then turned their gaze back into the human interior and there they found, as they said, the lower gods. But finally they arrived at a stage of development where the world of the upper gods and the world of the lower gods were one, where the above became the below and the below became the above, where it no longer mattered to them, since they only came from the spatial.

This is also the case for the newer initiation, for the newer initiation. We penetrate into the spiritual and soul life of nature. It is not a world of atoms with their pushing that reveals itself to us, but the spiritual powers of spiritual beings behind sense perception reveal themselves to us, and with introspection, beyond the limits of memory, the spiritual and soul beings within the human being reveal themselves to us. But the two worlds, the outer world of spirituality and the inner world of spirituality, ultimately flow into one another. We can already look pictorially at this one spiritual world. Take a person with his ordinary consciousness. He looks out into the outer nature. He perceives color, light, and directs the other senses out into the outer nature. He perceives sounds, differences in warmth, and other sensory qualities in external nature. He then looks at his own body. He perceives his own body in its sensory qualities. He looks at nature; it reveals itself to him in sensory qualities. He looks at his own body; it reveals itself in sense qualities. If the human being begins to set his will in motion, he walks through the world, then he becomes aware that this willpower influences the movements of his eye, that the same thing that guides the movements of his legs already flows into the being of his eye for sense perception. When a person immerses himself deeply enough in the sensory world, he becomes aware of the same thing that he relates to the external world through the expressions of his will. The world of the senses already flows together into a unified world for him. This unified confluence of the sensory world is superficial, but it is nevertheless a reflection of the confluence of the world of external spirituality and internal spirituality. By discovering these two worlds, which are one world, man becomes aware again of his spiritual and soul origin. And so today we stand as if at the end of an old era, which shows us for earlier epochs a looking into spiritual worlds by humanity, a looking in which man looks outwards into nature, a looking in when man looks within himself. Then came a period of time when it became dark, when the greatest triumphs were celebrated in the realm of darkness without the science of initiation.

But the world year is complete, the world's New Year has arrived. A new world year must begin. We could say that at Christmas, we would also like to feel such a symbolic festival, as it approaches us at this moment, in the same way, we would like to feel symbolized by such a festival, the turn of an era, which we must already feel today as a world turning point. Times have become serious, so serious that today we must look up from the narrowly limited events within the horizon, which today the majority of humanity would like to recognize as the only legitimate one, to the world at large, and also to the world of human soul and spiritual experience. But there we experience a world turning point. When we become aware of this world turning point, we realize that a world new year of the spirit must begin for humanity. If we learn to recognize such a turning point, then we alone can experience true humanity in our present epoch. For true humanity is only felt when the human being, who goes through repeated lives on earth, finds the possibility in each individual life on earth not only to feel generally as a human being, but as a human being with specific tasks in the specific period of time in which one of his lives on earth falls.

A person can only live with eternity if they find the possibility to live in the right way in time. For the eternal should not only reveal itself to a person in time, but through time a person should be able to experience the eternal. The eternal reigns in timeless duration, and also reigns in timeless duration through the human being. But its pulsation is the events of the individual epochs, as they strike into human experience. Only by experiencing these pulsations and uniting them into a comprehensive rhythm do we experience the eternal through time. Duration belongs to our true human nature. We can only experience duration if we lovingly and with strength allow the individual pulsations of the eternal world-being to become our own experience.

This is what I wanted to place on your hearts, on your souls today at the turn of the year. May the coming time bring us all the opportunity to apply in this sense, in the smallest and, if we are granted it, also in the larger, those impulses in our thinking, feeling and willing, of which we can become capable in our inner being.

For some time we have been occupied with gaining a more accurate knowledge of Man's relation to the universe, and today we would like to supplement our past studies. If we consider how Man lives in the present period of his evolution—taking this period so widely that it encompasses not only what is historical but also in part the pre-historical—we must conclude that speech is a preeminent characteristic at this moment of the cosmic evolution of mankind. It is speech that elevates Man above the other kingdoms of nature.

In the lectures last week, I mentioned that in the course of mankind's evolution, language, speech as a whole, has also undergone a development. I alluded to how, in very ancient times, speech was something that Man formed out of himself as his most primal ability; how, with the help of his organs of speech he was able to manifest the divine spiritual forces living within him. I also referred to how, in the transition from the Greek culture to the Roman-Latin culture, that is to say in the fourth Post-Atlantean period, the single sounds in language lose their names and, as in contemporary usage, merely have value as sounds. In Greek culture we still have a name for the first letter of the alphabet but in Latin it is just ‘A’. In passing from the Greek to the Latin culture something living in speech, something eminently concrete changes into abstraction. It might be said: as long as Man called the first letter of the alphabet ‘Alpha’, he experienced a certain amount of inspiration in it, but the moment he called it just ‘A’, the letters conformed to outer convention, to the prosaic aspects of life, replacing inspiration and inner experience. This constituted the actual transition from everything belonging to Greece to what is Roman-Latin—men of culture became estranged from the spiritual world of poetry and entered into the prose of life.

The people of Rome were a sober, prosaic race, a race of jurists, who brought prose and jurisprudence into the culture of later years. What lived in the people of Greece developed within mankind more or less like a cultural dream which men approach through their own revelations when they have inner experiences and wish to give expression to them. It might be said that all poetry has in it something which makes it appear to Europeans as a daughter of Greece, whereas all jurisprudence, all outer compartmentalization, all the prose of life, suggest descent from the Roman-Latin people.

I have previously called your attention to how a real understanding of the Alpha—Aleph in Hebrew—leads us to recognize in it the desire to express Man in a symbol. If one seeks the nearest modern words to convey the meaning of Alpha, these would be: ‘The one who experiences his own breathing’. In this name we have a direct reference to the Old Testament words: ‘And God formed Man ... and breathed into nostrils the breath of life’. What at that time was done with the breath, to make Man a Man of Earth, the being who had his Manhood imprinted on him by becoming the experiencer, the feeler of his own breathing, by receiving into himself consciousness of his breathing, is meant to be expressed in the first letter of the alphabet.

And the name ‘Beta’ considered with an open mind, turning here to the Hebrew equivalent, represents something of the nature of a wrapping, a covering, a house. Thus, if we were to put our experience on uttering ‘Alpha, Beta,’ into modern language we could say: ‘Man in his house’. And we could go through the whole alphabet in this way, giving expression to a concept, a meaning, a truth about Man simply by saying the names of the letters of the alphabet one after another. A comprehensive sentence would be uttered giving expression to the Mystery of Man. This sentence would begin by our being shown Man in his building, in his temple. The following parts of the sentence would go on to express how Man conducts himself in his temple and how he relates to the cosmos. In short, what would be expressed by speaking the names of the alphabet consecutively, would not be the abstraction we have today when we say A, B, C, without any accompanying thoughts, but it would be the expression of the Mystery of Man and of how his roots are in the universe.

When today, in various societies ‘the lost archetypal word’ is talked about, there is no recognition that it is actually contained in the sentence that comprises the names of the alphabet. Thus we can look back on a time in the evolution of humanity when Man, in repeating his alphabet, did not express what was related to external events, external needs, but what the divine spiritual mystery of his being brought to expression through his larynx and his speech organs.

It might be said that what belongs to the alphabet was applied later to external objects, and forgotten was all that can be revealed to Man through his speech about the mystery of his soul and spirit. Man's original word of truth, his word of wisdom, was lost. Speech was poured out over the matter-of-factness of life. In speaking today, Man is no longer conscious that the original primordial sentence has been forgotten; the sentence through which the divine revealed its own being to him. He is no longer aware that the single words, the single sentences uttered today, represent the mere shreds of that primordial sentence.

The poet, by avoiding the prose element in speech, and going back to the inner experience, the inner feeling, the inner formation of speech, attempts to return to its inspired archetypal element. One could perhaps say that every true poem, the humblest as well as the greatest, is an attempt to return to the word that has been lost, to retrace the steps from a life arranged in accordance with utility to times when cosmic being still revealed itself in the inner organism of speech.

Today we distinguish the consonant from the vowel element in speech. I have spoken of how it would appear to Man if he were to dive beneath the threshold of his consciousness. In ordinary consciousness memories are reflected upwards or, in other words, thoughts are reflections of what is experienced between birth and death. Normally we do not penetrate Man's actual being beyond this recollection, this thought left behind in memory. From another point of view I have indicated how, beneath the threshold of consciousness, there lives what may be called a universal tragedy of mankind. This can also be described in the following way: When Man wakes up in the morning and his ego and astral body dive down into his etheric body and his physical body, he does not perceive these bodies from within outwards, what he perceives is something quite different. We can get an idea of this by means of a diagram.

Let us say that here we have the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious, red representing the conscious, blue the unconscious. If a person sees something belonging to the outer world or to himself, for instance, if with his own eye he sees another Man's eye, then the visible rays which go out of his eye into the other Man are thrown back, and he experiences it in his consciousness. What he also bears of his own being beneath the threshold of consciousness he experiences in his astral body and his ego, but not in the ordinary waking state. It remains unconscious and essentially forms the actual content of the etheric and the physical bodies. The etheric body is never recognized at all by ordinary consciousness; it recognizes only the external aspect of the physical body. As I have mentioned in the past, we must plunge beneath memory to perceive the primal source of evil in human beings, but then something else can also be perceived, namely, an aspect of Man's connection with the cosmos.

We may, through appropriate meditation, succeed in penetrating the memory representations, as it were, to put aside what separates us inwardly from our etheric and physical bodies; if we then look down into the etheric body and the physical body so that we perceive what normally lies beneath the threshold of consciousness, we will hear something sounding within these bodies. And what sounds is the echo of the music of the spheres, which Man absorbed between death and new birth, during his descent out of the divine spiritual world into what is given to him through physical inheritance by parents and ancestors. In the etheric body and in the physical body there echoes the music of the spheres. In so far as it is of a vowel nature it echoes in the etheric body, and in the physical body in so far as it is of a consonant nature.

It is indeed true that Man, as he goes forward in the life between death and a new birth, raises himself to the world of the higher hierarchies. We have learned how Man in the world of the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai, joins in with their life and lives within the realm of the hierarchies, as here we live among the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. After this life between death and a new birth he descends once more to earthly life. And we have also learned how on his way down he first gathers to him the influences of the firmament of the fixed stars, represented in the signs of the Zodiac; then, as he descends further, he takes with him the influence of the moving planets.

Now just picture to yourselves the Zodiac, the representation of the fixed stars. Man is exposed to their influence on descending from the life of soul and spirit into earthly life. If their effects are to be designated in accordance with their actual being we must say that they are cosmic music, they are consonants. And the forming of consonants in the physical body is the echo of what resounds from the single formations of the Zodiac, whereas the formation of vowels within the music of the spheres occurs through the movements of the planets in the cosmos. This is imprinted into the etheric body. Thus, in our physical body we unconsciously bear a reflection of the cosmic consonants, whereas in our etheric body we bear a reflection of the cosmic vowels. This remains, one might say, in the silence of the subconscious. But as the child develops, forces press upwards within the body and strengthen the speech organs; these are forces that, as reflections of the formative forces of the cosmos, build up the speech organs. The more interior speech organs are so formed out of Man's essential being that they can produce vowels, and the organs nearer to the periphery, the palate, the tongue, the lips and everything that contributes to the form of the physical body, are built up in such a way that consonants can be produced. While the child is learning to speak, something takes place in the upper part of his being, as a result of the activity of his lower part, which is a consequence of the formative forces taken up into the physical body, and also into the etheric body. (This is naturally not a material process but has to do with formative activity.) Thus when we speak, we bring to Manifestation what we might call an echo of the experience Man goes through with the cosmos in the life between death and a new birth during his descent out of the divine spiritual world. All the single letters of the alphabet are actually formed as images of what lives in the cosmos.

We can get an approximate idea of the signs of the Zodiac if we relate them to modern speech by setting up B, C, D, F, and so forth, as constellations of the Zodiac. You can follow them by feeling the revolution of the planets in H (ed.: ‘H’ like in him, her)—H is not actually a letter like the others, H imitates the rotational movement, the circling around. And the single planets in their revolutions are always the individual vowels which are placed in various ways in front of the consonants. If you imagine the vowel A to be placed in here (see diagram) you have the A in harmony with B and C, but in each vowel there is the H. You can trace it in speaking—AH, IH, EH. H is in each vowel. What does it signify that H is in each vowel? It signifies that the vowel is revolving in the cosmos. The vowel is not at rest, it circles around in the cosmos. And the circling, the moving, is expressed in the H hidden in each of the vowels. Consider, therefore, a vowel harmony expressed somewhere in speech: let us say I, O, U, A. (ed.: IH, OH, UH, AH in German) What is expressed by this? Something is expressed that is the cosmic working of four planets. Let us add one of the consonants to something like this—IOSUA—let us add this S in the middle of it, and this would mean that not only the forming of vowels within the planetary spheres is expressed, but also the effect that the planets connected with I, O, U, A, experience in their movement through the connection with the star sign S. Thus if a Man in the days of ancient civilization uttered the name of a God in vowels, a planetary mystery was expressed. The deed of a divine being within the planetary world was expressed in the name. Were a divine name expressed with a consonant in it, the deed of the divine being concerned reached in thought to the representative of the fixed star firmament—the Zodiac.

When there was still an instinctive understanding of these things, in the time of atavistic clairvoyance, clairaudience, and so on, a connection with the cosmos was experienced in human speech. When speaking, Man felt himself within the cosmos. When the child learned to speak it was felt how what was experienced in the divine spiritual world before birth, or before conception, gradually evolved out of the being of the child.

It may be said that if a Man could look through himself inwardly he would have to admit: I am an etheric body, in other words, I am the echo of cosmic vowels; I am a physical body, in other words, the echo of cosmic consonants. Because I stand here on the earth, there sounds through my being an echo of all that is said by the signs of the Zodiac; and the life of this echo is my physical body. An echo is formed of all that is said by the planetary spheres and this echo is my etheric body.

1. Physical body = Echo of the Zodiac
2. Etheric body = Echo of the planetary movements
3. Astral body = Experience of the planetary movements
4. Ego = perception of the echo of the Zodiac

Nothing is said, my dear friends, by repeating that Man consists of physical body and etheric body. Those are no more than vague, indefinite words. If we want to speak in a real language, which can be learned from the mysteries of the cosmos, we would have to say: Man is constituted out of the echo of the heavens, of the fixed stars, of the echo of the planetary movements, of what is experienced of the echo of the planetary movements, and of what knowingly experiences the echo of the fixed star heavens. Then we would have expressed in real cosmic speech what is abstractly expressed by the words: Man is made up of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We remain entirely in the abstract by saying: Man is composed first of physical body, secondly of etheric body, thirdly of astral body, fourthly of ego. But we pass into concrete cosmic speech if we say: Man consists of the echo of the Zodiac, of the echo of the planetary movements, of the experience of the impression of the planetary movements in thinking, feeling and willing, and in the perception of the echo of the Zodiac. The first is abstraction, the second reality.

When you say ‘I’, what is that exactly? Now just imagine someone had planted trees in a beautifully artistic order. Each individual tree can be seen. However at a distance all the trees resolve into a single point. Take all the individual things—all that resounds from the Zodiac in the way of world consonants, then go far enough away: Everything that is formed as inward sound, in the most manifold way, is compressed within you to the single point ‘I’.

It is an actual fact that this name which Man gives himself is really only an expression for what we perceive in the measureless spaces of the universe. Everywhere it is necessary to go back to what, as reflection, as echo, appears here upon earth. Thus, when the matter is seen in its reality, before Man's higher and inward experience, everything out of which Man builds himself up as a phenomenon, as pure experience, melts away. If we look upon Man and gradually learn to know his true nature, then his physical body actually ceases to be in the way it normally confronts us and otherwise stands before us, our vision widens and Man grows into the heavens of the fixed stars. The etheric body, too, ceases to be before us. Vision is extended, experience is extended, and we arrive at a perception of planetary life, for this human etheric body is a mere reflection of planetary life.

Man standing before you is nothing but the phenomenon, the appearance, the image, of what goes on in the life of the planets. We think we have an individual human being in front of us, but this individual is a picture, on a certain spot, of the whole world. What then is the reason for the difference between an Asiatic and an American? The reason is that the starry heavens are portrayed at two different earthly points, just as we have various pictures of one and the same external fact. It is indeed true that when we observe Man the world begins to dawn upon us, and by such observation we are faced by the great mystery of the extent to which Man is an actual pictured microcosm of the reality of the macrocosm.

Now of what does modern life consist? When we look back from these modern times upon mankind's life in primeval times, we still find an experience of Man's connection with the spiritual world in the instinctive consciousness of those ancient days. In the alphabet we can have a concrete experience of this. When, in primeval words, Man had to express the rich store of the divine in all its fullness, he uttered the letters of the alphabet. When he expressed the mystery of his own nature, in the way he learned about it in the Mysteries, then he voiced how he had descended through Saturn or Jupiter in their stellar relation to the Lion or the Virgin, in other words, how he had descended through the A or the I in their relation to the M or the L. He gave utterance to what he had then experienced of the music of the spheres, and that was his cosmic name. And in those ancient days men were instinctively aware that they brought a name down with them from the cosmos to the Earth.

Since then Christian consciousness still preserves this primeval consciousness in an abstract way by consecrating individual days to the memory of saints, who, rightly understood, should give new life to the spiritual cosmos. By being born on a particular day of the year we should receive the name of the saint whose day it is on the calendar. What is meant to be expressed here in a more abstract way, was more concretely expressed in primeval times, when in the Mysteries the cosmic name of a person was found in accordance with what he experienced as he descended to earth, when with his being he created vowels with the planets and added them to the consonants of the Zodiac. The various groups of the human race had many names then, but these names were conceived in such a way that they harmonized with the universal all-embracing name.

Considered from this point of view, what was the alphabet? It was what the heavens revealed through their fixed stars and through the planets moving across them. When the alphabet was spoken out of the original, instinctive, human wisdom it was astronomy that was expressed. What was spoken through the alphabet and what was taught in astronomy in those olden days was one and the same thing. The wisdom in the astronomy of those times was not presented in the same way as the learning contained in any branch of knowledge today, which is built up from single perceptions and concepts. It was conceived as a revelation that made itself felt on the surface of human experience, either in the form of an axiomatic truth or as part of an axiomatic truth. Thus a concrete experience was represented with a part of the primal wisdom. And there was something of quite a dim consciousness connected with the fact that, in the Middle Ages, those who were highly educated still had to learn grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. In this ascent through the various spheres of learning lies a half conscious recognition of something, which in earlier days, existed in instinctive clarity. Today grammar has become very abstract. Going back into times of which history tells us nothing, but which, nevertheless, are still historical times, we find that grammar was not the abstract subject it is today but that men were led through grammar into the mystery of the individual letters. They learned that the secrets of the cosmos found expression in the letters. The single vowel was brought into connection with its planet, the single consonant with the single sign of the Zodiac; thus, through the letters of the alphabet, Man gained knowledge of the stars.

Passing from grammar to rhetoric entailed the application of what lived in Man as active astronomy. And by rising to dialectics one came in thought to comprehending and working on what lived in Man out of astronomy. Arithmetic was not taught as the abstraction of today, but as the entity expressed in the mystery of numbers. Number itself was looked upon differently from how it is done today. I will give you a trifling instance of this.

How does one picture 1, 2, 3 to oneself today? It is done by thinking of a pea, then of another pea, and this makes two; then another is added and there are three. It is a matter of adding one to another—piling them up. In olden days one did not count in this way. A start was made with a unit. And by splitting the unit into two parts one had 2. Thus 2 was not arrived at by adding one unit to another. It was not a putting together of units, but the two were contained in the one. Three was contained in the one in a different way—four again in a different way. The unit embraced all numbers and was the greatest. Today the unit is the smallest. Everything today is atomistically conceived. The unit is one member and the two is added to it, this is all imagined atomistically. The original idea was organic. There the unit is the greatest and the following numbers always appear as being smaller and are all contained in the unit. Here we come to quite different mysteries in the world of numbers.

These mysteries in the world of numbers give the merest intimation that here we are not concerned with what merely lives in the hollow of Man's head. (I say the hollow of his head because I have often shown it really to be hollow from the spiritual point of view.) In the relations of number we can come to perceive the relations of the objectivity of the world. If we always just add one to one naturally this is something that has nothing to do with the facts. I have a piece of chalk. If beside it I place a second piece of chalk this has nothing to do with the first. The one is not concerned with the other. If, however, I presuppose that everything is a unit and now pass to the numbers contained in this unit, I get a two in a way that is a matter of some consequence. I have to break up the piece. I then get right into reality.

Thus after being borne up in dialectics to grasping the thought of the astronomical, one reached still further into the cosmos with arithmetic and in a similar way with geometry. From geometry one got the feeling that the geometrical, thought concretely, was the music of the spheres. This is the difference between what holds good today and what once existed in the instinctive wisdom of primeval times. Take music today—the mathematical physicist reckons the pitch of a note, for example, reckons which pitch is at work in a melody. Then anyone who is musical is obliged to forget his music and enter the sphere of the abstract if, being a keen musician, he has not already run away from the mathematician. Man is led away from immediate experience into abstraction and this has very little to do with experience.

In itself it is really interesting—if one has a mathematical bent—to press on from the musical into the sphere of acoustics, but one does not gain much in the way of musical experience. That someone today learns geometry and as he proceeds begins to experience forms as musical notes, that is to say, if he rises from the 5th to the 6th grade, and makes geometry sound musically, all this, as far as I know, does not enter the curriculum. But that was once the meaning of rising to the sixth part of what was to be learned—from geometry to music. And only then did the archetypal, underlying reality become an experience. The astronomy in the subconscious then became something that one consciously mastered as astronomy, as the highest and 7th member of the so-called Trivium and Quadrivium.

The history of Man should be studied in accordance with the development of his consciousness for then we can gain a feeling that consciousness must return to these matters. That is just what is attempted in anthroposophical Spiritual Science. There is no need to marvel that those who are accustomed to accept the recognized science of the day find nothing right in what I have written, for example, in Occult Science. It is necessary, however, that Man should go back, in a fully conscious way, to the true reality which for a time had to recede into the background to enable Man to develop his freedom. Man would have been able ever more strongly to develop the consciousness of how necessary it is for him to stand within a divine cosmic world, had he not been cast out of this cosmos into the merely phenomenal, into pure appearance, so strongly indeed that the whole manifold splendor and majesty of the starry sky was condensed into the abstract ego.

This was a necessary step in the struggle for freedom. For Man could develop his freedom only by pressing together quite indistinguishably into the single point of the ego something that, filled out by the whole of cosmic space, streamed through all time. But he would lose his being, he would no longer know or possess himself, no longer be active and act on his own initiative, were he not to reconquer the whole world from this single point of his ego, were he not to rise again from the abstract to the concrete. It is indeed important to understand how, in passing from the Greek to the Latin culture, abstraction took hold of European culture and thus resulted in the loss of the primeval word. It must be remembered that the Latin language was for a long time the language of the cultural elite. What persisted however, was a kind of desperate holding on to what this Latin language had actually already discarded. And what had been spoken in the Greek world then remained behind only in thought. Of the logos there remained logic—abstract thought.

In the longing that a Man such as Goethe had for knowledge of the Greek culture, there lies something that may be expressed as follows: he longed for liberation from the abstraction of modern times, from the dry prose of Romanism. He wanted to reach the other daughter of the primeval wisdom of the world, what remained of all that stood for Greece.—We too must experience something of this kind if we wish to understand Goethe's intense yearning for the South. In modern school biographies we find nothing of all this. Only when in every individual thing there echoes a consciousness of Man being an expression of the whole cosmos, will the way be cleared for the forces needed for Man's progress, if civilization is not to decline into utter barbarism.

In the course of these lectures I have often explained how a man is not in a sleeping state only during ordinary sleep but that this state also plays into his everyday conscious life. This obliges us indeed to describe the state of complete wakefulness as existing, even in everyday consciousness, for our conceptual life alone. Compared to the conceptual life, what we bear within us as our life of feeling is not so closely connected with our waking state. To the unprejudiced observer our feeling life shows affinity to dream-life; though dream-life runs on in pictures and the life of feeling in the way we all know. Yet we soon realise that, on the one hand, dream-life—which as we know conjures up in pictures, into everyday life, facts unknown to ordinary consciousness—can be judged only by our conceptual faculty of discrimination. It is by means of this same faculty alone that the whole range and significance of our feeling life can be estimated. And what goes on in a will-impulse, in the expression, the working, of the will, is just as hidden from ordinary consciousness as what in dreamless sleep happens to man, as a being of soul and spirit, from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking.

What actually takes place when we perform the simplest act of will, when, let us say, by merely having an impulse to do so we raise an arm or a leg, is in fact just as great a mystery to us as what goes on in sleep. It is only because we can see the result of an act of will that the act itself enters our consciousness.

Having thought of raising our arm—but that is merely a thought—we see when this has taken place how the arm has indeed been raised. It is by means of our conceptual life that we learn the result of an act of will. But the actual carrying out of the deed remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, so that, even during our waking hours, what arises in us as an impulse of will we have to attribute to a sleeping state. And the whole of our life of feeling runs its course just like a dream.

Now what concerns us here is that, when taken as a whole, the facts I have just mentioned can be quite clear to our ordinary consciousness, although perhaps, when given an abstract interpretation certain points may not seem so at once. But by carefully following up the facts in question we shall find what has been said to be correct.

Consciousness when developed is able to follow up these facts. In particular it can observe in detail the conceptual life and the life of the will. We know how through exercises described in several of my works ordinary objective knowledge can be raised to Imaginative knowledge. On being observed this Imaginative knowledge or cognition shows, to begin with, its true relation to the human being as a whole. It will be useful for us, however, to recall certain facts about ordinary consciousness, before going on to what this Imaginative knowledge has chiefly to say about a man's conceptual power and his will.

Let us then look at the actual life of thought—the conceptual life. You will have to admit; If this conceptual life is experienced without prejudice, we shall not feel it to be a reality. Conceptions arise in our life of soul and there is no doubt the inner course of a man's conceptions is something added to the outer course taken by the facts. The outer course of events does not directly demand the accompaniment of an inwardly experienced conception. The fact of which we form an idea could take place without our experiencing it as an idea. Sinking ourselves in these conceptions, however, teaches us too that in them we live in what, compared with the external world, is something unreal. On the other hand, precisely in what concerns the life of will—which seems to ordinary consciousness as if experience in sleep—we become aware of our own reality and of the truth about our relation to the world.

As we form conceptions we find more and more that these conceptions live in us just as the images of objects are there in a mirror. And just as little as, in the case of what is usually called the real world, we feel the mirror-images to be a reality, do we—if our reason is sound—look upon our conceptions as real.

But there is another thing which prevents our ascribing reality to our conceptions, and that is our feeling of freedom. Just imagine that while forming conceptions we lived in them so that they ran on in us in the way nature works. The conceptual life would be like something happening outside in nature, taking place as a necessity. We should be caught up in a chain of necessities from which our thinking would be unable to free itself. We should never have the sense of freedom which, as such, is an actual fact. We experience ourselves as free human beings only when free impulses living in us spring out of pictures having no place in the chain of natural necessities. Only because we live with; our conceptions in pictures outside the necessary natural phenomena are we able, out of such conceptions, to experience free impulses of will.

When observing our conceptual life thus, we perceive it to be entirely unreal; whereas our life of will assures us of our own reality. When the will is in action it brings about changes in world outside—changes we are obliged to regard as real. Through our will we make actual contact with the external world. Therefore, it is only as beings of will that we can perceive ourselves as realities in the external world.

When from these facts—easily substantiated in ordinary consciousness—we go on to those of which Imagination can tell us, we find the following. When we have acquired Imaginative knowledge and, armed with this, try to arrive at a knowledge of man himself, then actually in two respects he appears a quite different being from what he is for ordinary consciousness. To ordinary consciousness our physical body is a self-contained entity at rest. We differentiate between its separate organs and observing an organ in our usual state of consciousness we have the impression of dealing with an independent member of the body which, as something complete in itself, can be drawn in definite outlines.

This ceases the moment we rise to Imaginative knowledge and study from that point of view the life of the body. Then this something at rest shows—if we don't want to be really theoretical, which of course it is always possible to be in a diagram—that it cannot be drawn in definite outline. This cannot be done in the case of lungs, heart, liver and so on, when we rise to Imaginative knowledge. For what this reveals about the body is its never-ending movement. Our body is in a state of continued motion—certainly not something at rest; it is a process, a becoming, a flux, which imaginative cognition brings to our notice. One might say that everything is seething, inwardly on the move, not only in space but, in an intensive way, one thing flows into another. We are no longer confronted by organs at rest and complete; there is active becoming, living, weaving. We cannot speak any more of lungs, heart, liver, but of processes—of the lung-process, heart-process, liver process. And these separate processes together make up the whole process—man. It is characteristic of our study of the human being from the point of view of Imaginative knowledge, that he appears as something moving, something enduring, in a state of perpetual becoming.

Consider what it signifies to have this change in our view of a man; when, that is, we first see the human body with its definitely outlined members, and then direct the gaze of our soul to the inner soul-life, finding there nothing to be drawn thus definitely. In the life of soul, we see what is taking its course in time, something always becoming, never at rest. The soul-life shows itself indeed to be a process perceptible only inwardly, a process of soul and spirit, yet clearly visible. This process in the life of soul, which is there for ordinary consciousness when a man's inner being is viewed without prejudice, this state of becoming in the soul-life, has very little resemblance to the life of the body at rest. It is true that the life of the body also shows movement; breathing is a movement, circulation is a movement. In relation to how a man appears to Imaginative cognition, however, I would describe this as merely a stage on the way to movement. Compared with the delicate, subtle movements of the human physical body revealed to Imaginative cognition, the circulation of the blood, the breathing, and other bodily motions seem relatively static.

In short, the objective knowledge of the human body perceived it ordinary consciousness is very different from what is perceived as the life of soul, that is in a perpetual state of becoming—always setting itself in motion and never resting.

When, however, with Imagination we observe the human body, it becomes inwardly mobile and in appearance more like the soul life. Thus, Imaginative cognition enables us to raise the appearance of the physical body to a level with the soul. Soul and body come nearer to each other. For Imaginative cognition the body in its physical substance appears more like the soul.

But here I have brought two things to your notice which belong to quite different spheres. First, I showed how the physical body appears to Imaginative cognition as something always on the move, always in a state of becoming. Then I pointed out how indeed, for the, inner vision of our usual consciousness, the ordinary life of soul is also ceaselessly becoming, running its course tie—a life, in effect, to which it is impossible to ascribe definite outlines.

When, however, we rise to Imaginative cognition, this life of soul also changes for the inward vision, and changes over in an opposite direction to the life of the body. It is noticeable that when filled with Imaginative knowledge we no longer feel any freedom of movement in our thoughts, in the combining of them with one another. We also feel that by rising to Imaginative cognition our thoughts gain certain mastery over our life of soul. In ordinary consciousness we can add one thought to another, with inner freedom either combine or not combine a subject with a predicate—feel free in our combining of conceptions.

This in not so when we acquire imaginative knowledge. Then in the thought-world we feel as though in something which works through powers of its own. We feel as if caught up in a web of thought, in such a way that the thoughts combine themselves through their own forces, independently of us. We can no longer say I think—but are forced to change it to: It thinks. In fact, we are not free to do otherwise. We begin to perceive thinking as an actual process—feel it to be as real a process in us as in everyday life we experience the gripping of pain and then its passing off, or the coming and going of something pleasant. By arising to Imaginative cognition, we feel the reality of the thought-world—something in the thought-world resembling experience in the physical body.

From his it can be seen how, through Imaginative knowledge, the conceptual life of the soul becomes more like the life of the body, than is the soul-life—as seen through the inner vision of ordinary consciousness. In short, the body grows soul-like. And the soul becomes more like the body, particularly like those bodily processes which to Imaginative consciousness disclose themselves in their becoming.

Thus, for Imaginative cognition the qualities of the soul approach those of the body, and the qualities of the body those of the soul. And we see the soul and spirit interweaving with the bodily-physical the two becoming more alike. It is as though our experience of what is of the soul acquired a materialistic character while our view of the bodily life, physical life generally, were spiritualised

This is an important fact which reveals itself to Imaginative cognition. And when further progress is made to Inspired Cognition, we find another secret about the human being unveiled. Having acquired Inspired knowledge we learn more of the material nature of thinking, of the conceptual faculty; we learn see more deeply into what actually happens when we think.

Now, as I have said, we no longer have freedom in our life of thought. "It thinks,” and we are caught up in the web of this "It thinks.” In certain circumstances the thoughts are the same as those which in ordinary consciousness we combine or separate in freedom, but which in Imaginative experience we perceive to take place as if from inner necessity.

From this we see that it is not in the thought-life, as such, that freedom and necessity are to be found, but in our own attitude, our own relation, to the thought-life of ordinary consciousness. We learn to recognise the actual situation with regard to our experience, in ordinary consciousness, of the unreality of thoughts. We gradually come to understand the reason for this experience, and then the following becomes clear.

By means of the organic process our organism both takes in and excretes substances. But it is not only a matter of these substances separating themselves from the organic process of the body and being thrown out by the excretory organs—certain of these substances become stored up in us. Having been thrown out of the life-process these remain, to some extent, in the nerve-tract, and in other places in the organism. In our life-process we are continuously engaged in detaching lifeless matter. People able to follow minutely the process of human life can observe this storing up of lifeless matter everywhere in the organism. A great part of this is excreted but there is a general storing up of a certain amount in a more tenuous form. The life of the human organism is such that it is always engaged on the organic process—like this (a drawing was made) But everywhere within the organic process we see inorganic, lifeless matter, not being excreted but stored up (which I indicated here with red chalk): I have drawn these red dots rather heavily because it is chiefly the unexcreted, lifeless matter which withdraws to the organ of the human head, where it remains.

Now the human organism is permeated throughout by the ego (I indicate this with green chalk). Within the organism the ego comes in contact with the lifeless substances which have been separated off and permeates them. So that our organism appears as having, on the one hand, its organic processes permeated by the ego, the process, that is, containing the living substance, and of having also what is lifeless—or shall we say mineralised—in the organism permeated by the ego.

This, then, is what is always going on when we think. Aroused by sense-perceptions outside, or inwardly by memory, the ego gets the upper hand over the lifeless substances, and—in accordance with the stimulation of the senses or of the memories—swings these lifeless substances to and fro in us, we might almost say makes drawings in us with them. For this is no figurative conception; this use of inorganic matter by the ego is absolute reality It might be compared to reducing chalk to a powder and then with a chalky finger drawing all kinds of figures. It is an actual fact that the ego sets this lifeless matter oscillating, masters it, and with it draws figures in us, though the figures are certainly unlike those usually drawn outside. Yet the ego with the help of this lifeless substance does really make drawings and form crystals in us—though not crystals like those found in the mineral kingdom (see red in drawing).

What goes on in this way between the ego and the mineralized substance in us that has detached itself as in a fine but solid state—it is this which provides the material basis of our thinking. In fact, to Inspired cognition the thinking process, the conceptual process, shows itself to be the use them ego makes of the mineralised substance in the human organism.

This, I would point out, gives a more accurate picture of what I have frequently described in the abstract when saying: In that we think we are always dying,—What within us is in a constant state of decay, detaching itself from the living and becoming mineralised, with this the ego makes drawings, actual drawings, of all our thoughts. It is the working and weaving of the ego in mineral kingdom, in that kingdom which alone makes it possible for us to possess the faculty of thinking.

You see it is what I have been describing here which dawned on the materialists of the 19th century, though they misconstrued it. The best advocates of materialism—and one of the best was Czolbe—had a vague notion that while thoughts are flitting through us physical processes are at work. These materialists forget, however,—and this is where error crept in—that it is the purely spiritual ego making drawings in us inwardly with what in mineralized. And on this inward drawing depends what we know of the actual awakening of ordinary consciousness.

Let us now consider the opposite side at the human being, the side of the will-impulses. If you recall what I have been describing, you will perhaps perceive how the ego becomes imprisoned in what has been mineralized within us. But it is able to make use of this mineralised substance to draw with it inwardly. The ego is able to sink right down into what is thus mineralised.

If, on the other hand, we study the life-processes, where the non-mineralised substances are to be found, we come to the material basis of the will. In sleep the ego leaves the physical body, whereas in willing the ego is only driven out of certain parts of the organism. Because of this, at certain moments when this is so, there is nothing mineralised in that region, everything there is full of life. Out of these parts of the organism, where all is alive and from which at that moment nothing mineralised is being detached, the impulses will unfold. But the ego is then driven out; it withdraws into what is mineral. The ego can work on the mineralised substances but not on what is living, from which it is thrust out just us when we are asleep at night our ego is driven out of the whole physical body.

But then the ego is outside the body whereas on mineralisation taking place it is driven inside. It is the life-giving process which thrust the ego out of certain parts of the body; then the ego is as much outside those parts as in sleep it is driven out of the whole body. Hence, we can say that when the will is in action parts of the ego are outside the regions of the physical body to which they are assigned. And those parts of the ego—where are they then? They are outside in the surrounding space and become one with the forces weaving there. By setting our will in action we go outside ourselves with part of our ego, and we take into us forces which have their place in the world outside. When I move an arm, this is not done by anything coming from within the organism but through a force outside, into which the ego enters only by being partly driven out of the arm. In willing go out of my body and move myself by means of outside forces. We do not lift our leg by means of forces within us, but through those actually working from outside. It is the same when an arm is moved. Whereas in thinking, through the relation of the ego to the mineralised part of the organism, we are driven within, in willing just as in sleep we are driven outside. No one understands the will who has not a conception of man as a cosmic being; no one understands the will who is bounded by the human body and does not realise that in willing he takes into him forces lying beyond it.

In willing we sink ourselves into the world, surrender ourselves to it. So that we can say: The material phenomenon that accompanies thinking is a mineral process in us, something drawn by the ego in the mineralised parts of the human organism. The will represents in us a vitalising, a widening of the ego, which then becomes a member of the spiritual world outside, and from there works back upon the body.

If we want to make a diagram of the relation between think and willing, it must be done in this way (a drawing was made). You see it is quite possible to pass over from an inward view of the soul-life to its physical counterpart, without being tempted to fall one-sidedly into materialism. We learn to recognise what takes place in a material way in thinking and in willing. But once we know how in thinking the ego plays an actual part with the inorganic, and how, on the other hand, through the organic life-giving process in the body it is driven out into the spirit, then we never lose the ego.

Materialism is therefore justified on the one hand, whereas on the other it no longer holds good. Simply to attack materialism betrays a superficial attitude. For what in a positive sense the materialist has to say is warranted. He is at fault only when he would approach man's whole wide conception of the world from one side.

In general, when the world and all that happens in it is followed inwardly, spiritually, it is found more and more that the positive standpoints of individual men are warranted, but not those that are negative. And in this connection spiritualism is often just as narrow as materialism. In what he affirms positively the materialist has right on his side, as the spiritualist has on his, when positive. It is only on becoming negative that they stray from the path and fall into error. And it is indeed no trifling error when, in an amateurish fashion, people imagine they have succeeded in their striving for a spiritual world-conception without having any understanding of material processes, and then look down on materialism. The material world is indeed permeated by spirit. But we must not be one-sided; we must learn about its material characteristics as well, recognising that reality has to be approached from various sides if we are to arrive at its full significance.

And that is a lesson best taught by a world-conception such as that offered by Anthroposophy.

From the aspect of modern thinking it may perhaps sound strange that we are arranging a study course for the Christmas holidays (Christmas Course for Teachers, 23rd December to 7th of January), because people generally think that during the great festivals of the year work should stop and that Christmas in particular should only be dedicated to religious exercises. Nevertheless a deeper insight into present conditions should not conceal the fact that this Christmas above all calls for other things than those which held good for such a long time. We live in another age and today it must seem frivolous to maintain old customs and traditions, without considering the difficult, distressing times in which we live, and untouched by what is taking place particularly in the present day both in the visible and in the invisible world. We see people making presents to each other at Christmas, they adorn the tree and do other things out of tradition, things which people have been accustomed to do for many centuries. But today in particular we should bear in mind that to keep up such old traditions and customs in almost … a crime.

Those who had a deeper share in the events of the past years feel as if they had lived for centuries, and they can only look with a certain feeling of sorrow upon that part of mankind which is still led by habit and has the same thoughts today which were to some extent justified until the beginning or the middle of the second decade of our century. To an unprejudiced mind everything coming from the events of the time must appear full of problems which touch the very elements of the whole life of man.

We frequently hear the reproach that many people more and more believe that Christianity consists in their calling out “Lord, Lord,” or in uttering the name of Christ as often as possible. But something quite different is needed today: A Christianization of our whole life, in which it does not suffice to utter the name of Christ, but entails that we should deeply and intimately unite ourselves with the Spirit of Christ. We see that almost in the whole world great problems of life are being advanced today. And we can already perceive that the region, the European region which has for many centuries been the stage of human civilization cannot remain so in future. We perceive that the world problems now extend to larger territories and in the present time we perceive above all through symptomatic phenomena that the great conflict between the West and the East announced itself in every sphere of life.

The West kindled the flame of a young spiritual life based upon a mechanical-naturalistic foundation. This spiritual life is only viewed in the right way by those who hold that it is in the beginning of its development. But from this young spiritual life in the West we should look across to the East; we become more and more connected with it, also geographically and historically, and the West must reckon with the East.

In the East there exists an ancient life of the spirit, a spiritual life that can be traced back thousands of years. Immense respect can be felt for what lives in the East; although it is already decadent; the greatest reverence can be felt for it when looking back from its present state of decadence to the primeval wisdom of humanity from which it sprang.

When we envisage the more spiritual aspects of life a word re-echoes from the East which always awakens a peculiar echo in our hearts, particularly when we adopt the standpoint of the West. It is a word which is meant to express in the language of the East the characteristic of the physical world which we perceive round about us through our senses. The East, beginning with India, has been accustomed to designate this physical-sensory world as MAYA, the great illusion – apart from the fact of it being expressed more or less clearly.

The East (but, as stated, this exists only in a decadent form) thus faces the external world perceived through the eyes and ears as a great illusion that confronts man, as Maya.

Those who learn to know the characteristics of the life conceptions of the East, must experience that this conception of Maya was not originally contained in the primeval wisdom of the Orient. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy above all enables us to gain insight into a development of the Oriental civilization stretching over thousands of years. We then look back into a time which lies 3000 years before Christ, and by going back still further into a remote antiquity, we find this conception of Maya less and less, this idea of the great illusion connected with the physical-sensory reality of the external world.

If we wish to indicate an approximate epoch, we may say: Only at the turn of the 3rd and 4th millennium B.C. this concept rises up in the East; the conviction rises up that the physical-sensory world which surrounds man is not a reality, but a great illusion, a Maya.

What is the cause of this immense change in the life attitude of the East? The cause lies deeply rooted in the soul development of humanity. If we consider the primeval wisdom of the East, the poetical form which it assumed later on in the Vedas, the philosophical form of the Vedanta philosophy and the Yoga doctrine into which it developed, if we notice, for example, the greatness and loftiness in which this eastern teaching is contained in the Bhagavad Gita, we find that once upon a time the essence of this Eastern teaching was that man perceived not only the external sensory world, but that in this physical world, in everything he saw through his eyes, heard through his ears or touched with his hands, he perceived a divine-spiritual essence.

For these primeval men the trees did not exist as prosaically as they do for us: In every tree, in every bush, in every cloud, in every fountain there was something which announced itself as a soul-spiritual, cosmic content of the world. Wherever they looked, they saw the physical permeated by the spiritual. The fountain did not only murmur in inarticulate sounds, but the murmuring fountain conveyed a soul-spiritual content. The forest did not only rustle in an inarticulate way; the rustling forest spoke to them the language of the everlasting Cosmic Word, of a soul-spiritual Being. Modern people can only have a very pale idea of the immensely living way in which man experienced the world in this remote, primeval time.

But this alert, spiritual way in which man lived in his surroundings gradually became paralyzed towards the 3rd millennium B.C. And if we transfer ourselves into the development of the times, we perceive that humanity, now taken as a whole, as it were, as humanity of the Orient, began to perceive the phenomena of the world with a certain feeling of longing and of sorrow, as if the gods had withdrawn from them. This feeling was voiced by many more profound souls almost in the form of a prayer by saying: the old gods have vanished and are now behind the surface of the external physical objects. The world has grown empty, it has lost the gods, and because of this emptiness, because it is without the gods, it is Maya, the great illusion. They did not speak of the world as a great illusion from the very beginning; but because it no longer contained the gods, they experienced it as a great illusion, as Maya.

If we wish to go back to the truly living essence of this conception we should go back even behind the Atlantean catastrophe, as far as the Atlantean race. For immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe civilization in general shows a faint trace of looking upon the external physical phenomena of the world as something not real.

Yet until the end of the 4th millennium B.C. there still existed in a strong measure the capacity to perceive the gods in the physical world. This faculty existed in so strong a measure that until that time people needed no consolation for what had up to that time been considered as unreality in the world. But such a consolation was needed after 4000 B.C. It was sought in initiation by the teachers and priests of the Mysteries. It was sought in the language of the stars. Here on earth – people said – there is no reality. But if we investigate the stars, they tell us in their language that reality is poured down to the earth from world-distant heavenly regions. If we listen to the language spoken by the stars Maya seems to obtain a true meaning. The great impression made upon mankind by the star wisdom of the ancient Egyptians consisted in the fact that people felt in this star wisdom something which gave Maya a foundation of reality. People said that here on earth only unreal things are to be found. But one had to look up to the eternal Cosmic Word that speaks to receptive souls in the movements and positions of the stars. Reality will then manifest itself in Maya. If anyone wished to know something important and significant in life, it was investigated in the stars and in their language. This was the human soul constitution until the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

What was real was announced to humanity by the sages of the mysteries, for people did not think that this reality could be found on earth. Those who understand the true essence of life in ancient Greece will perceive that something tragic weighs on it (although a certain superficial way of looking at things makes people say that in Greece life consisted in a childlike joy over the nature of reality); the Greeks yearned for a kind of redemption in human life. This is nothing but the echo of that Oriental feeling, which I have described to you just now. We modern people have reached the point where thought develops, as it were, in modern civilization as highest inner treasure; thought unfolds on every side. But we have not reached the point of recognizing thought as a reality. When submitting to the life of thought we feel as if we lived in something not real. Indeed, many people say that thought life is nothing but an ideology. This word “ideology” indicates in regard to the inner life of the soul, the same thing which was experienced in the Orient in regard to the external physical-sensory reality, which was designated as Maya. In the same way in which we speak of ideology, we may speak of Maya, but we must apply this to our inner soul life.

The soul-spiritual which was such an intense reality in the Orient for a certain epoch, became Maya for the Occident, and the Maya of the Orient, the external, physical-sensory world, became our naturalistic reality. We live by calling that which permeates us inwardly, maturing to the stage of thought, an ideology, or Maya. The Orientals once perceived gods in the external physical world of nature. But these gods vanished from their sight. The Orientals did not have thought in the form in which we have it now. The characteristic of the Occident is that it gained the faculty of thought, the purest, most light-filled form of soul life. But the divine element in thought has not yet dawned for us. We are waiting for the divine essence in thought which must rise up for us. The Orientals lost the divine essence in the external physical world, so that it became a Maya, but this divine essence does not as yet exist in our world of ideas, in our thoughts, in our inner world filled with thought. In the course of historical development the Orientals little by little saw that the external physical world no longer contained the gods. And our thought life does not yet contain the divine; it is without God. We can only grasp this by looking upon it as a kind of prophecy that one day the Maya of our thoughts will be filled by an inner reality.

The history of human evolution is thus divided into two important parts. One part develops from a life filled with the divine essence to a life deprived of this divine essence, of the gods; the other part – and we are now living in the beginning of this development – unfolds from a life deprived of the divine towards the hoped-for life filled with the divine. And in the middle - in between these two streams of development, the Cross is set up on Golgotha. How does it stand within the consciousness of humanity?

From the time of the Mystery of Golgotha we look back six centuries and come to Buddha, who gradually became an object of veneration on the part of a large community. We see Buddha abandoning his home and going out into the world, and among the manifold things which he perceives he sees a corpse. The sight of this corpse stirs up his soul, so that he turns away from the Maya of the external world. The corpse has a discouraging, frightening effect on Buddha. And because he had to look upon death, the corpse, he felt that he had to turn his gaze away from the physical world to another sphere, to the divine-spiritual which cannot be found on earth. The sight of the lifeless body was the true reason why Buddha left the world and fled into a sphere of reality outside the physical world.

Let us now turn to a historical moment about 600 years after the Mystery of Golgotha. Many people look towards that great symbol: the cross with the corpse hanging upon it. They look upon the lifeless human being. Yet they do not look upon him in such a way as to flee from him and seek another reality, but in this lifeless human being they see something which is a real refuge to them. Mankind went through a great change in the course of twelve centuries: It learned to love death upon the cross, that death from which Buddha fled.

Nothing can indicate more deeply the great change which took place through the Mystery of Golgotha, which lies in the middle, in between these two historical moments. And by turning our thoughts to the Mystery of Golgotha we should remember what was really the object of reverence in accordance with early Christianity.

St. Paul, an initiate in the mysteries of his time, could not believe in the living Jesus; he opposed the living Jesus. But when he perceived the living Christ on his way to Damascus, the Christ that can even manifest Himself out of the world's darkness, then Paul believed in the risen Christ, not in the living Jesus, and he began to love the living Jesus because he was the bearer of the risen Christ. Out of this special insight into the connections of the world St. Paul gained certainty in regard to the divine-spiritual life, and this certainty sprang out of death.

What had taken place in the development of humanity was that people once found comfort when they looked up from the earth to the stars, whence the everlasting Word resounded, whereas later on they turned their gaze to the historical event upon Golgotha; they beheld a human sheath that contained the mystery of life.

The apostle St. John expressed this Mystery of Life in the words: “In the beginning was the Word.” Yes, in the beginning the Word spoke out of the path and position of the stars! This Word resounded from the cosmos. This Word could no longer be found upon the earth, but it came down to the earth from heavenly spaces, from the Home of the Father. The writer of the Gospel of St. John ventured to pronounce the words: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That is to say, what once lived outside in the stars took up its abode in the body which hung upon the cross. What was formerly sought outside in the cosmic spaces became visible in a human being. What formerly streamed down to the earth in the shining light, came down to man! The whole way of looking upon life was inspired by a world-wide cosmology which led to a conception of the central human being filled by that which came down to man! The whole way of looking upon life was inspired by a world-wide cosmology which led to a conception of the central human being filled by that which once shone down from the stars and was permeated by the living Cosmic Word.

The sense, the deeper meaning which is to be revealed by the Mystery of Golgotha is that it is also possible to look towards the origin of the world by looking into Jesus' inner being and by establishing an intimate connection between one's own inner being and the inner human being of Jesus, even as in the past a connection was established between the human being living on earth and the everlasting Cosmic Word speaking out of the stars. The Mystery of Golgotha is indeed the most important and incisive influence in the evolution of the earth and this is indicated in the New Testament.

It is immensely stirring and profound how the Gospels – now it is related by this one, now by the other – speak of the coming of Christ Jesus. On the one hand there are the three sages, the Magi from the Orient, the bearers of an ancient starry lore, who investigated the Cosmic Word in the star writing of the cosmos. They were endowed with the highest wisdom then accessible to man. And the Gospels indicate that the highest wisdom could at that time only state that Christ Jesus had appeared, for the stars had revealed it. It is the eternal Cosmic Word that lives in the stars which revealed to man that Christ Jesus would appear. The schools of wisdom proclaimed: Since the beginning of the present earthly existence of mankind, Jupiter completed his planetary orbit 354 times. A Jupiter year, a great Jupiter year, reached its close since the time which the ancient Hebrews, for example, fixed for the beginning of man's existence on earth. In accordance with the world conception of that time, an ordinary year only had 354 days. 354 Jupiter days elapsed, and these 354 Jupiter days are like a sentence speaking out of the cosmic wisdom, a sublime sentence, in which the single words indicate the revolutions of Mercury. There is a Mercury day 7 x 7 = 49 times, and this in the same length of time of a Jupiter day.

These were the connections sought by the ancient sages in the writing of the stars. And the inspirations which their souls received by deciphering the starry writing was interpreted in such a way that they were able to say: Christ Jesus is coming, for the times are fulfilled. The Jupiter time, the Mercury time are both fulfilled. This is what the Gospels relate on the one side. On the other side they tell of the revelation which was given to the poor shepherds on the field; without any wisdom, from the dream streaming out of their simple hearts, merely by listening to the simple, pious voice of the human soul, a revelation came to these poor shepherds out of the depths of the human heart. And it is the same message: Christ is coming. Highest wisdom and greatest soul simplicity unite in the words: Christ is coming. At that time the highest wisdom was already decadent, it was setting. Instead, there rises up something which comes from man's own inner being. Ever since, thought has risen out of man's inner being. We cannot yet raise it to the stage of reality; it is still a Maya, but it is necessary in an ever-growing measure to bear in mind that thought can become a reality. In pre-Christian times man looked up to the stars in order to experience reality. We must look towards Christ in order to have reality in regard to our inner being. Not I, Christ in me – this is the Word which will confer weight and inner reality to thought.

The theologians of the 19th Century gradually changed Christ Jesus into a merely human character which can also be recognized with the aid of history, ordinary history; Jesus, the simple, though highly developed man of Nazareth. The Christ has been lost. He will appear in His true shape when a world conception based on the super-sensible will rise up again, a life conception that turns from the physical-sensory to the super-sensible. In the same measure in which mankind has lost the spiritual from the physical, it must gain inner reality in the life of thought, which has to be sure advanced to the stage of being filled with light, but in an abstract way.

This inner reality will be gained by perceiving on the earth itself, in the things taking place in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, something which the human soul can only face through super-sensible conceptions. Christ will be born anew in the development of human civilization in the same measure in which we decide to gain an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, with the aid of super-sensible knowledge. By absorbing super-sensible knowledge man may hope for a perennial Bethlehem. A profound meaning lies in the words of Angelus Silesius: “Though Christ be born a thousand times in Bethlehem, but not in you, then you are lost for evermore.”

Christ must be born not only in empty words, but in every form of wisdom and knowledge. We must reach the point of envisaging what may be gained by looking at the world, as Paul did before he approached the event of Damascus, before he perceived that the earth is permeated by the forces of the living Christ. These forces of the living Christ should be brought into every form of knowledge. The cold abstract knowledge which led us into the misery of the present time must be filled with warmth. This is an important and significant task of the present times. We should feel that first of all we must reach Christ. A profound intimate deepening of the Christ idea must be gained. We should realize that the present misery is too great for the maintenance of old Christmas customs. We must rise to the conviction that it is a farce to keep them up in the face of the other conceptions which prevail in the present time. The great conflict between East and West must also take place in the spiritual sphere and the harmonization of the Maya of the East with the Maya of the West – the Maya of the external world and the Maya of thought. These must reach a harmonious agreement.

Let us not think that in the present time we already have Christ. We should feel like the poor shepherds who were conscious of their misery. Christ should be sought in the innermost depths of man's being, even as the shepherds sought him in the stable of Bethlehem. Sacrifices should be offered to Christ, who transforms the Maya of our thoughts into realities. We should be humble enough to realize that we must first rise to an understanding of Christ's birth. We should remember that we first have to gain an understanding of the Christmas idea before we are really able to appreciate Christmas in the right way. Every sphere of life should be permeated with the living forces of Christ. We must work. And the festivals will be celebrated best of all if in the present misery we strive to transform into a spiritual reality the symbol – but it is a symbol of reality – which faces us historically from Golgotha's place of skulls.

Let us grasp that the most significant thought which we can have at Christmas is the following: A real understanding of Christianity must bring about a Cosmic Christmas. This inner voice, this inner longing, can lead us over into a Christmas which is in keeping with the misery of the present time. For the consecrated holy nights, the Christmas festival at the end of the year, can only acquire life if we are filled with the longing to see in Christmas an inducement to gain insight into the needs of human development. The festive feeling which we have at Christmas will then ray out something of the truth that tells us that through the power of an inner understanding of that reality which is still a Maya for us, we can come to the resurrection of that divine-spiritual reality which came to an end in more remote ages and led to the conception of Maya. Mankind reached Maya, the external Maya. The true soul-spiritual reality must unfold out of the inner Maya. If we understand this, then the individual Christmas idea which we have during this festive season will be permeated by a true cosmic feeling, and this is needed today, if we are to experience the true value and dignity of man. The feelings which we have in connection with the different festivals of the year will then ray out something which will induce us to say: In these times of misery and distress, Christmas should be celebrated in such a way that we can see the NEW CHRISTMAS LIGHTS OF A NEW SPIRITUAL LIFE. We must learn to celebrate not only an individual Christmas, but a COSMIC, UNIVERSAL CHRISTMAS.

Yesterday¹ I spoke about initiation science. Today² I shall describe some aspects of what nowadays gives expression to initiation science. A profound breach now runs through the whole of civilization, a breach which brings much chaos to the world and which people who are fully aware cannot but experience with a sense of tragedy. One expression of this breach is the fact that human beings, when considering human dignity and their worth as human beings, can no longer find any connection with a world to which they look up—that world which gives the human soul religious feelings both profound and uplifting—namely, the world of moral values.

People look instead to the world of nature, to which, of course, they also belong. During the course of recent centuries the world of nature has come to appear before the human soul in such a way that it has absorbed the whole of reality, has absorbed every aspect of actual existence. The world of nature, with its laws which are indifferent to moral values, runs its course in accordance with external necessity, and in their everyday life human beings, too, are tied up in this necessity. However the bounds of this necessity are defined, if human beings feel themselves enclosed within such bounds, it is impossible for them to discover what it is that makes them human. Human beings have to look up from the world of nature to the world of moral values. We have to see the content of this moral world as something which ought to be, something which is the ideal. Yet no knowledge which is current today is capable of showing us how moral ideals can flow into the laws of nature and how necessity can be made to serve moral values.

We have to admit that today's world is divided into two parts which, for modern consciousness, are incompatible: the moral world and the material world. People see birth and death as the boundaries which encompass the only existence recognized by present-day knowledge. On the other hand they have to look up to a world which lies above birth and death, a world which is eternally meaningful, unlike the endlessly changing material world; and they have to think of their soul life as being linked with the eternal meaning of that world of moral values. The Platonic view of the world, containing as it did the last remnants of orientalism, saw the external world perceptible to the senses as a semblance, an illusion, and the world of ideas as the true, real world. But for modern human beings, if they remain within the confines of present-day consciousness, this Platonic world view has no answers.

But now initiation science wants to enter once again into human civilization and show us that behind the world perceived by our senses there stands a spiritual world, a mighty world, powerful and real, a world of moral values to which we may turn. It is the task of initiation science to take away from natural existence the absolute reality it assumes for itself and to give reality back once more to the world of moral values. It can only do so by using means of expression different from those given by today's language, today's world of ideas and concepts.

The language of initiation science still seems strange, even illusory, to people today because they have no inkling that real forces stand behind the expressions used, nor that, whatever kind of speech is used—whether ordinary everyday speech or speech formation—language cannot give full and adequate expression to what is seen and perceived. What, after all, do the words ‘human being’ signify, when only the speech sounds are considered, compared with the abundant richness of spirit, soul and body of an actual human being standing before us! In just such a way in initiation science a spiritual world—behind the world of the senses—living in the world of moral values, storms and flows, working in manifold ways. This initiation science has to select all manner of ways of expressing what, despite everything, will be far richer in its manifestation than any possible means of expression.

Today I should like to speak about certain expressions of this kind with regard to man's immediate existence, expressions which have been discussed here in one connection or another over the last few days and which are well known to those of you who have concerned yourselves over a period of time with anthroposophical spiritual science.

It is both right and wrong to say that the true being of man is beyond understanding. It is right in a certain sense, but not in the sense frequently meant nowadays. Yet the true being of man is indeed revealed to initiation science in a way which defies direct definitions, descriptions or explanations. To make use of a comparison I might say that defining the being of man is like trying to draw a picture of the fulcrum of a beam. It cannot be drawn. You can draw the left-hand and the right-hand portions of the beam but not the fulcrum upon which it turns. The fulcrum is the point at which the right-hand and the left-hand portions of the beam begin. In a similar way the profoundest element of the human being cannot be encompassed by adequate concepts and ideas. But it can be grasped by endeavouring to look at deviations from the true human being. The being of man represents the state of balance poised between deviations that constantly want to go off in opposite directions. Human beings throughout their life are permanently beset by two dangers: deviation in one of two directions, the luciferic or the ahrimanic.³

In ordinary life our state of balance is maintained because only a part of our total, our full being, is harnessed to our bodily form, and because it is not we who hold this bodily form in a state of balance within the world as a whole, but spiritual beings who stand behind us. Thus, in ordinary consciousness, we are on the whole unaware of the two dangers which can cause us to deviate from our state of balance towards one side or the other, towards the luciferic or the ahrimanic side. This is what is characteristic of initiation science. When we begin to comprehend the world in its true nature we feel as though we were standing on a high rock with one abyss on our right and another on our left. The abyss is ever-present, but in ordinary life we do not see this abyss, or rather these two abysses. To learn to know ourselves fully we have to perceive these abysses, or at least we have to learn about them. We are drawn in one direction towards Lucifer and in the other towards Ahriman. And the ahrimanic and the luciferic aspects can be characterized in relation to the body, the soul and the spirit.

Let us start from the point of view of man's physical being. This physical being, which the senses perceive as a unit, is in fact only seemingly so. Actually we are forever in tension between the forces which make us young and those which make us old, between the forces of birth and the forces of death. Not for a single moment throughout our life is only one of these forces present; always both are there.

When we are small, perhaps tiny, children, the youthful, luciferic forces predominate. But even then, deep down, are the ageing forces, the forces which eventually lead to the sclerosis of our body and, in the end, to death. It is necessary for both kinds of force to exist in the human body. Through the luciferic forces there is always a possibility of inclining towards, let me say, the phosphoric side, towards warmth. In the extreme situation of an illness this manifests in a fever, such as a pleuritic condition, a state of inflammation. This inclination towards fever and inflammation is ever-present and is only held in check or in balance by those other forces which want to lead towards solidified, sclerotic, mineral states. The nature of the human being arises from the state of balance between these two polar-opposite forces.

Valid sciences of human physiology and biology will only be possible when the whole human body and each of its separate organs, such as heart, lungs, liver, are seen to encompass polar opposites which incline them on the one hand towards dissolution into warmth and, on the other hand, towards consolidation into the mineral state. The way the organs function will only be properly understood once the whole human being, as well as each separate organ, are seen in this light. The science of human health and sickness will only find a footing on healthy ground once these polarities in the physical human being are able to be seen everywhere. Then it will be known, for instance, that at the change of teeth, around the seventh year, ahrimanic forces are setting to work in the head region; or that when the physical body starts to develop towards the warmth pole at puberty, this means that luciferic forces are at work; that in the rhythmical nature of the human being there are constant swings of the pendulum, physically too, between the luciferic and the ahrimanic aspect. Until we learn to speak thus, without any superstition, but with scientific exactness, about the luciferic and ahrimanic influences upon human nature—just as today we speak without superstition or mysticism about positive and negative magnetism, about positive and negative electricity, about light and darkness—we shall not be in a position to gain knowledge of the human being which can stand up to the abstract knowledge of inorganic nature that we have achieved during the course of recent centuries.

In an abstract way many people already speak about all kinds of polarities in the human being. Mystical, nebulous publications discuss all kinds of positive and negative influences in man. They shy away from ascending to a much more concrete, more spiritual, but spiritually entirely concrete plane, and so they speak in a manner about the human being's positive and negative polarities which is just as abstract as that in which they discuss polarities in inorganic nature. Real knowledge of the human being can only come about if we rise above the poverty-stricken concepts of positive and negative, the poverty-stricken concepts of polarity as found in inorganic nature, and ascend to the meaningful concepts of luciferic and ahrimanic influences in man.

Turning now to the soul element, in a higher sense the second element of man's being, we find the ahrimanic influence at work in everything that drives the soul towards purely intellectual rigid laws. Our natural science today is almost totally ahrimanic. As we develop towards ahrimanic soul elements, we discard anything that might fill our concepts and ideas with warmth. We submit only to whatever makes concepts and ideas ice-cold and dry as dust. So we feel especially satisfied in today's scientific thinking when we are ahrimanic, when we handle dry, cold concepts, when we can make every explanation of the world conform to the pattern we have established for inorganic, lifeless nature. Also, when we imbue our soul with moral issues, the ahrimanic influence is found in everything that tends towards what is pedantic, stiff, philistine on the one hand; but also in what tends towards freedom, towards independence, towards everything that strives to extract the fruits of material existence from this material existence and wants to become perfect by filling material existence.

Both ahrimanic and luciferic influences nearly always display two sides. In the ahrimanic direction, one of these—the pedantic, the philistine, the one-sidedly intellectual aspect—leads us astray. But on the other side there is also something that lies in mankind's necessary line of evolution, something which develops a will for freedom, a will to make use of material existence, to free the human being and so on.

The luciferic influence in the human soul is found in everything that makes us desire to fly upwards out of ourselves. This can create nebulous, mystical attitudes which lead us to regions where any thought of the material world seems ignoble and inferior. Thus we are led astray, misled into despising material existence entirely and into wanting instead to indulge in whatever lies above the material world, into wanting wings on which to soar above earthly existence, at least in our soul. This is how the luciferic aspect works on our soul. To the ahrimanic aspect of dull, dry, cold science is added a sultry mysticism of the kind that in religions leads to an ascetic disdain for the earth, and so on.

This description of the ahrimanic and luciferic aspects of soul life shows us that the human soul, too, has to find a balance between polar opposites. Like the ahrimanic, the luciferic aspect also reveals possibilities for deviation and, at the same time, possibilities for the necessary further evolution of the proper being of man. The deviation is a blurred, hazy, nebulous mysticism that allows any clear concepts to flutter away into an indeterminate, misty flickering of clarity and obscurity with the purpose of leading us up and away from ourselves. On the other hand, a luciferic influence which is entirely justifiable, and is indeed a part of mankind's necessary progress, is made manifest when we fill material existence with today's genuine life principles, not in order to make exhaustive use of the impulses of this material existence—as is the case with ahrimanic influences—but in order to paralyse material existence into becoming a semblance which can then be used in order to describe a super-sensible realm, in order to describe something that is spiritually real, and yet—in this spiritual reality—cannot also be real in the world of the senses merely through natural existence.

Luciferic forces endow human beings with the possibility of expressing the spirit in the semblance of sense-perceptible existence. It is for this that all art and all beauty are striving. Lucifer is the guardian of beauty and art. So in seeking the right balance between luciferic and ahrimanic influences we may allow art—Lucifer—in the form of beauty, to work upon this balance. There is no question of saying that human beings must guard against ahrimanic and luciferic influences. What matters is for human beings to find the right attitude towards ahrimanic and luciferic influences, maintaining always a balance between the two. Provided this balance is maintained, luciferic influences may be permitted to shine into life in the form of beauty, in the form of art. Thus something unreal is brought into life as if by magic, something which has been transformed into a semblance of reality by the effort of human beings themselves.

It is the endeavour of luciferic forces to bring into present-day life something that has long been overtaken by world existence, something that the laws of existence cannot allow to be real in present-day life. If human beings follow a course of cosmic conservation, if they want to bring into the present certain forms of existence which were right and proper in earlier times, then they fall in the wrong way under the influence of the luciferic aspect. If, for instance, they bring in a view of the world that lives only in vague pictures such as were justifiable in ancient cosmic ages, if they allow everything living in their soul to become blurred and mingled, they are giving themselves up in the wrong way to luciferic existence. But if they give to external existence a form which expresses something it could not express by its own laws alone—marble can only express the laws of the mineral world—if they force marble to express something it would never be able to express by means of its own natural forces, the result is the art of sculpture; then, something which cannot be a reality in a sense-perceptible situation of this kind, something unreal, is brought as if, by magic into real existence. This is what Lucifer is striving to achieve. He strives to lead human beings away from the reality in which they find themselves between birth and death into a reality which was indeed reality in earlier times but which cannot be genuine reality for the present day.

Now let us look at the spiritual aspect of the human being. We find that here, too, both luciferic and ahrimanic influences are called upon. In life here on earth the being of man expresses itself in the first instance in the alternating states of waking and sleeping. In the waking state the spiritual part of our being is fully given over to the material world. The following must be said in this connection: In sleep, from the moment of going to sleep to the moment of waking up, we find ourselves in a spirit-soul existence. On going to sleep we depart with our spirit-soul existence from our physical and etheric bodies, and on waking up we enter with our spirit and soul once again into our physical and etheric bodies. In sleep, you could say, we bear our state of soul-spirit within us; but on waking up we keep back our soul state almost entirely in the form of our soul life. Only with our spirit do we plunge fully into our body. So in the waking state in the present phase of human evolution we become with our spirit entirely body, we plunge into our body, at least to a very high degree. From the existence of our sleeping state we fall into that of our waking state. We are carried over from one state to the other. This is brought about by forces which we have to count among the ahrimanic forces.

Looking at the spiritual aspect of the human being, that is, at the alternation between waking and sleeping, which is what reveals our spiritual aspect in physical, earthly existence, we find that in waking up the ahrimanic element is most at work, while falling asleep is brought about chiefly by the luciferic element. From being entirely enveloped in our physical body, we are carried across into the free soul-spirit state. We are carried over into a state in which we no longer think in ahrimanic concepts but solely in pictures which dissolve sharp ahrimanic conceptual contours, allowing everything to interweave and become blurred. We are placed in a state in which to interweave in pictures is normal. In brief we can say: The ahrimanic element carries us, quite properly, from the sleeping to the waking state, and the luciferic element carries us, equally properly, from the waking state into the sleeping state.

Deviations occur when too little of the luciferic impulse is carried over into the waking state, making the ahrimanic impulse stronger than it should be in the waking state. If this happens, the ahrimanic impulse presses the human being down too strongly into his physical body, preventing him from remaining in the realm of the soul sentiments of good and evil, the realm of moral impulses. He is pushed down into the realm of emotions and passions. He is submerged in the life of animal instinct. His ego is made to enter too thoroughly into the bodily aspect.

Conversely, when the luciferic impulse works in an unjustified way in the human being it means that he carries too much of his waking life into his sleeping life. Dreams rise up in sleep which are too reminiscent of waking life. These work back into waking life and push it into an unhealthy kind of mysticism.

So you see, in every aspect of life a state of balance must be brought about in the human being by the two polarities, by the luciferic and the ahrimanic elements. Yet deviations an occur. As I have said, a proper physiology of the body, with a proper knowledge of health and sickness, will only be possible when we have learnt to find this polarity in every aspect of bodily life. Similarly, a valid psychology will only be possible when we are in a position to discover this polarity in the soul.

Nowadays, in the sciences that are regarded as psychology—the science of the soul—all sorts of chaotic things are said about thinking, feeling and willing. In the life of the soul thinking, feeling and willing also flow into one another. However pure our thoughts may be, as we link them together and take them apart we are using our will in our thoughts. And even in movements which are purely instinctive our thought impulses work into our will activity. Thinking, feeling and willing are nowhere separate in our soul life; everywhere they work into one another. If, as is the custom today, they are separated out, this is merely an abstract separation; to speak of thinking, feeling and willing is then merely to speak of three abstractions. Certainly we can distinguish between what we call thinking, feeling and willing, and as abstract concepts they may help us to build up our knowledge of what each one is; but this by no means gives us a true picture of reality.

We gain a true picture of reality only if we see feeling and willing in every thought, thinking and willing in every feeling and thinking and feeling in every act of will. In order to see—in place of that abstract thinking, feeling and willing—our concrete living and surging soul life, we must also picture to ourselves how our soul life is deflected to one polarity or the other—for instance, how it is deflected to the ahrimanic polarity and there lives in thoughts. However many will impulses there may be in these thoughts, if we learn to recognize, at a higher level of knowledge, the special characteristics of the ahrimanic element, then we can feel the polarity of thinking in the soul. And if we see the soul deflected in the other direction, towards the will, then—however much thought content there may be in this will activity—if we have grasped the luciferic nature of the will, we shall have understood the living nature of the will in our soul life. All abstractions, concepts, ideas in us must be transformed into living vision. This we will not achieve unless we resolve to ascend to a view of the luciferic and the ahrimanic elements.

As regards the life of mankind through history, too, the pictures we form are only real if we are capable of perceiving the working and surging of the luciferic and ahrimanic elements in the different periods of history. Let us look, for instance, at the period of history which starts with Augustine⁴ and reaches to the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, the fifteenth century. Let us look at this period and see how in external life people preferred to allow impulses to work which came from their deepest inner being, out of their emotional life; let us see how people during this period wanted to shape even the external life of society and the state in accordance with what they believed they could discern of the divine impulses within themselves. We feel quite clearly that the luciferic impulse was at work in this period of history.

Now go to more recent times and see how people turn and look outwards towards the mechanical and physical aspects of the world which can only be adequately comprehended in the right way by thinking and by contact with the external world. It is obvious that the ahrimanic element is at work in this period. Yet this must not tempt us to declare the period from Augustine to Galileo to be luciferic and the period from Galileo to the present time to be ahrimanic. This would in turn be an ahrimanic judgement, an intellectualistic interpretation. If we want to make the transition from an intellectualistic to a living interpretation, to a recognition of life as an experience in which we share, of which we are a part, then we shall have to express ourselves differently. We shall have to say: During the period from Augustine to Galileo, human beings had to resist the luciferic element in their striving for balance. And in more recent times human beings have to resist the ahrimanic element in their striving for balance.

We must understand ever more clearly that in our civilization as it progresses it is not a matter of whether we say one thing or another. What matters is being able to decide, in a given situation, whether one thing or another can be said. However true it may be to say, in an abstract way, that the Middle Ages were luciferic and more recent times ahrimanic, what matters is that this abstract truth bears no real impulse. The real impulse comes into play when we say: In the Middle Ages human beings maintained their uprightness by combating the luciferic element; in modern times they maintain their uprightness by combating the ahrimanic element. In an external, abstract sense something that is in reality no more than an empty phrase can be perfectly true. But as regards the particular situation of human existence in question, a thing that is real in our life of ideas can only be something that is actually inwardly present. What people today must avoid more than anything else is to fall into empty phrases. Again and again we come across situations in which people who believe themselves to be standing in anthroposophical life say: So-and-so said something which was in perfect agreement with Anthroposophy. We are not concerned with an outward agreement in words alone. What matters is the spirit, the living spirit, the living reality within which something stands. If we concern ourselves solely with the external, logical content of what people say today, we do not avoid the danger of the empty phrase.

In one circle or another recently I have a number of times given a striking example of how strangely certain statements, which are perfectly correct in themselves, appear when illuminated by a sense for reality. In 1884, in the German Reichstag, Bismarck made a remarkable statement when he felt threatened by the approach of social democracy.⁵ He wanted to dissuade the majority of the working population from following their radical social-democratic leaders, and this is what spurred him to say: Every individual has the right to work; grant to every individual the right to work, let the state find work for everybody, provide everybody with what they need in order to live—thus spoke the German Chancellor—when they are old and can no longer work, or when they are ill, and you will see that the broad masses of the workers will turn tail on the promises of their leaders. This is what Prince Bismarck said in the German Reichstag in 1884.

Curiously enough, if you go back almost a hundred years you find that another political figure said the same, almost verbatim: It is our human duty to grant every individual the right to work, to let the state find work for all, so long as they can work, and for the state to care for them when they are ill and can no longer work. In 1793 Robespierre⁶ wanted to incorporate this sentence in the democratic constitution. Is it not remarkable that in 1793 the revolutionary Robespierre and in 1884 Prince Bismarck—who certainly had no wish to be another Robespierre—said exactly the same thing. Two people can say exactly the same, yet it is not the same. Curiously, too, Bismarck referred in 1884 to the fact that every worker in the state of Prussia was guaranteed the right to work, since this was laid down in the Prussian constitution of 1794. So Bismarck not only says the same, but he says that what Robespierre demanded was laid down in the Prussian constitution. The real situation, however, was as follows: Bismarck only spoke those words because he felt the approach of a threat which arose from the very fact that what stood word for word in the Prussian constitution was actually not the case at all.

I quote this example not because it is political but because it is a striking demonstration of how two people can say the same thing, word for word, even though the reality in each case is the opposite. Thus I want to make you aware that it is time for us to enter upon an age when what matters, rather than the actual words, is our experience of reality. If we fail in this, then in the realm of spiritual life we shall fall into empty phrases which play such a major role in the spiritual life of today. And this transition from mere correctness of content to truth livingly experienced is to be brought about through the entry of initiation science into human civilization, initiation science which progresses from mere logical content to the experience of the spiritual world. Those who view correctly the external symptoms of historical development in the present and on into the near future will succeed, out of these symptoms, in achieving a feeling, a sense, for the justified and necessary entry of initiation science into world civilization. This is what I wanted to place before your souls today by way of a New Year's contemplation.

• 1 . See lecture of 31 December 1921 in Rudolf Steiner, The Rediscovery of Spiritual Reality in Nature and in Man. English text available in typescript only.
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Rudolf Steiner Press London and Anthroposophic Press New York, 1986.
• 3 . Regarding luciferic and ahrimanic beings, see the chapter ‘Man and the Evolution of the World’ in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science—An Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979.
• 4 . Aurelius Augustinus 354-430, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa.
• 5 . in a speech on 9 May 1884, ‘I recognize unconditionally the right to work and will defend this so long as I occupy my present position. In doing so, I stand, not on the soil of socialism but on the soil of the Prussian constitution.’ Quoted in Gide and Rist Geschichte der volkswirt schaftlichen Lehrmeinungen, Jena 1921.
• 6 . Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre, 1758-1794. From 1793 a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety. Guillotined in 1794.

Today I shall add to what has been said over the past few days, both, before and after Christmas, about the Being of Christ. Our angle of approach to the question of Christ will be to relate it in a brief sketch chiefly to the world-wide social question. Mankind has at the present time an urgent need to reach a global understanding. Yet whatever sphere of life we turn to, we find precious little of any such understanding. The need for an understanding is there. What is not there is any talent on the part of human beings to come to such an understanding. We see how attempts are made to consult one another about important aspects of life. We see congresses taking place everywhere. With regard to the matters being discussed at these congresses, what is to be found in the depths of human souls is quite different from the words which are exchanged there. In the words exchanged at these congresses there are appearances which are deceptive. These appearances are supposed to give the impression that individual human beings everywhere desire to come to terms with one another, or something similar. But such coming to terms cannot be achieved anywhere, because it is not actually individual human beings who are speaking with one another but members of various nations. Only the external appearance makes it seem as though individuals were speaking with one another. What is actually speaking through each one are the very varied beings of the different nations. And since it is in the very nature of human beings these days to notice only the verbal content of words and not the source of the words—not the soil in which they are rooted—since human beings fail to discern these fundamental aspects of life, it is simply not noticed that it is the folk daemons who are speaking with one another, rather than human being with human being.

We would be hard put to it to find clearer proof of the fact that Christianity is today not realized in the world. Christianity is not realized, for fully to understand Christ means: to find man as man within oneself. Christ is no folk god, no god of any race. Christ is not the god of any group of human beings. He is the god of the individual, in so far as the individual is a member of the human race as a whole. Only when we can understand the Christ-being, through all the means available to us, as the God of mankind, only then will Christ come to have what will certainly be the greatest possible social significance for the globe as a whole.

We have to understand very clearly that there are things which hold sway in the depths of the soul, things which do not find their way into those words that remain stuck in empty phrases as a result of the differences between the folk daemons. Out of the situation in which people are content to reside at present, it is not possible to bring about what can actually only be brought about today out of the profound depths of man's being. Today what is needed is profundity, a willingness to enter into the profound depths of man's being, if forces of advance, forces of fruitful progress are to enter into earth evolution. What can be heard today in every corner of the earth does not to any extent even touch the surface of all that is rooted in the human being. What ought now to enter into mankind is the quest for what is most profoundly rooted in the being of man.

Let us now show in a few simple outlines the main differences that exist in people's attitudes to what could lead to a recognition and an understanding of the question of Christ. I have often drawn the distinction for you between people of the West, people of the East, and people of the middle region between West and East. This distinction can be viewed from very varied standpoints. Justice can only be done to it if it is considered without any kind of prejudice and with the utmost impartiality, if we refrain from looking with sympathy or antipathy at one or other of these divisions, perhaps because we happen to belong to one or the other of them ourselves. Today all the people of the world must work together in order to bring forth true unity in Christ. It can certainly be said that in the most varied parts of the world, in the very depths of mankind, the impulse exists towards finding this unity. But the search must take us into the profound depths.

Turning first to what appears now in the civilizations of the West, we discover that the essential element in these western civilizations finds an expression in the type of spirituality which is valid today. This special spirituality of today has the characteristic of taking the form of abstractness; it celebrates its greatest triumphs in ideas and abstractions. These ideas, these abstractions, are most suited to gaining a knowledge of nature as it appears to our senses, and a knowledge of that aspect of social life which has to take place as a result of the forces of the sense-perceptible world. With these forces, which I shall call the western forces, it is quite possible to penetrate into the depths of the human being and of the universe. Above all, these forces of the West have provided the foundation for scientific thinking and have sought those impulses of social life which derive from scientific thinking and which mankind will need in the future in order to shape life on earth in a possible way. What follows will show this to be so. By no means all the treasures of western spiritual life have been brought to the surface.

To start with, it is perfectly true that today's natural science could only be founded on those fundamental forces of man's being which can be most adequately expressed in the spirituality of abstractness and ideas. But it is also true that in everything that has been revealed there is another essential element as well. What has been revealed in the thought processes of natural science, and the social thought processes that go with it, can indeed be taken right up to the spiritual realm. A progression can be made from the laws of nature to a recognition of the spiritual beings within nature. These beings of nature are divine and spiritual. And if Christianity is to be understood in a way that befits mankind's most current needs, it will have to be permeated with that very spirit which has so far only poured itself out into natural science and its social consequences through the forces of the West. Any world conception gained out of these forces of the West can only be satisfying if it can be expressed in clearly defined, sharply contoured concepts and ideas. Human beings will need such clear, sharply defined concepts for the future of the earth. They will have to learn to present the highest spiritual content to mankind in terms which are every bit as clearly defined as are the natural and social concepts arising out of the forces of the West.

Let us turn now to the forces of the East. Here, what is made clearest to us is the following: If, out of the forces of the East, we want to attempt to describe Christianity, or indeed anything divine and spiritual, in sharp, clearly-defined terms, our efforts will be invain. Starting with Russia and going eastwards through Asia, the whole of the East brings forth forces in its peoples which are not capable of rising up to spiritual, divine realms in sharply defined concepts. The forces here are suitable for rising up to the spirit out of the depths of feeling.

In order to describe Christianity in a manner befitting the West we need philosophy, we need a concept of the world which is clothed in modern thought forms. But to describe Christianity with the forces of the East we cannot find such thought forms if we remain at the level of outer nationality. If we remain in the external, sense-perceptible world we have to grasp other means. For instance, we have to describe the feelings which are found as soon as we start going further and further eastwards, even in the regions of central Europe bordering on the East. Look at the living rooms of simple people and see the altar with the Mother of God in the corner. See how the image of the Mother of God is greeted by visitors as they arrive. Everywhere the first greeting is for the Mother of God, and only then are greetings exchanged with the people in the room. This is something that emanates from all the forces of the human being, with the exception of those of abstract ideas. There exists a radical contrast between West and East in the inmost feelings for what is divine and spiritual. Yet all these forces are root forces which can develop further, which can put forth leaves and shoots and finally bear fruit, if only they can come to a fundamental understanding of themselves.

The West is capable of reaching a conception and a feeling of the Father God in a manner which befits the new human spirit, a conception and a feeling beside which those other divine spiritual beings, the Son and the Spirit, can stand. But above all it is the task of the West to contribute to the world concepts and feelings about the Father God which are different from those possible in earlier times, when only vague presentiments could be achieved in this respect. On the other hand, if the forces mainly present in the East are developed—the forces which can only be described suitably in what might be called a non-intellectual way with the help of external gestures—if these forces are developed with the feelings and will impulses they entail, and if they take up also the forces streaming towards them from the West, they will be able to come to a fitting concept and a fitting feeling of the Son God. In this way mankind's development into the future can only be rightly understood when the things that are achieved in the different regions of the earth are taken to be contributions to a total outcome.

Especially the more outstanding spirits in the West—though mostly they are not aware of this themselves—may be seen to be struggling for a concept of the Father God, a concept arising from the foundations of natural science. And in the East we see in the external gestures of the people, in what comes out of their feelings and their will, how they are wrestling for an understanding of the Son God, the Christ. The middle region stands between these two extremes. This is shown clearly by what has been developing more recently in the culture of the middle region. It is characteristic of modern theology in Central Europe that it is uncertain in its understanding of the Father and also in its understanding of the Son, the Christ. Endeavours to find such an understanding are taken immensely earnestly. But this very earnestness has caused the endeavours to be split in two separate directions. On the one hand we see knowledge developing, and on the other we see faith. We see how knowledge is to contain only what applies to the sense-perceptible world and everything that belongs to it. And we see how faith, which must not be allowed to become knowledge, is allotted everything that makes up man's relationship to what is divine and spiritual. These divergent endeavours express the quest, a quest which cannot achieve an adequate concept and feeling for either the Father God or the Son God without joining forces with the other regions of the earth, with East and West.

How such a global working together in the spirit should take place can be seen especially in the beginnings made by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.¹ This Russian philosopher has taken western thought forms into his own thinking. If you are thoroughly familiar with the thought forms of the West, you will find them everywhere in Soloviev's work. But you will find that they are handled differently from the way in which they are handled in the West. If you approach Soloviev with a thinking prepared in the West you will have to relearn something—not about the content of thoughts, but about the attitude of the human being towards the content of thoughts. You will have to undergo a complete inner metamorphosis.

Take what I regard as one of the cardinal passages in Soloviev's work, a passage he has invested with a great deal of human striving towards a knowledge of man's being and his relationship with the world. He says: Human beings must strive for perfection. This endeavour is expressed in the way they strive for the truth. By uniting truth ever more and more closely with their souls they will become ever more and more perfect. Without this movement towards perfection human life would be worthless. Human beings must have the prospect of reaching the highest pinnacles of perfection through truth, as otherwise their lives would be null and void. At the same time they must have a part in immortality, for a striving for perfection destined only to be forfeited in death would be a fraud of universal proportions.

This is expressed by Soloviev in words and thought forms which imitate those of the West, or rather the thought forms are borrowed and the word forms imitated. But the way in which it is expressed, and the way the impulse to express it is present—this is impossible in the West. You will not find it expressed in this way by any western philosopher. Just imagine Mill or Bergson saying such a thing! It is unimaginable. These are the things for which we must develop a sense nowadays. We must develop a sense for the living sources from which words flow. The content of words is growing ever more insignificant in comparison with world concepts. A sense for the living source of things is what has real significance.

We can today only imagine a person to be capable of speaking in the way Soloviev does if he still has a true experience of what every one of his compatriots does before the icon of the Mother of God. Such a person must stand immersed in his people, a people capable of bringing proof without having to base it on abstract, logical foundations, a people for whom proofs based on mere abstract logic are less important than those which come out of the whole human being.

We feel in these words of Soloviev how, coming from the East, what is said comes out of the total being of man, not just out of mere intellectual human understanding. Because Soloviev speaks and thinks and feels out of the very foundations of his people, the whole of his world conception tends in the direction of the Christ. Because he has also taken on, as something from outside, the thought forms of the West, his world conception at the same time tends in the direction of the Father God as well as the Christ. Thus we discover in him something which it is almost impossible to find anywhere in the present, and that is a fundamental, clear distinction in the feelings of a human being between the way to the Father God and the way to Christ, the Son God. In a spirit such as Vladimir Soloviev we find a hint of what must come about in the future. For what must come about is a working together of the different regions of the earth, and this cannot come about if any one region imagines itself to be in possession of the whole.

Mankind came forth out of a unity. If we go back into the obscure, remote antiquity of human evolution we come to an archetypal wisdom which was still instinctive and which, because of this, still filled the whole human being. Throughout the whole of the earth people communicated with one another, not yet by means of the logical content of language but externally, by means of the then still existing inner capacity to communicate in gestures, of which today we no longer have the faintest idea. People communicated with one another by means of something which today, if at all, remains only in those remnants of the treasure-house of language which we call interjections. Naturally, if you exclaim: Whew! or sigh: Oh! you will be understood world over. This kind of understanding resembles the communication that took place at the time of instinctive archetypal wisdom. Today we no longer know how to feel in language as a whole what the archetypal wisdom felt in it. All that remains for us is our feeling or the interjections which, of course, we only use occasionally. In parenthesis let me add that it is quite in keeping that, out of people's dissatisfaction arising from the whole chaos of our spiritual life, authors are starting to write novels in interjections. This does happen nowadays. I am not quoting, but simply mention that you can find prose passages today which read: Ah! Oh! Wow! Eh! Then the writer begins: Once there was—and then come more interjections. Some recent novels are tending in this direction. As symptoms they are not without significance. As I said, this just in passing.

We have lost the ability to invest the whole of language with what we today only invest in interjections. Consider the following: ‘Anthropos’ means man, human being. ‘Anthropoid’ means man-like, that is, the higher animals. The final syllable, ‘oid’, is connected with the word which means ‘like, similar to’. Now there is a remarkable connection between Greek and, for instance, German. In German the final syllable meaning ‘like’ is ‘ig’. This is pronounced ‘ich’. If we speak this final syllable by itself, we have the German word for ego, for our own being. This is one kind of etymological truth. The ‘ich’ in the human being is what strives in its totality to become like the universe. ‘Ich’ is like, is similar to, everything; microcosm compared with macrocosm. Of course to go into things in this way cannot be done in the superficial manner in which etymology and linguistics are conducted nowadays. One has to go down to a more profound level and gain a sense for the way in which the sounds are connected with one another.

I brought this up merely to show one of the facets of what we must do to enter into language in search of a far more alive content than exists nowadays in the languages of the world. We must strive not to take words merely as words but to seek out their living roots. We must learn to understand that two people can say the same thing and yet mean something quite different, depending on the way of life from which it stems. We shall need such a deepening of our feelings in order to enter into the kind of global working together which will be necessary if mankind is to set out once more on the upward path.

It is not enough to address Christ as: Lord, Lord! Christ must become something which fills the whole human being. This can only happen if we support our understanding with something which comes to meet us when we look towards the archetypal wisdom of the world and remind ourselves that that wisdom made mankind into a totality. It was, though, a totality in which all individuality was lost. But evolution progressed. Human beings became ever more individualized. They felt more and more that they were approaching the point at which each one feels separated from all the others, for that alone guarantees the experience of freedom. So something had to be poured out into human evolution which might once more bring unity to the whole earth. This was the Christ-being. The Christ-being will only be fully understood when we gain from it a feeling for the impulse to bring about a social unity of human beings over the whole earth. Or looked at the other way round: Only the Christ-being, fully understood, can lead to a right social impulse throughout the world.

We look to the archetypal wisdom, which developed out of instinctive foundations to a certain high degree of vision—not our vision but an ancient vision. We find this vision in its final phase expressed in the archetypal symbol of what the three wise men, the three Magi from the East, brought to Christ Jesus. What led them to Christ Jesus was the most ancient and, at that time, the highest wisdom of mankind. And at the same time we are told by another evangelist how the individual human being, out of the inmost forces of his soul, as though in a dream—for the individual is alone when he dreams, even though he may be in company with others—is also led to Christ Jesus, how the shepherds in the field, dreaming in their solitary souls, are led to Christ Jesus: the first beginning of a new age. By the fourth century AD mankind had lost the wisdom of the Magi from the East. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the highest archetypal wisdom—about to fade—meets and mingles with something that appears at first utterly devoid of wisdom, something which must be developed ever further, until in the end it can take root in every individual human being, uniting all mankind.

In his youth, Augustine² endeavoured to save the last remnants of the wisdom brought to Christ Jesus by the Magi from the East. But Augustine had already received it in a form to which he could not confess in the long run. It was even then too degenerate. So he had to turn to what had been present at the beginning of evolution, to what will have to progress ever further and further, to what must be sought in order that mankind may once again find unity over the whole face of the earth.

If we pursue these hints—for that is all they are for the moment—in the right way, they will give us forces which will lead ever more profoundly into an understanding of the Christ-being, to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what I wanted to add to what we have been saying about the Being of Christ.

• 1 . Vladimir Soloviev, 1853-1900. The quotation in German is from Die geistigen Grundlagen des Lebens, Part One (The Spiritual Foundations of Life), Selected Works translated by H Kohler, Stuttgart 1922.
• 2 . See Lecture One, Note 4